by Daniel Pool
roly-poly pudding—Jam or fruit all rolled up in a sheet of pastry and cooked.
rook—A relative of the crow, except that the crow lived on dead animals while the rook ate grain, insects, slugs, and snails. In northern Britain rooks were called crows. They nested in big groups called rookeries.
rookery—Literally, a nesting place for a lot of rooks. For what it’s worth the actual full title of David Copperfield was “The Personal History, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery which he never meant to be published on any account.” “Rookery” also was used to denote an urban slum of many people and buildings jammed together.
root—Root crops were turnips, Swedish turnips, mangel-wurzels, and potatoes. The first three were viewed in the 1800s as a key to successful “modern” farming because they put nutrients back into depleted fields and provided winter feed for livestock.
rotten borough—A parliamentary borough that had very few or almost no inhabitants, due usually to gradual population decline over the years, yet still managed to return members to Parliament. The most notorious was perhaps that of Old Sarum in Wiltshire; it had five voters and no inhabitants. Rotten boroughs were one of the targets of the First Reform Act of 1832. Those who benefitted from them—they were, after all, easy to control—saw it in a somewhat different light. “Rotten! be hanged”—says Sir Pitt Crawley in Vanity Fair—“it produces me a good fifteen hundred a year.”
Rotten Row—A walkway for horses in the southern part of Hyde Park much favored by the fashionable elite. In 1871 the time to catch the fashionable in action was from noon to two or five to seven in May through July.
roundabout—A merry-go-round.
rounders—A game like baseball. There were two teams and one whacked a ball and then ran around the bases. Unlike baseball, someone could put a player out by throwing the ball at him and hitting him.
round game—A card game at which any number could play, like Pope Joan, as opposed to a game like whist where there was a maximum number of players.
round robin—A letter of complaint or petition signed by a group.
Royal Exchange—’Change, as it was called, was the meeting place in the City for merchants in different trades, who would gather there and walk about with their fellow merchants in the specific area allotted to their line of commerce. It also housed Lloyd’s, the famous insurance firm. As certain trades outgrew the ’Change, they left and formed their own, like the Corn Exchange and, in 1801, the Stock Exchange.
rubric—The portions of the Book of Common Prayer that were printed in red. The rubric provided the instructions for the clergyman on how to conduct the services.
rubber—In games like whist, a rubber was a set of three or more games, where the idea was to win the best two out of three or three out of five.
Rules—Areas around prisons like the Fleet and the King’s Bench that certain prisoners, particularly debtors, could inhabit with permission from the appropriate authorities. One prisoner commuted to his work every night under this arrangement for some time as editor of the Times.
run—A fox-hunting term denoting the chase of a fox by the field and ending in a death. If the fox were caught quickly, there could be more than one run in a day’s hunt.
rural dean—A clergyman who assisted the archdeacon in overseeing the affairs of a diocese.
rushlight—Ordinary rushes dipped in dripping or similar material so they could be set alight. Used as candles by the poor and also as nightlights, since, unlike a candle, when they burned down, the “wick” just disintegrated, thus lessening the danger of fire.
rusticate—To punish by sending away from Oxford or Cambridge, usually only as a temporary suspension. To “send down,” by contrast, was to expel permanently.
s.—The abbreviation for shilling. From the Latin solidus.
Sabbatarians—Very strict observers of Sunday who tried to close down shops and other “irreligious” activities on the Lord’s Day. Often, they were Evangelicals and the like. One of their particular bêtes noires, as the fulminations of Mrs. Proudie in Barchester Towers make clear, was the impious running of trains on Sunday by the railroad companies. There was also a parliamentary proposal to prevent the poor from using bakehouses to cook hot Sunday meals.
sack—A dry white wine from Spain or the Canary Islands.
sackcloth—A cloth for making sacks. Coarse and made usually of hemp or flax.
sack coat—The ancestor of the sport coat, it started becoming popular in the 1870s. Like the frock coat, it was of uniform length all around, but in front it stopped short just below the hips, and it hung straight down in back instead of being form fitting.
sacristan—The man who looked after the sacred chalices and similar consecrated ware in a church, like those used in the communion services. The vessels were kept in what was called a sacristy.
saddler—A saddlemaker.
sago—A pasty sort of substance made out of certain kinds of palm trees and used for food.
St. Giles—A notoriously wretched London slum in the mid-century with a substantial Irish and Jewish population. Along with Covent Garden, it was a center of prostitution.
St. James’s Palace—The official royal residence until 1837 when the new queen, Victoria, moved to Buckingham Palace. St. James’s was used thereafter for drawing rooms and levees. (Buckingham Palace became the site of royal concerts and balls.)
St. Martin’s Day—See Martin’s Day.
saloon—Any large, grand room for receiving visitors in a great house. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet et al. are “shown through the hall into the saloon” at Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley. “In this room they were received by Miss Darcy.”
salver—One of those little silver trays that people put their visiting cards on in the hallway or that the servants used for handing around biscuits at various private social gatherings.
sal volatile—A kind of smelling salt made with ammonium carbonate.
sandals—Used for footgear by ladies in the early part of the century, they were slipperlike shoes that fastened over the instep with a strap.
sapper—Among the forerunners of the army engineers. They were in charge of building fortifications that would make it possible to advance toward a besieged fortress without being blown to smithereens.
sash—A popular accompaniment to the muslin frock, especially for little girls.
saveloy—A kind of strongly seasoned, dry sausage.
savoury—A spiced dish served at the start or conclusion of a dinner.
sawpit—See sawyer.
sawyer—A man who sawed things. There were top sawyers and bottom sawyers. When wood was sawed in a sawpit, the bottom sawyer stood in the pit below ground holding one end of the saw while the top sawyer stood on the ground above holding the other.
schoolroom—The place where children in a well-off home had their lessons, generally until they went away to school or “came out,” and which, a contemporary source advised, should be large enough so as to enable the children “to take their dancing lessons in it, and to serve for them to play at battledore and shuttlecock in it, or take other exercise during inclement weather.” Typically, it was on one of the upper floors of the house. The expression “in the schoolroom” used of a young girl meant that she had not yet “come out.”
scout—A man servant at Oxford.
screw—An old worthless horse. Also, an old tightwad or miser. Becky Sharp writes to Amelia Sedley that people call her employer Sir Pitt Crawley “an old screw; which means a very stingy, avaricious person.” Prison guards were sometimes called screws, too.
scrivener—A copier or secretary.
scullery—The place where dishes were washed and stored or a back kitchen.
scullerymaid—The girl who washed dishes and who was at the very bottom of the servant hierarchy. The generic term for male or female scullery workers was “scullion”—it was used as a term of abuse.
sealing wax—
Beeswax and later a mixture that included shellac and turpentine; used for sealing letters. Red was to be used only for business letters, other colors for social correspondence, and black for mourning.
seals—Small ornaments, worn on a watch chain, and including a seal used to seal letters plus similarly shaped items. It is one of the possessions of Scrooge’s that he and the Spirit of Christmas to Come find the ghoulish charwoman and her cronies haggling over in the rag-and-bone shop in Scrooge’s prevision of his death.
season—The London social season, in which the fashionable high life of the nobility dominated the city. Although families returned from their country houses to London in February, the real season—of balls, parties, sporting events like Ascot and so on—ran only from May through July.
second-rate—See rate.
secretary of state—The title given to the heads of various executive departments in the national government such as the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and so on, who were known informally as the home secretary, the foreign secretary, etc. In 1801 only the Home Office and the Foreign Office had a secretary, plus there was one for war and the colonies. A secretary of state for war was added in 1854 and one for the colonies and then one for India in 1858 after the government took control of the subcontinent from the East India Company. They were all members of the cabinet.
sedge—Plants similar to grass. They grew in marshy areas and on river banks.
see—The post of bishop in a diocese.
seedcake—A sweet cake made usually with caraway seeds.
sell out—To leave the army by selling the commission one had purchased to someone.
sell up—To sell all the goods belonging to someone in settlement of their debts.
seminary—Originally, a place of religious instruction but applied by the 1800s to private schools for young ladies.
senior wrangler—In the math honors exams or “tripos” at Cambridge the top students were called wranglers. The student who ranked higher than all the others was the senior wrangler.
sennight—A contraction of “seven night,” meaning a week. Used by the pompous Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice.
send down—To expel from a university. To “rusticate,” by contrast, was usually only to suspend temporarily.
sergeant major—Not the same as “sergeant,” who was the man who drilled a company and ranked just above a corporal. The sergeant major was in charge of discipline and drill for an entire regiment.
serjeant—In 1800, the serjeants were the lawyers with the most prestige. They were the litigators in the courts of Common Pleas, King’s Bench and Exchequer, corresponding to the barristers who argued in the Chancery Court. For a long time one could not be a common-law judge without being a serjeant first, and they had their own “inn”—Serjeants’ Inn—separate from the Inns of Court. However, the barristers eventually edged them out for top position, and the status of serjeant became less prestigious than the new honor of King’s or Queen’s Counsel. The position of serjeant was abolished altogether after mid-century.
servants’ hall—The place where the servants ate and congregated in a household when they were given a special room for the purpose. (In smaller houses, they generally used the kitchen.) Thackeray makes use of the term to tell us how Becky Sharp conquered the servants at the Sedleys’ in the course of her efforts to trap Joe Sedley—“the Servants’ Hall was almost as charmed with her as the Drawing Room.”
session—A session of Parliament meant its annual meeting, usually from January or February till about the middle of August. An “adjournment” was a brief cessation of business during a session. To “dissolve” Parliament meant that the existing Parliament went out of existence either during or after the session as general elections were held to elect new members.
sessions—The period in which a court sat; in rural areas, sessions would probably have generally meant the quarter sessions.
set—A group of dancers. When country-dances were performed, if there were too many couples to fit in the two long straight parallel lines which the dance demanded, the dancers would be divided up into several sets. The term could also mean the figures in a quadrille.
settee—An indoor chair on which at least two people could sit.
settle—In taverns and rustic homes, a wooden bench with a high back capable of seating several people. It was often drawn up facing the fire, and the high back served to protect against cold drafts. As a verb, “to settle” meant to make some legal arrangement by will or contract or similar device for the use or custody of property or money.
settlement—Applied to a legal arrangement of property, it was used principally in two connections. First, it was employed to denote the marriage settlement of a well-off woman, in which lawyers for her side met with lawyers for the groom prior to the marriage to ensure that at the least she would get pin money, a jointure and portions for their children. Second, a strict settlement was an arrangement by which a landed estate was entailed against the possibility of a male heir selling or mortgaging it, e.g., to pay his debts. In an entirely different, nonproperty context, settlement under the Poor Law meant that one could not get relief in a parish without meeting certain criteria of “settlement” there, e.g., that one was born in the parish, had been apprenticed there, or—in a woman’s case—had married a resident.
Seven Dials—An infamous criminal district in London of seven streets converging in the area of St. Giles.
sexton—A contraction of sacristan, but the sexton acquired different duties as his name changed. The sexton was the man who rang the bells and dug the graves at a churchyard. The sexton in Tess charges the heroine “a shilling and a pint of beer” to bury her child. Uriah Heep observes to David Copperfield that “my father’s former calling was umble. He was a sexton.”
shawl—A favorite accompaniment to dresses and frocks for a good portion of the century. There was an art to how it was to be draped.
sheriff—The high sheriff was originally the king’s principal representative in a shire. Along with the earl, he basically ran things, especially the peacekeeping establishment, which is why the sheriff of Nottingham was Robin Hood’s nemesis. In the twelfth century the position abruptly lost its prestige when it was turned into a one-year job. Thereafter, the sheriff’s authority dwindled away until by the end of the 1800s he was basically a country gentleman in charge of entertaining the assize justices when they came around on circuit. The sheriff was also in charge of executing writs and carrying out certain official county functions through his assistants, the bailiffs. In London the sheriff’s officers were the ones who ran the sponging houses to which people arrested for debt were taken.
shift—The basic item of women’s underwear, a long kind of nightgownlike garment which—except for the corset—was all the underwear women wore until the advent of drawers in the 1860s. “Shift” actually replaced the original term “smock” because smock was thought to be too indelicate. Then “shift” was thought to be improper, and people started calling it a “chemise” instead.
shilling—An English silver coin worth twelvepence. Twenty shillings equaled a pound.
shilling number—A monthly installment of a novel (Pickwick was published thus), each costing a shilling; a popular form of serialized publication for a good part of the century.
shipbreaker—Someone who tore apart old boats and sold the resulting scrap.
ship-of-the-line—A warship large enough to take part in the “line of battle” in which ships then fought. Hence a ship usually of sixty guns or more, i.e., a “fourth-rate” or better.
shire—The unit of regional government run by the earl and the sheriff (shire reeve) on behalf of the monarch into which all England was divided when the Normans arrived. The Normans substituted the term “county” for “shire” but the old name lingered in a number of the counties such as Hampshire, Lincolnshire, etc. “The shires” in foxhunting circles referred to Midlands shires, which were said to have the best fox hunti
ng in the country, particularly Rutland, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire.
shopman—A man who owned a shop or worked in one.
short commons—At Cambridge University food was referred to as “commons.” “Short commons” was insufficient food.
shorts—Knee breeches.
shove-halfpenny—A children’s game basically equivalent to shuffleboard, except it could be played on a table instead of the floor and one shoved coins instead of big disks.
shovel hat—“His shovel-hat,” observes Trollope in The Warden, “declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker’s broad brim.” It was the hat worn by Church of England clergy, turned up on either side and sticking out in the front and back like a shovel.
sideboard—Originally, a rather modest piece of furniture, that stood in a dining room, on which one could put extra dishes. It grew drawers and spaces as the century wore on and became a storage place for plate, silverware, and similar articles.
Sir—The title by which baronets and knights were addressed.
sitting room—The room where family members sat and were comfortable, as opposed to a drawing room, for example, where visitors would typically be received or entertained more formally after dinner. Rented apartments seem generally to have consisted at a minimum of a bedroom and a sitting room.
sizar—At one time, the name given to scholarship students at Cambridge.
’sizes—Short for “assizes.”
skimmington, skimmity—A rural pastime that involved parading people or effigies of a quarreling wife or husband past the home of the feuding couple for everyone’s general amusement and edification.
skittles—Basically, bowling. One set up nine skittles or pins and then tried to knock them down with a ball.
slop basin—The basin into which the housemaid cleaning a bedroom would empty waste water.