This map associational thingy reminds me (as almost everything does at the
moment) of blowens.
Starting, as one might as well, with David Haggart's +Life+, written in
1821, and leaving aside how Pierce Egan managed to incorporate Sinfu'
Davey's definition of "blone" as a girl (this before the definition was
changed, after DH was safely hung and dissected, in the 3rd edition of the
Life to "a woman") into his revision in 1823 of Grose's +Dictionary of the
Vulgar Tongue+, William Maginn (under the nom du guerre of O'Docherty) has
much fun, in the +Noctes Ambrosianae+, with the phrenologist George Combe's
fingering of Haggart's skull. (The name of William Brodie also crops up in
this context.)
Eight years later, Maginn is chasing blowens through the pages of Vidocq's
+Memoirs+ (the English translation of which is promptly staged by Douglas
Jerrold as +Vidocq! the French Spy+. Some time even later, Jerrold makes a
rather tedious joke about an actress who was once a blossom but now is
blowen.) Not much after Vidocq's Memoirs appear, in 1836, Maginn fights a
duel (don't even ask why) with Grantley Berkeley who in his own +Memoirs+ in
1856 uses his elder brother's taste for flash blowens as a reason why he
(Grantley) is the Rightful Heir to the Berkeley title and lands.
George Borrow of course can't be ignored here. Not only is he the only
person (in +Romany Lavo-Lil) to suggest that "blowen" derives from Rom, but
he and David Haggart were kids together in Edinburgh, well before David was
hangit. He's also been suggested as the translator of Vidocq's Memoirs, but
this is unlikely. Borrow mentions Vidocq with qualified approval in +The
Gypsies in Spain+ but privately, in a letter to his publisher, refuses to
countence the possibility of Vidocq translating Borrow's own English works
into French on the grounds, probably warranted, that Vidocq was an
untrustworthy con-man.
Then there's James Hardy "thrice transported" Vaux, George Matsell, New York
Chief of Police, the Reverend Tefft [who had a variety of blowens (dinge
blowens, rum blowens, flash blowens) explained to him by THE NAPOLEON OF
BURGULARS in a Virginia pennetentiary in 1851] ...
... and somewhere on the periphery is Thomas Shadwell blowing his own
trumpet in +The Squire of Alsatia+ (1688).
I could go on. (But won't. For the moment.)
R.
(Incidentally, from the summaries I've found, the actual film being
singularly unavailable, John Houston's +Sinful Davey+ bears hardly any
resemblance to Haggart's +Life+ [which is acknowledged in the credits],
which in turn almost certainly differs from Haggart's life as it was lived
rather than (re)written by David himself.)
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