HALF a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
Up and down the City Road,
In and out the Eagle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
Every night when I go out,
The monkey’s on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off,
Pop goes the weasel.
A penny for a ball of thread,
Another for a needle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
There has been much debate over the years about the meaning of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. A hugely popular music-hall song, its memorable and seemingly nonsensical lyrics spread like wildfire throughout Victorian London. But is there more to the rhyme than meets the eye?
For centuries, the poor and immigrants had lived outside the walls of the City of London in Spitalfields, Hoxton and Shoreditch. These were traditionally areas of high crime and even higher poverty. Ever since the arrival of the Huguenots, French Protestant refugees escaping religious persecution in the 1680s, it had been where all London’s textile work and weaving took place. Packed with sweatshops, it was also the epicentre of the thriving entertainment business and the site of many music halls and theatres whose audiences consisted of the local workers who did long shifts in the factories or laboured in their own homes, creating clothes for very low wages.
One theory suggests that ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ was an attempt to turn the grim reality of local people’s lives into a hit song. In the textile industry, a spinner’s weasel was a mechanical thread-measuring device in the shape of a spoked wheel that accurately measured out yarn by making a popping sound to indicate the correct length had been reached. The mind-numbing and repetitive nature of the work is captured in the final line of each verse, indicating that whatever you were doing, or wherever your mind had wandered to, reality was never far away with the weasel to pop you alert again. The rest of the lyrics can be seen as snapshots of mundane, everyday life in Shoreditch – of having enough money to buy food (rice and treacle), spend on visits to the Eagle music hall on City Road, or pay for the tools of the trade (A penny for a ball of thread, / Another for a needle). That was the way the money went.
A more recent theory involves Cockney rhyming slang –invented by East Enders wishing to communicate only with their own kind. Here set phrases are used to indicate an object that rhymes with the final word, hence ‘apples and pears’ for ‘stairs’ or ‘frog and toad’ for ‘road’. Which is reasonably straightforward once you get the hang of it,
although you have to be a bit quicker on the uptake when just the first part of the phrase is used, as in ‘He fell down the apples’ or ‘I’m going down the frog’. In rhyming slang, weasel comes from ‘weasel and stoat’ and means ‘coat’.
So, according to this interpretation, the rhyme tells the story of an East End pub crawl (Up and down the City Road, / In and out the Eagle). The current Eagle pub (which has the words of the nursery rhyme painted on its wall) on the City Road is the site of the former Royal Eagle Tavern music hall. A monkey was a sailors’ term in Victorian times for the glazed jug or tankard they drank their rum and grog rations from. ‘Knocking off a stick’ meant to drink alcohol. This raucous night out used up every penny of the worker’s wages (That’s the way the money goes), leaving nothing to live on for the rest of the week.
It would have been a hand-to-mouth existence at the best of times. In those days, many people relied on the pawnbroker, who would advance money against objects that were left with him. Many would have to put their weasel into pawn (pop), in order to be able to buy even the cheapest and nastiest food (Half a pound of tuppenny rice, / Half a pound of treacle) to keep themselves going until the next payday. After all, without a coat or money, they weren’t going to be able to go on another bender up and down the City Road for the time being. Although it’s a dark song, it also catches the happy-go-lucky attitude that saw one good night out as worth a week surviving on tuppenny rice and treacle, and the people it was written about easily identified with it.
The earliest published version of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ appeared in America during the early 1850s. American news sheets labelled it ‘the new English dance’, while, back in England, The Times published an article in 1853 describing various popular songs and dances of the day, including ‘La Tempête, La Napolitenne and Pop Goes the Weasel, three celebrated dances’. In 1854, Boosey & Co., a well-established music and book shop in London, included the following words in one of their adverts: ‘The new country dance “Pop Goes the Weasel”, introduced by Her Majesty Queen Victoria’, suggesting that the rhyme had now reached a wider audience – from East End music hall to Royal Variety Performance.