Tag: Georgian London

Stephen Hart’s Canting Lexicon, & More

gordsellar0 Comments

A very quick post, because I’m running  against several deadlines but wanted to at least add something here… For those interested in the “rogues’ cant” of Georgian England–something that interests me, though it’ll only get a certain amount of use in my ongoing project (since most of the characters aren’t criminals)–Stephen Hart has the best and most accessible canting lexicon index I’ve managed to find online. He has a bunch of pages of canting words and corresponding definitions arranged by topic or theme. The canting word lists are accessible from here. It’s a very useful resource for anyone in a position like mine, who’d like to look …

Continue Reading

Got Hops?: Southwark Borough High Street

gordsellar0 Comments

This is a post on the geography of the hop trade in London in the 1730s, but it’s really more than that. It’s actually the product of research I had to do to figure out where exactly my protagonist was walking in one scene of the novel I’m writing, and what it probably looked like. As such, it veers between all of this: the main hop market in London, urban geography, the architecture of London bridge at the time, how Londoners internalized the systematic cognitive infrastructure of being urban people, the state of capital punishment in London, hop packaging and transport in the early 1700s, a …

Continue Reading

Cats in the Brewhouse

gordsellar1 Comment

A short post, because I’m busy…  While searching (fruitlessly) for a picture of the brewer John Perkins at Shut Up At Barclay Perkins, I found a great post about another sort of animal laborer in the old London brewhouse: cats. Probably anyone who’s lived on a farm isn’t surprised, but this was news to me, even if it immediately made sense.   I’ve mentioned before how work-animals–specifically horses–were an important part of the brewhouse. But I hadn’t realized that cats, too were used by brewers. It makes sense, of course: rats like to eat grain, and cats like to hunt …

Continue Reading

How John Perkins Saved Thrale’s Anchor Brewery From the Gordon Riots

gordsellar5 Comments

Long story short? Free (as in “free beer”) beer. And food. And a horse-drawn cart. But you want the long version, right? In a very recent post, I speculated on parallels between Georgian England and other societies that are in a comparable stage of internalizing modernity, industrialization, urbanization, and so on. I specifically suggested that what had sounded so odd to me about the handling of the Bin Duong rioters here in Vietnam–trying to appease them, and even give them a refreshing drink–might have a parallel in Georgian England. Well, whaddaya know. While reading a paper on the hop trade …

Continue Reading

Two Interesting Cases of Female Cross-Dressing in History

gordsellar5 Comments

Most of the time, one hears about male cross-dressers; one runs across female cross-dressers primarily in Shakespeare plays. But lately, I’ve run across two interesting cases of women dressing up as men, that seem worth sharing: First is Mary Hamilton, who was the subject of a pamphlet by Henry Fielding titled The Female Husband in 1746. (Okay, it was really titled The Surprising Adventures of a FEMALE HUSBAND containing the whimsical Amours, curious Incidents, and Diabolical Tricks. Okay, actually, it was… well, the “title” wasn’t really a title but an attention-grabbing page of text, so it seems to vary depending …

Continue Reading