David Latane writes:
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One might mention in this context the strong interest in the early 19th-century in canting language, evidenced in the often reprinted 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (Cromie).
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This is effectively the fourth edition of what starts life as Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785, 1788, 1796). It’s particularly interesting for what it adds to Grose, since the additions represent terms which only become current in the early nineteenth century. It’s not so much that it was frequently reprinted (then – there are various reprints now) as that it lay behind later texts, most notably Egan’s 1823 dictionary, and George Matsell’s Vocabulum: Or, The Rogue’s Lexicon. Matsell, in turn, made his way into Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York (1928), and ultimately Scorsese’s film.
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In France, Béranger's songs sometimes used something akin to the Dublin patois.
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Also relevant here, and perhaps impacting more directly on the English exploitations of cant, would be Balzac and (especially) Vidocq, both directly and via his influence on Victor Hugo, especially in Hugo’s Les Misérables and Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné. Vidocq’s Memoirs were translated into English the same year (1828) that they appeared in French. Vidocq’s Les Voleurs doesn’t seem to have been noticed in the same way, in England at least.
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In the "Newgate" novel vogue, middle-class writers such as Harrison Ainsworth put a sort of synthetic underworld language into songs in novels such as Rookwood, with footnotes.
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Cant in Rookwood is all over the shop, reflecting everything from material going back ultimately to Harman in 1563 to, as your example below shows, stuff which was pretty much contemporary. I’d tend to describe it as pastiche rather than synthetic.
To The Usual Suspects implicated in the Newgate Novel (Ainsworth, Thackeray, Dickens, and Bulwer Lytton), I’d add George Reynolds in The Mysteries and Miseries of London. In background, Reynolds was as middle-class as the rest, but does seem to have a more immediate knowledge of actual criminal cant as it was spoken in London in the early nineteenth century. (He also, earlier in his career, translated Hugo. Or was it later? Anyway, he translates a song in French argot in The Last Days of the Condemned, that Hugo probably got from Vidocq, into English cant.)
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From the Project Gutenberg edition, a sample from "The Double Cross."
Quite cautiously the mill began,
For neither knew the other's plan;
Each cull[99] completely in the dark,
Of vot might be his neighbor's mark;
Resolved his fibbing[100] not to mind,
Nor yet to pay him back in kind;
So on each other kept they tout,[101]
And sparred a bit, and dodged about,
Ri, tol, lol, &c.
[99] Fellow.
[100] A particular kind of pugilistic punishment.
[101] Kept each an eye upon the other.
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A selection of Ainsworth’s poems in Rookwood can be found in J.S.Farmer’s Musa Pedestris. (Available online.) There are problems with this anthology by Farmer – not least of which is that he manages, at one point, to ascribe a poem by Ainsworth to Bampfylde Moore Carew – but it’s about the best there is at the moment. (Among other things, I’m at work attempting to produce a revised version of Farmer’s Musa Pedestris.) “The Double Cross” falls into a variety of poetry linked to Pugilism, mostly exemplified by Thomas Moore and Pierce Egan. The way Ainsworth here uses the terms “milling” and “fibbing” (which have different meanings or different nuances in earlier cant and outside the slang of the Fancy) draw on this.
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Could a poet play with this meaning of "fibbing"? Once one knows it, can it be forgotten?
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Probably not, especially if one remembers that the term “fib” (in this sense) begins its recorded existence in Samuel Rowlands’ Martin-Mark-All and reaches Ainsworth via a string of writers including Thomas Dekker, Richard Head, and the editor of the New Canting Dictionary of 1725, but probably most immediately from either Pierce Egan (Boxiana, or equally likely, Egan’s Sonnets for the Fancy) or Thomas Moore ...
If anyone’s interested, my take on cant in London in 1725 can be found linked to from here:
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0b7fdab3-0774-4b87-aa5d-ba0c4d1c9f1c
Best,
Robin
