by Daniel Pool
watermen—They were of two kinds. The ones on the Thames rowed people out to boats or across the river for a fee. The watermen on land were men who stood at cab stands and gave water to the horses.
weeds—Mourning garments, the word “weed” meaning simply clothes.
weepers—Various kinds of funeral garb, including a black band on a man’s hat and the long black veil which widows wore. On those days when she anticipated that her husband might leave her not as much money as she would like, Mrs. Gregg in The Mill on the Floss “resolved that she would have scarcely any weeper on her bonnet and would cry no more than if he had been a second husband.” In the latter part of the century the term also came to refer to long sideburns.
weir—Either a dam, usually constructed in order to channel water for a millwheel, or a series of stakes and nets in a body of water aimed at trapping fish.
Wellington, duke of—The great British war hero who defeated Napoleon in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo and subsequently became a Tory prime minister, responsible for passing the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829.
Wesleyanism—See Methodism.
wetnurse—Somebody hired to breast-feed a child not her own.
West End—The western and fancy part of London (as opposed to the City and the East End), reaching from Charing Cross west to the western boundary of Hyde Park. It included Buckingham Palace, Mayfair, and St. James’s Park.
Westminster—Before London expanded so enormously during the nineteenth century, there lay to its west the city of Westminster. This was the home of the monarch and it also housed Westminster Abbey, the royal palaces of Whitehall and St. James, and the Palace of Westminster, where the courts and Parliament met. (Due to its meeting place, Parliament was sometimes spoken of in verbal shorthand as “Westminster.”) As London grew, Westminster was absorbed into it.
whalebone—Used to reinforce corsets but not made of a whale’s bone. Actually, whalebone consisted of long thin strips in a whale’s jaw that acted like teeth to strain out its food. Whalebone was springy and tough enough to serve as a corset stiffener (and also as umbrella ribs).
wharfinger—Someone who owned or ran a wharf.
wheeler(s)—The horse(s) harnessed closest to a carriage, i.e., its wheels, the “leaders” being farther away.
whey—As in “eating her curds and—.” Whey was the runny substance that separated from milk when the curds coagulated, as in the course of making cheese. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Tess falls asleep to “the measured dripping of the whey.”
Whigs—The liberal faction in English politics. Opposed to the Tories, they represented, broadly speaking, the middle class, manufacturers, and Dissenters. They changed their name in the 1830s and 1840s to Liberals.
whin—Another name for furze or gorse.
whippers-in—The term given to the assistants of the huntsman in fox hunting who helped him keep the hounds together. In Parliament, whippers-in or whips were party members who tracked down their colleagues in the party so they would be on hand for crucial votes in Parliament. The parliamentary, or patronage, secretary to the treasury was the leading whip for the party in power; his main assistants were the junior lords of the treasury.
whist—That quintessential nineteenth-century English card game. The ancestor of bridge. Four people, that is, two couples, with the partners sitting opposite each other, were each dealt thirteen cards. They then fixed a trump suit. Then one person put down a card and the next player had to play the same suit or—if he couldn’t—he played the trump suit or discarded. When all four people had played, the person who dealt the highest trump or the highest card of the suit took that trick of four cards. Points were scored on the basis of tricks played and, sometimes, on the number of honors (high trump cards) held. A game was either 5 or 10 points depending on whether it was “short” or “long” whist. The best two out of three games was a rubber.
Whitehall—A district in Westminster named for an old royal palace that did, indeed, have a white hall in it. It was the location of the Admiralty, the Treasury, the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, and the Horse Guards, i.e., the army headquarters.
whitesmith—A worker in tin or sometimes in other metals. Sometimes a worker in metal who just did cosmetic work on it as opposed to “forging” it.
whiting—A good-tasting small fish. Also, pulverized fine chalk used for cleaning or whitewashing.
Whitsun—In the church calendar, the seventh Sunday after Easter. Also known as Pentecost.
wicket—A small gate sometimes used in preference to the larger gate that it was part of or next to. In cricket, depending on the era in question, a wicket referred to either two or three stakes in the ground that had either one or two pieces of wood on top that a bowler tried to hit.
Wilberforce—There were two eminent figures in the 1800s who bore this name, the first, the great Evangelical reformer William Wilberforce (1759–1833), whose career was most notable for his attack on the slave trade. Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, liberal spirit that he is, points out that “I knew Wilberforce in his best days.” The other Wilberforce (1805–73) was the somewhat oleaginous bishop of Oxford known as “Soapy Sam.” In describing in The Warden various of Dr. Grantly’s children who are named after prominent contemporary clergy, Trollope describes Samuel, “dear little Soapy as he was familiarly called,” “a cunning boy, and those even who loved him best could not but own that for one so young he was too adroit in choosing his words, and too skilled in modulating his voice.”
wilderness—An area in a park or garden that had trees in it, sometimes growing wild and sometimes planted in a kind of maze. In Mansfield Park the protagonists journey to Sotherton, where, after a tour of the house, “a considerable flight of steps landed them in the wilderness, which was a planted wood of about two acres, and though chiefly of larch and laurel, and beech cut down, and though laid out with too much regularity, was darkness and shade, and natural beauty.” Landscaping for a romantic, “natural” effect was very popular in the early 1800s.
willow pattern—A popular pattern for blue china dishes that showed a mandarin and his house with a river, a boat, a bridge, and two lovers.
wimble—Something used for boring holes, like an auger or a gimlet.
Windsor—A town on the Thames west of London that has housed a palace of the royal family for many years and which Queen Victoria increasingly favored for her residence near London, rather than Buckingham Palace, after her husband died.
withy—A withy was a willow tree. It was also a twig or branch not necessarily of willow that was suitable for making into baskets or twisting and tieing things with.
woodbine—A climbing plant like honeysuckle, ivy, or convulvulus.
woolsack—The lord chancellor sat on a square sack filled with wool while presiding over the House of Lords. To be elevated to the woolsack was therefore to become lord chancellor.
Woolwich—Woolwich and the Tower of London were the two main arsenals for the British army. Woolwich was also where engineers and artillery officers trained.
workbox—Sewing, embroidery, and similar kinds of needlework were referred to as “work.” A “workbox” or “workbag” was thus a sewing basket or kit. There were also “worktables.”
workhouse—Or the “union” or sometimes just plain “the house” for short. The publicly supported institution to which the sick, destitute, aged, and otherwise impoverished went, the theory being that they would get food and shelter there in exchange for work. After 1834, apparently in an effort to make sure lazy people did not take advantage of the workhouses, they were made grim beyond belief. Husbands and wives were separated once inside their walls, children were taken from their parents, and all inmates had to wear a dismal uniform. No cards, no tobacco—the work consisted of breaking stones or picking oakum, and after 1833, unclaimed workhouse bodies were given to anatomists for dissection. The poor hated and feared the workhouse. Before 1834 the workhouses were run by overseers
of the poor selected by the local justice of the peace. After 1834, they were run by elected boards of guardians.
worsted—Worsted was the name of the place in Norfolk where this woolen material was first made. Sometimes the term referred to a very fancy kind of wool yarn.
wrangler—Wranglers were the top honors students in math at Cambridge. The person with highest honors was the senior wrangler.
wuther—It is actually an intransitive verb and it describes—among other things—exactly what Emily Brontë says it does in her novel: “ ‘Wuthering heights’ is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.” “Wuther” is a dialect form of “whither,” which is applied to something like the wind when it roars or rushes sharply at something.
yellow—In election campaigns and the like, yellow was the color of the Whigs. The Tories favored blue.
yellow fever—A tropical disease spread by mosquitoes, which produced flulike symptoms in mild cases, kidney failure, liver failure and death in severe ones.
yeoman—The small independent farmer with some land of his own, say, 300 to 1,000 acres in the estimate of one expert, typified by Mr. Glegg in The Mill on the Floss. (As George Eliot explicitly tells us.) As the century wore on, the yeomen often styled themselves “gentleman farmers.” They were the social group next below the gentry in the countryside. Unlike the gentry, they typically had no tenants on their property and sometimes even worked it themselves. Historically, they represented the sturdy, independent Englishman, e.g., the yeoman archer at Agincourt, who was the stout bulwark of traditional English freedoms and the mainstay of the countryside. With economic change and the increasing growth of large estates in the nineteenth century, much of the class died out.
yeomanry—The mounted, i.e., wealthier, group within the militia.
yew—A dismal evergreen tree—poisonous, appropriately enough—which was a favorite in English churchyards, apparently because, being evergreen, it was thought to symbolize immortality.
Your Grace—The correct form of address to dukes and duchesses by those below the nobility and gentry in rank and the correct form of address to an archbishop by everyone.
Your Worship—The correct form of address to a magistrate, e.g., a justice of the peace.
DANIEL POOL received a doctorate in political science from Brandeis University and a law degree from Columbia University. He lives in New York City.
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