“Respicere . . . voces”: Horace Ars Poetica 317–18: “I would advise one who has learned the imitative art to look to life and manners for a model, and draw from thence living words.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Latin and Greek are from the Loeb editions. The variant veras in the second half of the second line changes the meaning from “living” to “truthful.” As C. O. Brink notes, many ancient texts, including several used in the early eighteenth century (1711, 1730), contain the variant veras for vivas in line 318 (Horace on Poetry: The “Ars Poetica” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], 66n).
1. “county of England”: Following upon a nineteenth-century identification of the source for Commodore Trunnion, the county has been identified as Cheshire, in west-central England, bordered on the west by Wales and the Irish Sea (see chap. 2, n. 1; Kahrl, 28–35; Knapp, 318). Cheshire, however, is closer to 200 than 100 miles from the “metropolis,” calling in doubt the certainty of the identification. Given that Peregrine’s grandfather might have been engaged in smuggling (see n. 18, below), that smuggling was rampant in Kent during this period (see chap. 88, n. 285), and that Trunnion’s wedding suit of clothes was made by a tailor in the Kentish town of Ramsgate (see chap. 8, n. 5), one of the counties to the east, southeast, or south of London could also be intended.
2. “Gamaliel Pickle Esq”: Gamaliel, from Hebrew meaning “benefit of God,” appears in both Old and New Testaments. In Acts 22:3, Gamaliel is the teacher of the apostle Paul. The honorary title of Esquire was extended originally to men who could claim gentle birth and to “officers in the service of a king or nobleman” (OED). Gamaliel Pickle’s gentility was of recent origin, his grandfather having been a humble merchant who through his own industry rose to the prominent position of lord mayor of London.
3. “Plum”: “The sum of one hundred thousand pounds; (more generally) a fortune” (OED). Samuel Johnson labels the term, helpfully, as “cant of the city,” or jargon of the financial center of London, where Gamaliel Pickle’s father made his fortune.
4. “coming upon the parish”: To be forced to rely on the parish for support, as a pauper. In 1601, in the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign, an act of Parliament established the parish as the main administrative unit for poor relief (43 Eliz. 1, c. 2). For a social history of the poor law to the end of the eighteenth century, see Paul A. Fiedler, Social Welfare in Pre-industrial England: The Old Poor Law Tradition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), esp. 109–14, “Going on the Parish.”
5. “housekeeper”: Householder, who would have been granted relief under the existing poor laws after having resided in the parish for at least three years.
6. “pot”: Common metonymy in which the container stands in for its contents, in this case ale or some other spirituous drink.
7. “Mr. Creech”: Thomas Creech (1659–1700), Oxford-educated scholar and translator whose reputation was established by his translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura in 1682. In 1684 appeared his Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace. Done into English. A second edition followed in 1688. This translation was not received favorably by the critics. Creech committed suicide in 1700. The two lines of verse quoted here are from Pope’s version of “The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace” (1738; lines 1–2). Creech’s version runs as follows:
Not to admire, as most are wont to do,
It is the only method that I know,
To make Men happy, and to keep ’em so. (487)
8. “phlegm”: Apathy. In premodern medicine, phlegm was one of the four bodily humors. It was characterized as cold and moist, and its predominance supposedly made a person indolent or apathetic (OED).
9. “underwriter”: Insurer.
10. “Grizzle”: Gray; a sprinkling of gray hairs (OED). Grizzle also suggests Grisildis, Chaucer’s patient wife in The Clerk’s Tale, here used ironically. At the end of the nineteenth century, the word came to be applied to a person who frets (OED).
11. “oeconomy”: Frugality (OED).
12. “city”: The part of London within the old walls; “the center of commercial and financial activity” (OED).
13. “cast”: A slight squint (OED).
14. “office of sheriff”: From 1199 the City of London elected two sheriffs for a term of one year. The election required approval by the sovereign. Aldermen who held the office of sheriff were eligible to be elected lord mayor. See Geoffrey Camberlege, The Corporation of London: Its Origin, Constitution, Powers and Duties (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 11–26. George Rudé writes that the office of sheriff was sought during the eighteenth century mainly as “a stepping stone to the mayoralty” (Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971], 125).
15. “constructions”: Interpretations.
16. “vis inertiæ”: Power of inertia, or resistance to change.
17. “Bank stock and India bonds”: P. G. M. Dickson estimates that there were 4,750 accounts in Bank of England stock in 1752, and by midcentury 21 percent of all accounts in Bank stocks and India bonds belonged to small investors (The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 [London: Macmillan, 1967], 285, 290). According to Thomas Mortimer, “India bonds are the most convenient and profitable security any person can be possessed of, who has a quantity of cash unemployed, but which he knows not how soon he may have occasion for” (Every Man His Own Broker [London, 1761], quoted in Dickson, 410).
18. “traffick”: Commerce, with perhaps an arch suggestion here of engaging in smuggling. See chap. 88, n. 286.
19. “cann”: “A cup made of metal, or some other matter than earth” (Johnson); here a metonymy for the ale it contains.
1. “Commodore Trunnion”: A commodore is “a general officer in the British marine, invested with a command of a detachment of ships of war destined on any particular enterprise; during which time he bears the rank of brigadier-general in the army” (Falconer). The OED notes that the rank lasts only as long as the person commands the detachment. It is above a captain but below a rear admiral. A trunnion is a pin or pivot on either side of a cannon. It supports the cannon in the carriage. The commodore’s given name, Hawser, denotes a large rope or small cable used for towing and mooring. The Reverend Edward Hinchliffe identified Adm. Daniel Hoare (d. 1762) as the model for Trunnion in Barthomley (London: Longman, 1856), 73–74. Around 1750 Hoare built Bellefields, near Warrington, in Cheshire. Modeled upon a ship, the house featured cabins and officers’ quarters furnished with hammocks. Visitors to Bellefields showed Hoare all the respect due an admiral aboard ship. Kahrl, who spells the name of the admiral Hore, speculates that Smollett first learned of Hoare in the West Indies, where the latter was captain of the fireship Success. For an account of Hoare’s naval service, see Kahrl, 28–30. See also H. G. Archer, “Alfieri in England: Original of Hawser Trunnion,” Notes & Queries, 11th ser., 2 (1910): 421. According to the ODNB, Fitzroy Henry Lee (1699–1750) has also been mentioned as the “original of Tobias Smollett’s Hawser Trunnion.” In 1746 Lee was accused of “incivility, drunkenness, and neglect of duty,” relieved of command, but never tried. In 1747 he was promoted to rear admiral and became vice admiral in 1748. The source for this attribution remains untraced.
2. “humoursome”: Subject to humors; that is, either capricious or peevish.
3. “woundily”: Excessively, dreadfully. The OED notes that the word appears in Smollett’s translation of Alain René Le Sage’s Gil Blas (462). Smollett had also used it in Roderick Random (129, 195).
4. “yard-arm”: “Either of the two ends of a yard. . . . Often used of the yard as a whole.” The yard is a perpendicular spar set across “and forward of, a mast and serving to support and extend a square sail which is bent to it” (OED). To lie yardarm to yardarm is to be close enough to an enemy ship so as to be able to lash the yardarms together and thus prevent the ships from drifting apart during battle.
5. “board and board”: “bord á bord . . . side by side, or joined to a ship, wharf, etc. and lying parallel thereto” (Falconer).
6. “grappling”: A grappling iron is a small, anchorlike instrument fitted with claws and often used to bring an enemy ship close enough to allow boarding.
7. “stink-pots”: “An earthen jar, or shell, charged with powder . . . and other materials of an offensive and suffocating smell.” It was often used by privateers when boarding an enemy ship (Falconer).
8. “grapes”: An explosive charge for a cannon, also known as grapeshot, or “a combination of balls . . . put into a thick canvas bag and corded strongly together, so as to form a sort of cylinder” (Falconer).
9. “round and double-headed partridges”: Another kind of charge for cannon. The OED defines it as similar to “case shot,” which Falconer defines as being “formed by putting a great quantity of musket bullets in a tin-box called a cannister” (s.v. “shot”).
10. “crows”: Crowbar, an iron lever used on ships “for various purposes, . . . as to remove pieces of timber, and other weighty bodies; and to draw spike nails, etc. as well as to manage the great guns, by moving them into their ports, levelling or pointing them to a particular object” (Falconer).
11. “carters”: Missile? The only example of this usage in the OED comes from Peregrine Pickle.
12. “patereroes”: Pedero, a “small piece of ordinance with a relatively short barrel, used . . . in naval and siege warfare. Also used to fire salutes” (OED).
13. “Mr. Hatchway”: Kahrl suggests that Hatchway is modeled on Capt. John Bover (d. 1782), friend of Adm. Daniel Hoare, who appointed him executor of his estate and left him an annuity of £30 (30–31).
14. “half-pay”: Retired officers or those not in active service received half the usual salary for their rank.
15. “the length . . . foot”: “To know a person well; to discover his weakness” (Partridge). See also the ODEP, which records the first usage of this proverb in Lyly, Euphues and His England, 2:68.
16. “Tom Pipes”: Pipes, from the boatswain’s whistle. According to Kahrl, modeled on Thomas Smale, Admiral Hoare’s servant aboard the Canterbury and remembered generously in the admiral’s will (32).
17. “song concerning the boatswain’s whistle”: Charles N. Robinson makes the following observation about this song: “This ballad is of the same period as that in which John Gay wrote ‘Black-Eyed Susan,’ [1720–23] but it does not look like the work of a genuine sailor. It was set to music by [Maurice] Greene [1696–1755] and various versions are to be found in the garlands and song-books about the time that Smollett wrote ‘Peregrine Pickle’” (The British Tar in Fact and Fiction [London: Harper Bros., 1911], 347). For the text of “The Boatswain’s Whistle,” see C. H. Firth, Naval Songs and Ballads (London: Publications of the Navy Records Society, 1908), 165–66.
18. “hussle-cap”: A form of pitch and toss, a game in which coins are first pitched at a mark. The player whose coin comes nearest the mark then tosses all the coins and keeps those that land heads up. In hustle-cap, the coins are put in a cap (hustled together) and tossed at once (OED).
19. “chuck-farthing”: Similar to pitch and toss, except the player who pitches nearest the mark then tries to toss the coins into a hole, keeping those that go in (OED).
20. “thof”: Dialectal form of though. Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols. (London: Henry Frowde, 1898–1905), vol. 6, s.v. “though.”
21. “cast in a swinging sum”: Found guilty and heavily fined.
22. “match”: “A piece of wick, cord, etc., which burns at a uniform rate (being hard to extinguish once lit), used to fire a cannon or other firearm, or ignite a trail of gunpowder, etc.; a fuse” (OED).
23. “pucker”: State of agitation.
24. “as e’er . . . leather”: Paraphrasing Julius Caesar 1.1.25–26: “As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s-leather have gone upon my handiwork.” Neat’s-leather is made from cowhide.
25. “anchors”: Anker. “A measure of wine and spirits, used in Holland, North Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. It varies in different countries; that of Rotterdam, formerly also used in England, contains 10 old wine gallons or 8–1/3 imperial gallons” (OED). The OED cites this passage as an example of the word’s usage.
26. “Nantz”: A brandy named after Nantes in the Loire region of France.
27. “conjured . . . Red Sea”: See Exodus 10:19. “And the Lord turned a mighty strong west wind, which took away the locusts, and cast them into the Red sea.”
28. “jack-daws”: A species of crow.
29. “main”: “Violent; strong; overpowering” (Johnson).
30. “the devil . . . about”: Paraphrase of 1 Peter 5:8. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
31. “queen of Sheba”: 1 Kings recounts Sheba’s visit to Solomon, bringing with her “a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones” (10:2). She may have been the ruler of the Sabeans of southern Arabia. Later legends report that she bore Solomon a son, who became prince of the Ethiopian people.
32. “rumbo”: A strong rum punch.
33. “Odd’s niggers!”: An oath. Odds is a minced and euphemistic form of God. The source and meaning of niggers as part of this oath is uncertain. It may be a variant of nigs, of unknown origin, dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century, possibly related to niggard, and sometimes appearing “in reduplicated form as niggers-noggers.” An echo of the meaning referring to the peoples of Africa, either in a neutral or derogatory sense, is possible, given that the initial appearance of the oath is coterminous with the beginning of the slave trade. The first-recorded use of a variant of the oath in the OED is 1602 (“Gods neakes”). The first-recorded use of nigger as referring to the dark-skinned peoples of Africa is 1574 (“Nigers of Aethiop”). The same oath appears in Roderick Random (299), where it is uttered by Narcissa’s brother; and in Gil Blas, where it appears in the form “odd’s nigers!” (55), said by Fabricius, Gil Blas’s schoolfellow. The speakers and contexts of all the uses make it unlikely that a deliberate reference to the dark-skinned peoples of Africa is intended.
34. “lee-brace”: A brace is a “rope attached to the yard of a vessel for the purpose of ‘trimming’ the sail” (OED). The lee brace faces away from the wind; the weather brace faces the direction from which the wind is blowing.
35. “haul upon a wind”: “Direct the ship’s course nearer to that point of the compass from which the wind arises” (Falconer).
36. “lay along”: In nautical jargon, a ship is said to lay along when it is “pressed down sideways by a weight of sail in a fresh wind that crosses the ship’s course” (Falconer). The ship’s sail would then be horizontal to the sea. In this case, the side of Trunnion’s carriage is horizontal to the ground.
37. “cunned”: “To give sailing directions to the steersman.” The OED cites this passage as an example of this usage; s.v. “con.”
38. “larboard”: The left side of a ship when looking forward; also known as “port.”
39. “abaft”: Toward the stern of a ship (Falconer).
40. “rope yarn”: A trifle; in this instance, a strand of yarn used in making the strands that form the rope.
41. “run your rig”: “To make a fool or mockery of; to ridicule” (OED); A New Canting Dictionary (London, 1725) defines rig as “Game, Diversion, Ridicule” and cross-references it with “Fun.”
42. “raise a perpendicular”: A geometrical problem that entails drawing “either of two vertical lines passing through defined points at the bow and stern of a ship, respectively, and the line of the keel” and that has applications in shipbuilding and navigation (OED).
43. “trim”: The state or disposition of a ship so as to make it ready for navigation (Falconer).
44. “cocked his eye”: To wink or leer; to look knowing (Partridge).
45. “admiral Bower”: This is most likely George Anson, Baron Anson (1697–1762), who entered the navy in 1712, became a member of Parliament in 1744, and was promoted to rear admiral in 1745 and vice admiral in 1746. In May 1747 Anson, in command of the western fleet charged with patrolling the English Channel, defeated two French convoys in the battle of Cape Finisterre (see n. 64, below). He was named Baron Anson of Soberton two months later. On 25 April 1748 he married Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of Lord Hardwicke, the lord chancellor and Anson’s political patron. Smollett satirized Anson in Adventures of an Atom under the name of Nin-kom-poo-po. Robert Adams Day remarks that the cause of Smollett’s animosity toward Anson is unknown. See The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. Robert Adams Day and O M Brack, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 21–22, 260–61.
46. “Avast!”: “Hold!” “Stop!” The OED speculates that it is a “worn-down form” of hold fast, from the Dutch hou’vast, and cites a passage from Roderick Random (211), where the command is spoken by Tom Bowling, Random’s uncle.
47. “sprit-sail-yard”: For yard, see n. 4, above. The spritsail is “attached to a yard which hangs under the bowsprit. . . . It is furnished with a large hole in each of its lower corners, to evacuate the water with which the cavity, or belly of it is frequently filled, by the surge of the sea when the ship pitches.” The bowsprit is a boom or mast that extends over the stem, or curved upright timber that unites the two sides of a ship at the front of the vessel (Falconer).
48. “mizzen top-sail haulyards”: Halyard, the ropes and tackles used to raise the topsail of the mizzen, or aftmost mast of a ship. The OED cites this passage as an example of its usage. The entire phrase, “from the sprit-sail yard to the mizzen top-sail haulyards,” can be paraphrased as the more familiar “from stem to stern.”
49. “manger”: “A small apartment, extending athwart [side to side] the lower-deck of a ship of war, immediately within the hause-holes, and fenced on the after-part by a partition, which separates it from the other part of the deck behind it” (Falconer). The purpose of the manger was to keep water, which would enter in the hawse hole from either the motion of the sea or the hauling in of the anchor cables, from running down the rest of the deck. Because of the “fence” or partition, it was also a convenient place to keep livestock, from which, according to one scholar, it gets its name. See Peter Goodwin, The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War, 1650–1850 (London: Naval Institute Press, 1987), 178.
50. “ordered to the gun”: Tied to the ship’s gun, where corporal punishment was administered.
51. “hove down”: To turn a ship on its side for cleaning or repairing; from the past tense of heave (OED).
52. “Guinea-pigs”: A midshipman in the East India service but also, and here, a term of reproach for an inexperienced sailor. Partridge cites this occurrence as the first instance of its use as a general term of reproach, colloquial during the period c. 1745 to 1830; but Jack Rattlin uses it in Roderick Random when he tells Random that his uncle Bowling is “a brave fellow as ever crackt bisket;—none of your guinea pigs” (128). The OED cites the passage from Roderick Random as an example of the term’s usage.
53. “quarter-deck”: Above the upper deck and extending between the stern and the mainmast, it is usually reserved for officers, who command the ship from this vantage (Falconer).
54. “cook’s shifter”: “A person appointed to assist the ship’s cook, particularly in washing, steeping, and shifting the salt provisions” (Falconer). The OED cites this passage as an example of the term’s usage.
55. “unbended”: Relaxed.
56. “bum-boat”: The following note appears in Roderick Random: “A bum boat-woman, is one who sells bread, cheese, greens, liquor, and fresh provision to the sailors, in a small boat that lies along-side of the ship” (128). Bumboats traveled between the shore and a ship lying at anchor.
57. “Rook”: Sir George Rooke (1650–1709), naval officer, commissioner of the admiralty, and member of Parliament. Rooke began his long and distinguished naval career in 1672 as second lieutenant. By 1690 he was promoted to rear admiral. Two years later he was named vice admiral. In 1693 he was promoted to admiral and became Admiral of the Fleet for a brief period in 1696. In the summer of 1704 he commanded the fleet that captured Gibraltar and turned back the French fleet at Málaga, with the result that the French desisted from any more naval actions during the War of the Spanish Succession. Smollett writes that when Rooke returned to England in September 1704, he “was received by the ministry, and the people in general, with those marks of esteem and veneration which were due to his long services and signal success” (Complete History, 4:293). A lifelong Tory, party politics and poor health caused him to resign his commission in early 1705 (ODNB).
58. “Jennings”: Sir John Jennings (1664–1743), who began his naval career as a lieutenant in February 1687. Like Rooke, he was another battle-tried naval officer with a long and distinguished career. He was promoted to captain in November 1689. He fought beside Rooke when the latter captured Gibraltar and fought the French at the battle of Málaga. As a result of his service in the Mediterranean, he was knighted in October 1704 and named rear admiral in January 1705. A series of further promotions and service as a member of Parliament followed fast upon one another. His last shipboard service was in 1726. On 17 January 1733 he was named rear admiral of Great Britain, an honorary office (ODNB).
59. “hollow”: “To cry out loud, to shout” (OED).
60. “taken all aback”: “When through a shift of wind or bad steerage, the wind comes in front of the square sails and lays them back against the masts, instantly staying the ship’s onward course and giving her stern way; an accident exceedingly dangerous in a strong gale” (OED).
61. “eight glasses”: Eight turns of the sand glass. Ships had glasses for half-hour, half-minute, and quarter-minute periods, but when not specified, “glass” usually referred to the half-hour glass. Thus, here, four hours.
62. “Floor de Louse”: Fleur de lis. In his Continuation of the Complete History of England, Smollett relates the destruction of a French frigate of this name in a naval battle off the island of Hispaniola in October 1760. Apparently, this was a common name for French ships (Continuation of the Complete History of England, 4 vols. [London, 1760–65], 4:8–9).
63. “metal”: A warship’s firepower. Peregrine Pickle contains the first instance of this usage cited in the OED.
64. “Cape Finisterre”: Literally, “land’s end,” a rocky cape in Galicia considered the westernmost point of Spain. In two battles in May and October 1747, British naval forces defeated the French there (see n. 45, above).
65. “weather-bow”: The side of the ship’s bow that is turned toward the wind (OED).
66. “chace”: A vessel, presumed to be an enemy, being pursued (Falconer).
67. “studding-sails”: “Light sails extended, in moderate and steady breezes, beyond the skirts of the principal sails, where they appear as wings upon the yard-arm.” By increasing the sail area, studding sails (pronounced “stuns’l”) increase the ship’s speed (Falconer).
68. “jack and ensign”: Ship’s colors or flags. The jack, the smaller of the two, was flown from the bow; the ensign flew from the stern. In the British navy, the jack was the “union jack,” a union of the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew. The ensign featured a field of red, white, or blue, with the jack in the canton, or upper quadrant next to the staff.
69. “rattlins”: Ratlines, or horizontal ropes serving as ladders on a ship’s rigging. Smollett used the name of these ropes in Roderick Random for the sailor Jack Rattlin, a former shipmate of the hero’s uncle Tom Bowling and a friend to Random while they both served aboard the Thunder (Roderick Random, chaps. 24–35).
70. “Triumph”: A twenty-gun Spanish ship of this name was captured in the Caribbean by Adm. Edward Vernon’s fleet in late 1739. See The Vernon Papers, ed. B. McL. Ranft (London: Navy Records Society, 1958), 99:46–48, 85.
71. “hull-to”: Also “a-hull,” or with sails furled, usually employed during a storm to keep the ship in the trough of the waves and minimize the danger of swamping or capsizing. The process is called trying (Falconer). A ship that is hull-to would be sitting low in the water and would thereby present less of a target to its enemy. Hatchway teases Trunnion by implying that a broadside would miss the ship and hit the gulls flying above it.
72. “athwart my hawse”: According to Falconer, hawse “is generally understood to imply the situation of the cables before the ship’s stem, when she is moored with two anchors out from forward, viz. One on the starboard, and the other on the larboard bow. . . . It also denotes any small distance a-head of a ship, or between her head and the anchors employed to ride her: as . . . the ‘brig fell athwart our hause [sic].’” A ship is said to be athwart another’s hawse when it is perpendicular to its bow, to which hawse often refers. Partridge records the phrase as a slang term meaning “To obstruct or check; fall out with.” Hawse should not be confused with hawser, which denotes the cables of a ship. See n. 1, above.
73. “lee-beam”: A beam is a timber that stretches across the ship, from side to side, supporting the decks. Lee-beam refers to the side of the ship away from the wind.
74. “scuppers”: Small holes, level with the deck, for channeling water into the sea.
75. “crank”: “Liable to lean over or capsize: said of a ship when she is built too deep or narrow, or has not sufficient ballast to carry full sail” (OED); in this instance, drunk.
76. “rolled”: Describing the motion of a ship that has come to a position parallel to the swell, moving from side to side rather than perpendicular to it.
77. “Lightning”: A fireship of this name sailed in the fleet commanded by Sir John Norris in August 1741. It was lost on 16 June 1745. See Frederic Hervey, The Naval History of Great Britain, 4 vols. (London, 1780–83), 4:154, 392.
78. “paid off”: When a ship’s crew receives payment at the time when the ship itself is discharged from service (Falconer).
79. “work you to an oil”: To beat or crush, as in extracting oil from a seed or fruit.
80. “hussled”: “To push or knock (a person) about roughly or unceremoniously; . . . said esp. of a number who subject an individual to this treatment as a method of assaulting or robbing him” (OED). Smollett’s is the first example of this usage in the OED.
81. “rated on the books”: Entered on the ship’s books as a member of its company in a particular rank or office; in this case as boatswain’s mate.
82. “smart ticket”: A surgeon’s certificate entitling a disabled seaman to a pension.
83. “we sailors . . . asses”: A nautical commonplace; cited by the ODEP as its first appearance in print (692).
84. “pipe of Hermes”: Hermes is credited with turning a tortoise into a lyre on the day of his birth. He is sometimes said to have invented the syrinx, a musical pipe of seven reeds, which is also attributed to his son Pan. Syrinx was the nymph who was turned into a bed of reeds while fleeing Pan.
85. “sow-gelder’s horn”: Used to announce his arrival at a place (OED).
86. “Bustle . . . joys”: See n. 17, above.
1. “morceau”: “A short literary or musical composition” (OED). The OED notes this usage in Roderick Random. Young Roderick uses the word to describe his early attempts at poetical composition. In the first edition of the novel, the word “pieces” appears instead of “morceaus” (32).
2. “engross”: “To write in a peculiar character appropriate to legal documents; hence, to write out or express in legal form” (OED).
3. “on the anvil”: In preparation; in hand.
4. “clenching”: Clinch; confirm (Johnson).
5. “breechings”: In nautical terms, “a rope used to secure the cannon . . . and prevent them from recoiling too much” (Falconer); here, an obviously bawdy pun.
6. “Bay of Biscay”: In the North Atlantic, between the northern coast of Spain and the western coast of France, between Ushant Island and Cape Ortegal, known for strong currents and sudden storms. In The Harlot’s Progress: or, The Humours of Drury Lane, 2nd ed. (London, 1732), the bay also stands for that which cannot be fathomed:
O Hat sublime! Thy Brims have cover’d;
The deepest Thing Man has discover’d;
A Myst’ry deep, unfathomable,
As Bay of Biscay with a Cable. (57)
7. “slip his cable”: “To allow (an anchor-cable, etc.) to run out, freq. with a buoy attached, when quitting an anchorage in haste” (OED).
1. “Philomel”: Raped by Tereus, her sister Procne’s husband. According to Ovid’s version of the myth, Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue to prevent her from accusing him of rape; but Philomela tells her story nonetheless by weaving it in a tapestry, which her maidservant carries to her sister. Procne takes revenge upon her husband for raping her sister by killing their son Itys and serving him to his father. Philomela, Procne, and Tereus are turned into birds (Metamorphosis 6.424–674). In some versions of the myth, Procne becomes a nightingale and Philomela a swallow; in others, Philomela is transformed into the nightingale.
2. “females . . . the point at Portsmouth”: A drawbridge separated Portsmouth Point from the rest of Portsmouth. One historian describes the point as “a picturesque, heterogeneous assemblage of taverns, liquor-shops, eating-houses, cook-shops, tailors, drapers, pawnbrokers, watch-jobbers, and trinket merchants, backed by a warren of mean streets and alleys.” It was later to acquire a “‘fearful name’” because of “‘the scenes of debauchery and brutal violence’” that could be observed there. See G. J. Marcus, Heart of Oak: A Survey of British Sea Power in the Georgian Era (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 144. The last two phrases about Portsmouth are quoted by Marcus from W. G. Gates, Free Mart Fair (Portsmouth: Charpen-tier & Co., 1897).
3. “two lads of the castle”: See chap. 35, n. 6.
4. “bumpers”: A bumper is a cup filled to overflowing (Johnson).
5. “throwing the stocking”: An old custom that occurs when the bride and bridegroom retire to bed and before the drinking of the customary sack-posset. The young men remove the stocking of the bride, the young women that of the bridegroom. Each young man in turn sitting at the foot of the bed with his back toward the newlywed couple takes the stocking of the bride in hand and tosses the stocking over his head in an attempt to hit the bride with the stocking. The same is done by the young women, who toss the stocking to hit the bridegroom. Success indicates that the stocking thrower will shortly be married. The following lines, from the Progress of Matrimony (Palace Miscellany [London, 1733], 49), describe the custom:
Then come all the younger folk in,
With ceremony throw the stocking;
Backward, o’erhead, in turn they toss’d it;
Till in sack-posset they had lost it.
Th’ intent of flinging thus the hose
Is to hit him or her o’ th’ nose;
Who hits the mark thus o’er left shoulder,
Must married be ere twelve months older.
This poem and other instances of the custom can be found in John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 3 vols., new ed., Sir Henry Ellis (1848–49; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1970), 2:170–73.
1. “left decency on the left hand”: Disregarded decency. See The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Falstaff tells Pistol, “I, I, I myself sometimes, leaving the fear of God on the left hand, and hiding mine honor in my necessity, am fain to shuffle, to hedge, and to lurch” (2.2.22–25). Grose uses the same phrase in his definition of “Billingsgate language” as “foul language . . . apt to leave decency and good manners a little on the left hand.”
2. “block-faced”: Lumpish, or perhaps with reference to the naval meaning of block, a case containing a pulley or pulleys. Smollett’s is the only instance of this combination cited in the OED.
3. “piss-kitchen”: Kitchen maid (Partridge).
4. “exhibited evident symptoms of pregnancy”: R. G. Collins argues that evident signs of pregnancy after “not . . . many months” of marriage suggests that Peregrine is not Gamaliel’s son. That his mother was pregnant before her marriage to Gamaliel could explain, moreover, her antipathy toward her firstborn son. See “The Hidden Bastard: A Question of Illegitimacy in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle,” PMLA 94 (1979): 91–105.
5. “Culpepper’s Midwifery”: Nicholas Culpeper’s (1616–54) Directory for Midwives (London, 1651). One scholar asserts that Culpeper “had a far greater influence on medical practice in England between 1650 and 1750 than either Harvey or Sydenham. His writings reflect faithfully the orthodox medicine of his own time” (F. N. L. Poynter, “Nicholas Culpeper and His Books,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 17 [1962]: 152). The Directory for Midwives had gone through many editions and abridgments by 1750. Joseph Addison listed it among the books in a “Lady’s Library”; see the Spectator, no. 37 (12 April 1711), ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:155.
6. “sagacious performance . . . Aristotle’s name”: Aristotle’s Compleat and Experienc’d Midwife: In Two Parts, 10th ed. (London, [1750?]). Smollett must surely have known this and Culpeper’s book, especially during the period 1749–51, when he was editing, annotating, and preparing for the press the first volume of William Smellie’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, 3 vols. (London, 1752–64).
7. “Compleat House-wife”: The Compleat Housewife, or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion (1727), by Eliza Smith (d. 1732?). In the fourteenth edition by 1750, the book contained cooking and medicinal recipes.
8. “Quincy’s Dispensatory”: John Quincy (d. 1722), Pharmacopoeia . . . or, a Compleat English Dispensatory (London, 1718), a popular handbook on medicinal preparations and prescriptions. By 1749 it was in its twelfth edition.
9. “She restricted her . . . vegetables”: Referring to the common belief, described in Culpeper, Quincy, and elsewhere, that certain fruits and vegetables caused abortion. For a detailed study of the medical background of this and the next chapter, see G. S. Rousseau, “Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica, and Peregrine Pickle,” in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp, ed. George S. Rousseau and Paul-Gabriel Boucé (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 79–98.
10. “longing was baulked . . . disease”: The notion that a “diseased imagination” in a pregnant mother would produce a marked or defective baby was current medical theory in 1750; the background and the fortunes of this theory during the period 1720–50 are described by Rousseau, “Pineapples,” 83–94. For further medical background, especially relating to controversies about the theory of the pregnant mother’s “diseased imagination,” see Philip K. Wilson, “‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind?’: The Daniel Turner–James Blondel Dispute over the Power of the Maternal Imagination,” Annals of Science 49 (1992): 63–85, reprinted in Childbirth: Changing Ideas and Practices in Britain and America 1600 to the Present, ed. Philip K. Wilson, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1996), 3:361–83. Jill Campbell discusses the appearance and function of this belief in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, where Joseph’s true parentage is revealed by the discovery of a strawberry birthmark, attributed to his mother’s longing for this fruit. “‘The Exact Picture of His Mother’: Recognizing Joseph Andrews,” ELH: A Journal of Literary History 55 (1988): 643–64.
11. “this fatal fruit”: Pineapples were one of the fruits thought to cause abortions. Ephraim Chambers writes that pineapple “is good to strengthen the heart and nerves, against nausea, to refresh the spirits, and excites urine powerfully; but is apt to occasion abortion in women” (s.v. “ananas”). On the history of the cultivation of the pineapple in England and on its medicinal uses, see Rousseau, “Pineapples,” 98–101, 104–7.
12. “five pieces”: Probably five guineas. According to the OED, piece was “popularly applied to an English gold coin; orig. to the unite of James I, and afterwards to the sovereign, and guinea, as the one or other was the current coin.” Even at a cost exceeding £5, Rousseau points out that Mrs. Grizzle has received a bargain, because he estimates the average cost, c. 1726, of growing a pineapple, from purchase of the seeds to harvest, at £80 (“Pineapples,” 101 n. 39).
1. “imagination . . . seemed to be strangely diseased”: See chap. 5, n. 10.
2. “penetralia”: “The innermost parts or recesses of a building; spec. the sanctuary or inner sanctum of a temple” (OED).
3. “yaw-sighted”: Squinting; from “yaw,” to steer off course (Partridge).
4. “halted”: Limped (OED).
5. “Bologne”: In the Travels, Smollett describes this city, his port of debarkation, as “a large agreeable town, with broad open streets, excellently paved; and the houses are of stone, well built and commodious. The number of inhabitants may amount to sixteen thousand. . . . [I]n clear weather the coast of England, from Dover to Folkstone, appears so plain, that one would imagine it was within four or five leagues of the French shore” (15–16).
6. “Jordan”: “A kind of pot or vessel formerly used by physicians and alchemists.” It came to signify a chamber pot, it is thought, because it was used as a container for urine by the physicians (OED).
7. “Argonauts . . . golden fleece”: In order to prevent Jason from claiming the throne after deposing his father, Aeson, Pelias, half-brother to Aeson, sends Jason to Colchis to retrieve the golden fleece. Jason’s men were called the Argonauts, after the ship that took them to Colchis, where King Aietes agreed to surrender the fleece if Jason performed three formidable tasks. Aided by Aietes’s daughter Medea, Jason accomplished all three tasks.
8. “Peregrine”: Upon a pilgrimage; upon one’s travels; traveling abroad (OED). The Peregrine galley was a sixth-rate ship built in 1700. It was converted into the royal yacht and renamed Carolina in 1716. In 1749, when a new royal yacht was commissioned, the ship was once again named the Peregrine and was converted into a sixteen-gun sloop. The ship foundered in the West Indies in 1762. See Grant Uden and Richard Cooper, A Dictionary of British Ships and Seamen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 370. See also “pickle,” “a person, usually a boy, who is always causing trouble” (OED). Although the first instance of this usage dates from 1788, it is supposed to have been derived from “pickled,” or “thoroughly ‘imbued’ with mischief,” which is found in the late seventeenth century.
9. “bandages . . . be loosened and laid aside”: Peregrine’s mother is acting against the advice in Aristotle’s . . . Compleat and Experienc’d Midwife, in which is found the following instruction: “Let its Arms and Legs be wrapped in its Bed, stretched and strait, and swathed to keep them so. . . . Let none think this of Swathing the Infant is needless to set down, for it is necessary it should be thus swaddled to give its little Body a strait Figure, which is most decent and proper for a Man, and to accustom him to keep upon his Feet, which otherwise would go upon All-four, as most other Animals do” (97). By the 1750s, however, swaddling practices were giving way to new forms of infant dress that allowed for freedom of movement. See Phillis Cunnington and Anne Buck, Children’s Costume in England: From the Fourteenth to the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 103–5; and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 161–62, 424–26.
10. “tub-full of cold water”: In March 1752, one year after the publication of Peregrine Pickle, Smollett published An Essay on the External Use of Water, in which he extols the use of cold baths for “hypochondriac Disorders” (6). He says nothing about subjecting infants to cold baths.
11. “Comfit Colocynth”: The name yokes together two violently different foodstuffs. Johnson defines comfit as “a dry sweetmeat; any kind of fruit or root preserved with sugar, and diced.” According to Chambers, the extract of the colocynth “is one of the most violent purgative drugs known; insomuch that it excoriates the passages to that degree, as sometimes to bring away blood, and induce a superpurgation” (s.v. “coloquintida”).
12. “lawyers”: A lawyer is a “professor of law; advocate; pleader” (Johnson). Though lawyer is used at times interchangeably with attorney in Peregrine Pickle, the latter term had a more particular meaning of “one appointed or ordained to act for another; an agent, deputy, commissioner,” and one who is qualified to practice in courts of common law (OED).
13. “jade”: The term could be applied contemptuously to a worthless horse; a “sorry woman . . . noting sometimes age, but generally vice”; or it could be used ironically and thus endearingly for a young woman (Johnson).
14. “poop”: Stern, or aftermost part of a ship.
15. “spank”: To move quickly (OED). A sail at the aftermost part of the ship, used to take advantage of a fresh or “spanking” breeze.
16. “jury-legg’d”: From “jury mast,” a temporary substitute for a mast that has been broken or lost at sea. “Jury” is frequently combined with other words to designate the “other parts of a ship put together or contrived for temporary use.” The common general usage is “jury-rigged.” This passage from the novel appears in the OED as an instance of the formation’s humorous adaptation to a nonnautical object.
17. “Tully or Demosthenes”: Tully, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), the greatest Roman orator; and Demosthenes (384–322 BC), the greatest Athenian orator.
18. “Castick”: Perhaps with reference to the obsolete term castical, “making chaste, pure or continent” (OED).
19. “brimstone”: The common name for sulfur; by extension, any fiery compound; figuratively, a “virago, a spit-fire,” or a scold, with the suggestion by virtue of context that the woman would make the man “burn” by transmitting to him a venereal disease. The OED cites this passage as an example of the figurative use.
20. “Coddle”: To boil or stew (OED).
21. “Griffin”: Though Griffin is a common surname, it can also mean “vulture” (OED).
22. “box her compass”: To box the compass is to “answer all questions; to adapt oneself to circumstances: orig. and mainly nautical; . . . the nautical feat of naming, in order, backwards, or irregularly, the thirty-two points of the compass” (Partridge). Here it is used in a bawdy sense, as is the next phrase in the annotations.
23. “well sheathed alow”: “A sort of casing or covering laid on the outside of a ship’s bottom, to protect the planks from the pernicious effects of the worms.” In the eighteenth century, sheathing was made from fir, lead, or copper. Falconer notes that copper “is a very late invention, having been only experienced on a few of his Majesty’s frigates” (s.v. “sheathing”).
24. “hatches”: The openings on a ship’s deck that lead to other decks and into the hold (Falconer). See chap. 28, n. 2.
25. “weather the point”: To sail to the windward of the land; that is, to get by an obstacle safely (OED).
26. “picturesque”: This is an unusual usage of a word that would come into vogue in the decades immediately following the publication of Peregrine Pickle, often to describe natural scenery characterized by rough irregularity. In using the term here for its comic effect, Smollett may intend the meaning “behaving in a striking or unusual manner” (OED).
1. “heir at law . . . estate”: According to the “parentelic scheme,” property first descended to all those who derived their “blood” from the deceased. If the deceased had no issue, an heir was sought among the descendants of the deceased’s father. Thus, siblings of the childless deceased person stood next in line, with, of course, male siblings having precedence over female. See J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd ed. (London: Butterworths, 1990), 304–5.
2. “spliced”: In nautical terms, to join ropes by interweaving. This passage is cited in the OED as the first instance of the meaning “to join in matrimony.”
3. “beat up to windward”: “To strive against contrary winds or currents at sea” (OED).
4. “sheered off . . . stays”: In nautical terms, to “sheer off” is to “remove at a greater distance” (Falconer); to be “in stays” is “said of a ship when her head is being turned to windward for the purpose of tacking” (OED). In this instance, Hatchway has left Trunnion to fend for himself during a critical maneuver, thereby threatening the success of the encounter.
5. “reeved”: “To pass (a rope) through a hole, ring, or block” (OED); to tie or fix.
6. “upon the carpet”: “Under consideration or discussion” (OED).
1. “barge”: In this usage, an admiral’s or captain’s boat, propelled by a crew of rowers, and often light enough to be hoisted out of and back into a ship; also the term for a much grander boat (e.g., a royal barge), ornamented for ceremonial occasions but still manned by rowers.
2. “tacking . . . leeway”: Trunnion describes the nautical practice of sailing against the wind, which requires a zigzag course (tacking). Leeway here is the difference between a ship’s plotted course and the actual course, the difference being caused by the action of the wind and waves upon the hull of the ship.
3. “weathered the parson’s house”: See chap. 6, n. 25.
4. “reckoned without his host”: The first printed instance of this proverb is found in Caxton in 1489 (ODEP).
5. “Ramsgate”: That Trunnion’s suit has been made in the Kentish port town of Ramsgate and that his coat is blue reflect his seafaring life. The blue coat had been introduced in 1748 as a part of naval officer uniforms. Broadcloth is a fine but sturdy fabric.
6. “tape”: “A narrow woven strip of stout linen, cotton, silk, or other textile, used as a string for tying garments” (OED).
7. “vellum holes”: Buttonholes lined with vellum-cloth, a smooth and transparent calf or lamb skin used in fine men’s clothing for decoration.
8. “hanger”: “A kind of short sword, originally hung from the belt” (OED).
9. “backsword”: A sword with only one cutting edge, usually with a basket hilt (OED).
10. “Coniac”: Cognac.
11. “luffed round”: “Put the helm towards the lee-side of the ship, in order to make the ship sail nearer the direction of the wind” (Falconer); to change direction. The lee side is the side away from the wind.
12. “birth”: An alternate spelling of “berth.”
13. “hare’um scare’um”: “Reckless, careless, heedless in action; wild, rash” (OED).
14. “shoulder slipped”: With a dislocated shoulder.
15. “jocky”: A horse dealer (OED). The OED notes this usage in Smollett’s translation of Gil Blas (14).
16. “flat counter”: The part of a horse’s breast between the shoulders and under the neck.
17. “withers”: The highest part of the back of a horse or other animal located between the shoulder blades.
18. “fired in the further fetlock”: Fired here means “cauterized”; fetlock is the part of a horse’s leg just above the hoof. The cauterizing scar suggests that the horse had been treated at one time for injury or disease.
19. “plate”: “A silver or gold trophy given to the winner of a race or other sporting contest; (hence) a contest, esp. a horse race, in which such a trophy is awarded” (OED).
20. “laughed in their sleeves”: Laughed to themselves.
1. “half-seas over”: “A proverbial expression for any one far advanced. It is commonly used of one half drunk” (Johnson).
2. “pillaw”: Pilau or pilaf; rice cooked with spices and usually containing meat.
3. “hard fish”: Salted and dried cod or some other common fish.
4. “lob’s course”: Lobscouse. “A dish much eaten at sea, composed of salt beef, biscuit, and onions, well peppered and stewed together” (Grose).
5. “salmagundy”: “A mixture of chopped meat and pickled herrings with oil, vinegar, pepper, and onions” (Johnson). Morgan prepares a salmagundy for his shipmates in Roderick Random (136).
6. “sea-pye”: “A favourite sea-dish in rough weather, consisting of an olla of fish, meat, and vegetables, in layers between crusts, the number of which denominate it a two or three decker” (W. H. Smyth, The Sailor’s Word-Book [London: Blackie and Son, 1867], 603).
7. “flip”: “A liquor much used in ships made by mixing beer with spirits and sugar” (Johnson). The OED notes that it is “heated with a hot iron.”
8. “rumbo”: See chap. 2, n. 32. The OED cites this passage as the first instance of the word’s use.
9. “Barbadoes water”: Popular spirituous drink flavored with orange and lemon peel.
10. “Welch-harp”: The Welsh triple harp, so called from its three rows of strings, the outer rows being unisons in diatonic series, the inner providing the chromatic half-tones.
11. “exceptious”: “Peevish, froward; full of objections; quarrelsome” (Johnson).
12. “yoke”: Probably “a small board or bar which crosses the upper end of a boat’s rudder at right angles . . . whereby she is steered” (Falconer).
13. “vinegar aspect”: The phrase appears in The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.54, meaning sour-looking.
14. “hurricane houses”: A hurricane house is “a shelter at the mast-head for the look-out man” (OED).
15. “toil”: “Any net or snare woven or meshed” (Johnson).
16. “myrmidons”: A myrmidon is a faithful servant or follower; from the peoples inhabiting the southern borders of Thessaly, who accompany their king, Achilles, to Troy (Iliad 2.681–85); also, constable’s assistants (Grose).
17. “cockatrice”: A serpent, born from a cock’s egg, that is reputed to be able to kill with a glance; when applied to a woman, it also can mean “prostitute,” “whore.”
18. “poultice”: “A moist, usually heated mass of a substance with a soft, pasty consistency, applied to the skin, usually by means of a bandage or dressing, in order to promote healing, reduce swelling, relieve pain, etc.” (OED).
1. “thorough-paced”: Literally, referring to a trained horse; figuratively, “thoroughly trained or accomplished, perfectly skilled or versed (in something); hence, thoroughgoing, complete, perfect, thorough” (OED).
2. “chaise”: Generally, a two-wheeled vehicle capable of carrying two persons and drawn by a single horse.
3. “reachings”: Dialect for “retching.”
4. “Hans en kelderr . . . low cellar”: The English phrase is a translation of the Dutch that precedes it (literally, jack-in-cellar) (OED). It denotes the unborn child in the womb; it appears to have been a common toast, as evidenced by Trunnion and his companions. See Grose, s.v. “Hans in Kelder”; and B.E., A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew (London, 1699).
5. “gossips”: Given the mention of “matrons” in the same sentence, “gossip” probably here means Mrs. Trunnion’s female friends. The word also was used to denote a child’s godparents.
6. “number three is always fortunate”: The ODEP lists the phrase “third time’s lucky,” proverbial since the nineteenth century; see also Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950): “There is Luck in odd numbers” (L582).
7. “close divan”: A secret council or meeting; usually referring to the council of an Asiatic ruler.
8. “the patient . . . child”: False pregnancy; one treatise on midwifery is of the opinion that this condition is more common among older than among younger women, especially those who are nearing menopause. The prevailing opinion attributed the cause of this condition to the suppression of the menses. The following passage is a “reflection” on the case of a woman who believed she was in labor: “I made this lady sensible that these nauseas, vomitings and longings she had perceived at first, were caused by the suppression of her menses, and that the elevation and bigness of her belly were the consequences of it: that these humours, by their long stay, had contracted an acrimony, and irritated the womb and membranous parts of the belly in such a manner as to cause these stimulating pains which she mistook for labour pains” (Guillaum Mauquest de La Motte, A General Treatise of Midwifry [London, 1746], 40).
1. “Hannibal Tough”: Hannibal (247–183 BC), famous and fearsome Carthaginian general, best known for the feat of crossing the Alps in fifteen days, fought Rome for fifteen years. Possible sources for this name include Don Annibal de Chinchilla in Gil Blas, who has lost an arm, leg, and eye in battles. Gil Blas helps him write his memoirs and secure a pension (316–21). Another possible source is “serjeant Annibal Antonio Quebrantador,” a “tough” character from The Devil upon Crutches by Le Sage. Serjeant Hannibal faces down a pretended ghost in an inn and afterward single-handedly thrashes the supposed ghost turned innkeeper and “three or four” passersby who come to the innkeeper’s aid. See Devil, 56–59. Smollett’s translation of Gil Blas appeared in 1749; Devil appeared in 1750.
1. “usher”: “An under-teacher; one who introduces young scholars to higher learning” (Johnson).
2. “brought the school . . . superior”: William D. Templeman proposes that the school is a portrait of Cheam School, where William Gilpin was experimenting with new educational practices (The Life and Work of William Gilpin [1724–1804] [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1939], 68–71).
3. “lett”: “Hindrance, stoppage, obstruction” (OED).
4. “colleges of Westminster or Eaton”: Westminster, known as the Royal School because of its association with the royal court, dates from the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Eton was founded in 1440 by Henry VI. Howard Staunton called it “the nursing mother of the future temporal and spiritual rulers of England; of statesmen, of warriors, of divines, of scholars, and of poets” (The Great Schools of England [London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1865], 2).
1. “Cornelius Nepos”: First extant Latin biographer (c. 100–24 BC), author of De viris illustribus, or Lives of Famous Men, in sixteen books. One entire book of the sixteen (On Eminent Foreign Leaders) and the lives of Cato the Elder and Atticus have survived. In An Essay upon the Education of Youth in Grammar Schools, John Clarke recommends that students be introduced to the classic Latin authors by reading first Caesar’s Commentaries, then Justin (a Roman historian of the third century AD), and next Nepos (3rd ed. [London, 1740], 85–89). That Keypstick cannot read this author, who is thought to be appropriate for young boys just beginning their instruction in Latin, reveals his ignorance.
2. “furniture of his head”: His wig.
3. “soup maigre”: “Thin soup, made chiefly of vegetables or fish” (OED).
4. “dished out”: “To present (attractively) for acceptance” (OED).
5. “tye”: Tie-wig, with the hair gathered and tied behind with a ribbon.
6. “high Dutch”: German (hoch Deutsch).
7. “chimera”: Here, “a mere wild fancy” (OED). For the literal meaning, see chap. 46, n. 31.
8. “musa”: Muse; common example for the first declension paradigm, which a beginning student in Latin would be expected to know.
9. “jackanapes”: Tame monkey; one who exhibits the behaviors of a monkey; an impertinent person, a coxcomb (OED).
10. “wore a head”: That is, any man living, a common intensifier of the period. Cf. Tom Jones, bk. 8, chap. 2.
11. “friction upon a glass globe”: During 1705–6 Francis Hauksbee (1660–1713), natural philosopher, scientific instrument maker, and public lecturer, demonstrated before the Royal Society that rubbing a woolen cloth against a glass globe from which the air had been removed caused an intense glow within the globe. The globe emits sparks of static electricity when a person moves a hand within an inch of its surface. Hauksbee continued his experiments with static electricity until his death. See J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 230–31.
1. “Davit”: “A long beam of timber, . . . used as a crane, whereby to hoist the flukes of the anchor to the top of the bow, without injuring the planks of the ship’s side as it ascends; . . . the davit may be occasionally shifted so as to project over either side of the ship, according to the position of the anchor on which it is to be employed. . . . There is also a davit of a smaller kind, occasionally fixed in the long-boat, and employed to weigh the anchor therein” (Falconer).
2. “the very moral of you”: “A counterpart, a likeness.” The OED cites this passage as the first example of its usage. Smollett uses the phrase again in The Reprisal (1757). See Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 179.
3. “spit out of your own mouth”: “Said of a child much resembling his father” (Grose, 2nd ed., 1788). Partridge traces the usage back to an early seventeenth-century work, Nicolas Breton, Wonders Worth the Hearing (1602).
4. “oons”: Variant of zounds, itself an abbreviation of the oath by God’s wounds.
5. “innocent as the babe unborn”: Smollett will use this exact phrase again in Humphry Clinker. Clinker utters it when Tabitha Bramble boxes his ear and demands that her brother Matt send him away (85). For other examples, see Thomas Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches (1681), act 5.
6. “jallap”: “A firm and solid root . . . of an acrid and nauseous taste. It was not known in Europe ’till after the discovery of America. . . . It is an excellent purgative” (Johnson). Smollett reprises this practical joke in Humphry Clinker, where a lawyer is told that because the bottle from which he has just taken a large draught contains jallap, he should “swallow all the oil and butter you can find in the hoose [sic], to defend your poor stomach and intastins from the villication of the particles of the jallap” (174).
7. “vellicating”: Twitching, stimulating (Johnson).
8. “Æsculapius”: Latin form of Asclepius, Greek hero and god of healing. In one version of his myth, he is the son of Apollo and a mortal, Coronis. After Apollo kills Coronis for marrying a mortal, he rescues the unborn infant from the funeral pyre and gives him to the centaur Chiron to raise. Worshiped as the founder of medicine, he inspired cults throughout the classical world.
1. “delay breeds danger”: In Tilley’s Dictionary of the Proverbs in England, this proverb is listed as D195. The earliest example of the proverb provided by Tilley dates to 1548. Smollett repeats the phrase in his translation of Don Quixote. Quixote tells Dorothea, disguised as the Princess Micomicona, that he will see her restored to her kingdom: “Let us set hands to the work then, for, according to the common observation, Delay breeds danger” (The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, ed. Martin C. Battestin and O M Brack, Jr. [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003], 1.4.2.209, see also 572, 730). The OED cites the same phrase in Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote (1620).
2. “malice propense”: Malice prepense, or “with malice aforethought,” “the state of mind required for a person to be found guilty of certain criminal offenses . . . [or] liable for certain torts” (OED).
3. “Roger Ravine”: An appropriate name for an attorney, given Trunnion’s hatred for them. Roger is slang for “copulate,” and Ravine is similar to ravin, an obsolete variant of “rapine.”
4. “poultice”: See chap. 9, n. 18.
5. “action of assault and battery”: That is, Ravine has probably taken out a “writ of trespass” against Trunnion, alleging in the formulaic language of such writs that Trunnion “with Force and Arms . . . made an Assault, and [Ravine] did beat, wounded, and evil treated, and other Wrongs, to him did” (Giles Jacob, A New Law-Dictionary, 6th ed. [London, 1750], s.v. “trespass”). The action, if successful, could result in damages being awarded to the plaintiff. See also Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 456–58. In 1752 Peter Gordon and Edward Groom sued Smollett for trespass and assault. The court found in favor of the plaintiffs, and Smollett paid damages and court costs. See Alice Parker, “Tobias Smollett and the Law,” Studies in Philology 39 (1942): 547–48.
6. “nonsuited”: “The stoppage of a suit by the judge when the plaintiff fails to make out a legal case or to bring sufficient evidence” (OED). In this case, Ravine’s action against Trunnion is dismissed.
7. “Nantz”: See chap. 2, n. 26.
8. “Davy Jones . . . deep”: First occurrence of this usage in the OED. See, however, The Four Years Voyages of Captain George Roberts (London, 1726) for “Davy Jones’s Locker,” figurative for death at sea (89). The origin of the name has been the object of speculation. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests that “Davy” comes from the West Indian duppy (devil); that “Jones” comes from “Jonah,” temporarily resident “in the ‘locker’ of the whale’s belly”; or that Davy Jones was a pirate ([1870], 17th ed. [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005], s.v. “Davy Jones”).
9. “warning the devoted wretch of death and woe”: See James Thomson, The Seasons (1730):
Then too, they say, thro’ all the burthen’d Air
Long Groans are heard, shrill Sounds, and distant Sighs,
That, utter’d by the Demon of the Night,
Warn the devoted Wretch of Woe, and Death.
The passage describes a winter storm (“Winter,” lines 191–94, in The Seasons, by James Thomson, ed. James Sambrook [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], 212).
1. “deer-stealing”: Laws against deer stealing go back as far as the reign of James I. Over time, penalties became progressively harsher, from “treble damages” and three months’ imprisonment under 3 Jac. 1, c. 13, to a fine of £20 under 13 Car. 2, c. 10. Under 5 Geo. 1, c. 15 and c. 28, “Persons guilty of Deer Stealing, may be indicted before a Judge of Gaol Delivery, and in that Case be transported to the Plantations for seven Years.” The notorious Black Act (1723; 9 Geo. 1, c. 22) included deer stealing among a host of other crimes that became felonies without benefit of clergy, or capital offenses (Jacob, A New Law-Dictionary, s.v. “deer-stealers”). See also E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 58–64, 246–47. The Transportation Act of 1718 had made transportation a more likely alternative to execution by regulating the methods of transportation and broadening the scope of crimes punishable by deportation. A. Roger Ekirch estimates that by midcentury “only one in every six or seven received the death penalty,” the rest of the capital criminals being transported or pardoned outright (Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies 1718–1775 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], 21).
2. “exciseman of the parish”: Excisemen, sometimes called gaugers, were responsible for collecting excise taxes on many commodities, including spirituous liquors and fermented beverages, candles, coffee, tea, chocolate, leather, linen cloth, silks, paper, plate, salt, soap, starch, and hair powder. The tax was first adopted in 1643. John Brewer writes that “the exciseman was a ubiquitous presence in eighteenth-century England, for he worked . . . in every small town and hamlet where beer and ale were brewed or tea sold over the counter” (The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 [London: Unwin Hyman, 1989], 114). Having been greatly expanded after the Glorious Revolution, the excise was generally resented, not least for its intrusiveness (101–14). Johnson famously defines excise as “a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.”
3. “I should have known you . . . Salisbury-plain”: Salisbury Plain was proverbial for its openness and uniformity. See, for example, Henry Fielding: “Matrimony . . . must . . . be allowed to be this state of tranquil felicity, including so little variety, that, like Salisbury Plain, it affords only one prospect, a very pleasant one it must be confessed, but the same” (Jonathan Wild, bk. 3, chap. 7). The plain itself was also proverbial as a haunt of highwaymen, as “Salisbury plain is seldom without a thief or twain” (A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs, 3rd ed. [London, 1749], 263).
4. “to bowss . . . gum”: To bowse is “to haul with tackle,” and gum is “impertinent talk; chatter; ‘jaw’” (OED). First occurrence of this usage of gum in the OED.
5. “stopper”: “Short pieces of rope, which . . . are used to retain a cable, shroud, etc. in a fixed position” (Falconer).
6. “renewed his age, like the eagles”: Ancient superstition that an eagle acquires new life by plunging into the ocean. See Psalm 103:5 and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, 1.11 (Brewer’s Dictionary, s.v. “youth”).
7. “Trickle”: The name carries an obsolete and rare meaning of “treacherous, requiring caution” (OED).
8. “Tobiah”: Hebrew form of Tobias, meaning “God is good” and given to several figures in the Old Testament. The best-known bearer of the name can be found in the book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. The angel Raphael gave Tobias a wife, healed his father’s blindness, and traveled with him to Ecbatane to collect a debt owed his father.
9. “Hogarth”: William Hogarth (1697–1764), engraver, painter, and preeminent caricaturist of his day. Smollett had signaled his appreciation of Hogarth’s talents as a renderer of surprise in a similar way in Roderick Random, when Strap discovers that his master, Roderick, has lost eighteen guineas at the gambling table the night before: “It would require the pencil of Hogarth to express the astonishment and concern of Strap, on hearing this piece of news” (250). Later, in The Present State of All Nations, appeared the following estimation of the artist: “In the comic scenes of painting, Hogarth is an inimitable original with respect to invention, humour, and expression” (Tobias Smollett, The Present State of All Nations, 8 vols. [London: 1768–69], 2:230). Similar sentiments also appear in Sir Launcelot Greaves (91) and Humphry Clinker (141). See Robert Etheridge Moore, Hogarth’s Literary Relationships (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), 164–67, for a discussion of Smollett’s references to Hogarth. See also Jerry Beasley, Tobias Smollett, Novelist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 22–24, for a discussion of the affinities between Smollett’s and Hogarth’s representational practices. Beasley disagrees with Ronald Paulson’s assertion that Smollett “mocks” Hogarth in the character of Pallet, whom Peregrine meets in Paris. See chap. 46, n. 4, and chap. 96, n. 13.
10. “call him Horse”: “A term of derision where an officer assumes the grandioso, demanding honour where honour is not his due. Also, a strict disciplinarian” (Smyth, The Sailor’s Word-Book, 391).
11. “ingratitude is worse than . . . witchcraft”: A proverbial phrase. See James Hardy, ed., The Denham Tracts: A Collection of Folklore by Michael Aislabie Denham, 2 vols. (London: Folklore Society, 1895), 2:83. Although the exciseman seems to refer to Paul here, a similar saying in the New Testament has not been found. Calling ingratitude the worst of all sins was a commonplace in the homiletic discourse of the period, as can be seen from the following excerpt from a sermon by Robert South: “And now thou Ungratefull Brute, thou Blemish to Mankind, and Reproach to thy Creation; what shall we say of thee, or to what shall we compare thee? for thou art an Exception from all the visible World; neither the Heavens above, nor the Earth beneath, afford any thing like thee: And therefore, if thou would’st find thy Parallel, go to Hell, which is both the Region, and the Emblem of Ingratitude; for, besides thy self, there is nothing but Hell, that is always Receiving, and never Restoring” (“A Sermon Preached at Christ-Church, Oxon., Before the University, Octob. 17, 1675,” in Twelve sermons preached upon several occasions [London, 1692], 560).
12. “cuts”: “A step in dancing” (OED).
13. “flead”: Flayed.
1. “Winchester”: Founded by William of Wykeham in 1387 and associated with New College, Oxford. Peregrine’s conduct at Winchester has been studied by H. C. Adams, who notes:
The character given by Lord Elcho of the Winchester of his youth, bears out, only too fully, the picture drawn by Smollett, in his novel of “Peregrine Pickle;” which otherwise we should be apt to fancy an impossible, or at all events an overcoloured, representation of the public school of the day. . . . Smollett was careful to draw his pictures after the real life of the day, and would hardly have introduced any very gross or extravagant caricature. His descriptions tally only too accurately with those we find in the pages of Henry Brook, as well as in those of Thomas Day, and Cowper the poet, a generation subsequently. (Wykehamica: A History of Winchester College and Commoners [Oxford: J. Parker, 1878], 112–13)
Similar conclusions are reached by J. D’E. Firth, who also accepts Smollett’s “pictures” as the “real life of the day” (Winchester College [London: Winchester Publications, 1949], 96–97).
2. “governor”: Tutor.
3. “Jolter”: Perhaps suggesting a jolter-head, a stupid fellow.
4. “high-churchman”: Jolter, as his given name, Jacob, suggests, holds political views that are associated with Jacobites, the surviving supporters of the Stuart dynasty and its policies and doctrines. Among such doctrines were opposition to Dissenters, support of episcopal power, royal divine right, and nonresistance to divinely ordained authority. Even after the government put down the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, concern about Jacobitism remained. Martin C. Battestin notes that Henry Fielding was prompted to write the satirical Jacobite’s Journal from December 1747 to November 1748 because of serious concern about the appeals being made by the Jacobites (Henry Fielding: A Life [London: Routledge, 1989], 424–27).
5. “school-divinity”: Medieval (i.e., scholastic) theology; “the religious principles and doctrines maintained and taught in the Schools, or by the mediæval moralists and divines” (OED).
6. “Better late mend than never do well”: A combination of “It is never too late to mend” and “Better late than never.” According to the ODEP, the first proverb dates from the late sixteenth century; the latter’s origins are in the ancient world.
7. “I’ll be damned if . . . make me love him”: Kahrl, noting a resemblance between Falstaff and Trunnion, points out that Hatchway’s words echo those Falstaff says to Poins: “If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hang’d” (34). See 1 Henry IV, 2.2.18–19.
1. “on the catch”: On the watch for.
2. “Dulcinea”: Dulcinea del Toboso, the name Don Quixote gives to his idealized lady, whose real name is Aldonza Lorenço. She never appears in person in the narrative. The name came to mean “sweetheart,” generally. Smollett was fond of this name and used it frequently and chiefly ironically in Roderick Random (43, 89, 265, 284, 290). In Peregrine Pickle, as in Roderick Random, it almost always denotes a lower-class woman of questionable chastity. Smollett had been working on a translation of Don Quixote from at least as early as 1748.
3. “the laws and regulations of the place”: Extremely lax at this period, especially among the class of students known as “gentleman commoners,” of which Peregrine is one. Lord Elcho, also a “commoner” during the 1730s, seems to have spent much of his time playing cards, haunting taverns, and acquiring a “‘polite taste for pleasurable vice,’” according to his memoirist (David, Lord Elcho . . . with a Memoir and Annotations by the Hon. Evan Charteris [1907; repr., Edinburgh: James Thin, 1973], 10).
4. “his own unimportance”: This tallies with accounts of the role of governors or tutors at Winchester during the 1730s; they usually lived in cheap rooms in town and had no influence on the master and other school officials. See Adams, Wykehamica, 113–14.
5. “Pons Asinorum”: Literally, bridge of asses. “A humorous name for the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid, from the difficulty which beginners or dull-witted persons find in ‘getting over’ or mastering it” (OED).
6. “fortieth and seventh proposition . . . Pythagoras”: The forty-seventh proposition in the first book of Euclid is what is called the Pythagorean theorem, or “in every right-angled Triangle, . . . the Square of the Side . . . which is opposite to the right Angle is equal to the two Squares together of the two other Sides” (The Elements of Euclid, 6th ed. [London, 1747], 53). Pythagoras (fl. sixth century BC) had a great influence on Greek intellectual culture, though little is known of his life. In addition to his well-known mathematical theorem, he has also been called the source for the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. See chap. 47, n. 15.
7. “malversations”: An obsolete and rare word meaning “corruption in office”; it also has the even rarer meaning of “general evil conduct” (OED). Johnson defines it as “bad shifts, mean artifices; wicked and fraudulent tricks.”
8. “commission under the great seal”: The Great Seal was a metal stamp or mold in the possession of the lord high chancellor. A wax impression of the seal affixed to a document or commission signified that the highest authority (i.e., the sovereign) had given his or her approval to the contents of the document. Thus, in this case, Pipes is acting as if on a mission from the king.
9. “hussle-cap”: See chap. 2, n. 18.
10. “chuck farthing”: See chap. 2, n. 19.
11. “all-fours”: A “low” card game played by two persons (Johnson). It uses a fifty-two-card deck. Each player gets six cards, three at a time, with the thirteenth card turned up to mark the trump suit. According to The Compleat Gamester, the game is named after the method of its scoring, with “Highest, Lowest, Jack and Game” counting. Game here means the highest card in a trick or game during a hand. See Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester, 6th ed. (London, 1726), 80–83. A version of the card game is still played in parts of England and is known as the national card game of Trinidad.
12. “storming the castle”: “Storming King Arthur’s Castle” is mentioned as a “Contrivance . . . to keep the people in exercise and from the Scurvey [sic]” in Ramblin’ Jack: The Journal of Captain John Cremer 1700–1774, transcribed by R. Reynell Bellamy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 50. There is a children’s game sometimes called Defence of the Castle, sometimes King of the Castle (in the United States, King of the Hill), popular in Scotland, in which a group tries to dislodge a person occupying a high position. “Castle” is also an obsolete usage for “forecastle,” a raised deck at the bow or stern of a ship (OED). See Alice Bertha Gomme, ed., The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols. (1894; repr., New York: Dover, 1964), 1:300–301.
13. “comedy of Prince Arthur”: “A game used at sea, when near the line [i.e., the equator], or in a hot latitude. It is performed thus: a man who is to represent king Arthur, ridiculously dressed, . . . is seated on the side, or over a large vessel of water, every person in his turn is to be ceremoniously introduced to him, and to pour a bucket of water over him, crying hail, king Arthur! If during this ceremony the person introduced laughs or smiles, . . . he changes place with, and then becomes king Arthur, till relieved by some brother tar, who has as little command over his muscles as himself” (Grose, s.v. “Arthur”).
14. “bloods”: “Riotous disorderly” fellows (Grose), often with the connotation of aristocratic lineage. The OED also gives the meaning, “at public schools and universities applied to those who are regarded as setting the fashion in habits and dress,” which would apply here, though the first example of this usage in the OED dates from 1892.
15. “St. Giles’s hornpipe”: A hornpipe is a lively dance, usually performed by one person to the accompaniment of a wind instrument, and specifically associated with the merrymaking of sailors; St. Giles is the patron saint of the crippled as well as a parish in London. Peter Ackroyd calls it a “crossroads,” and he notes that “throughout its history it has been the haunt of the poor and the outcast” (London: The Biography [New York: Anchor Books, 2000], 122–23).
16. “flip”: See chap. 9, n. 7.
1. “mattock”: “A tool similar to a pick but with a point or chisel edge at one end of the head and an adze-like blade at the other, used for breaking up hard ground, grubbing up trees, etc.” (OED).
2. “forlorn hope”: “A picked body of men, detached to the front to begin the attack; a body of skirmishers” (OED).
3. “petard”: “A small bomb made of a metal or wooden box filled with powder, used to blow in a door, gate, etc., or to make a hole in a wall” (OED).
4. “postern”: Back door; in fortifications, a hidden door for access to outworks.
5. “Hercules”: Son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, the greatest of Greek heroes, or, in some regions and traditions, a god. He was renowned for his strength and the completion of twelve arduous labors, imposed as punishment for killing his wife.
6. “Casemated”: Strongly fortified. The OED cites this passage as the first occurrence of the word used as an adjective. As a noun, it refers to a vaulted chamber under the ramparts of a fort.
7. “Peter Kolben’s . . . Good Hope”: First published in German at Nuremberg in 1719, Peter Kolb’s (1675–1726) The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope was translated into English by Guido Medley and published in London in two volumes in 1731. Kahrl notes that “Kolben’s book is the source of Smollett’s numerous references elsewhere to Negroes in Africa, in particular, to the Hottentots” (151). Kolb writes that when the shinbone of the lion is exposed to the “Sun’s Heat, those Pieces become as hard as Flints, and altogether as smooth and solid; . . . and they serve, altogether as well as Flints, to strike Fire with” (95).
8. “son of earth”: A person of mean birth. See Pope, The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated (1738): “His Chloë, blind to Wit and Worth,/Weds the rich Dulness of some Son of Earth” (lines 42–43).
9. “fleam”: “An instrument used to bleed cattle, which is placed on the vein, and then driven by a blow” (Johnson).
10. “coming upon the parish”: See chap. 1, n. 4.
11. “board”: A meeting, so named for the table or board at which it is held (OED).
12. “sign of the George”: Common public house name and sign. Bryant Lillywhite calls the George “one of the most numerous inn signs found in London,” dating back at least to 1348 and possibly to 1175. Until the advent of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714, the signs had always represented St. George, the patron saint of England, usually on horseback and sometimes defeating the dragon. In the latter instance, the inn was sometimes called the George and Dragon, though often shortened to the George. Lillywhite speculates that with the advent of the House of Hanover, inn signs could have represented the reigning monarch, and he notes that a number of signs of George IV (r. 1820–30) could still be found in London of the 1960s. He found none of the earlier Hanoverian kings (London Signs: A Reference Book of London Signs from Earliest Times to about the Mid-Nineteenth Century [London: Allen and Unwin, 1972], 204–12). Eric R. Delderfield also attests to the popularity of the sign of the George throughout England (British Inn Signs and Their Stories [London: David and Charles, 1965], 30–31).
13. “thought . . . at large”: Without restraint; too freely.
14. “next their stomachs”: To “stick in one’s stomach” is to make a painful impression on the mind (OED).
15. “club”: “To pay to a common reckoning” (Johnson).
16. “pocket-pieces”: A lucky coin; money that is not current (OED).
1. “White Hart”: Common public house name, derived from the “badge” of the popular king Richard II (r. 1377–99). Delderfield claims that it is found “in most market towns in England” (British Inn Signs, 69). Lillywhite dates the sign’s appearance in London from around 1400 and also notes its popularity throughout England (London Signs, 634–40).
2. “horsed”: To horse an individual is to put him on the back of another and then flog him (OED). Although Smollett does not tell us that Peregrine was flogged, the fact that his punishment is intended to instill terror in the other pupils and that he is greatly embarrassed by the punishment suggests that he was indeed flogged. A similar punishment is found in The History of Lawrence Lazy (London, [1750?]): “His master commanded him to be horsed, in order to give him correction” (8).
3. “complexion”: Here meaning “constitution,” a meaning derived from the humoral theory of the body and its influence on character.
4. “young Delias”: Sweethearts, from the pseudonym (for Plania) that Tibullus (c. 55–19 BC) gave to his lover in five Latin elegies.
5. “coxcomb”: “A fop, a superficial pretender to knowledge or accomplishments” (Johnson).
6. “time of the races”: The racing season ran from March to October, with various locales devoting a week or two to the events. According to different years’ editions of “The Sporting Calendar” and “An Historical List of Horse-Matches Run,” the first week of June or thereabouts was the common time for the most popular races.
7. “gentleman . . . boots”: Attired for riding, not dancing. Richard “Beau” Nash (1674–1761), as master of ceremonies at Bath, banned men in boots from the assemblies.
8. “delicious”: An obsolete usage, here meaning “voluptuous” (OED).
9. “Adonis”: The son of Cinyras and his daughter Myrrha, who fled the court when her father discovered that she had been sharing his bed under the cover of darkness. Myrrha was changed into the myrrh tree, from which Adonis was born. Ovid writes about Adonis that “even Envy would praise his beauty” (Metamorphoses 10.515). Venus falls in love with Adonis, and she warns him to avoid hunting dangerous animals. Ignoring her warnings, he is gored in the groin by a wild boar and dies. Venus changes him into an anemone. In other versions of the myth, Adonis is beloved by Aphrodite and Persephone. After he is killed by the boar, Zeus proclaims that he is to spend winters in Hades with Persephone and summers with Aphrodite.
10. “glass”: Mirror.
11. “petulance”: An obsolete usage, meaning “impudence” (OED).
12. “Damon”: A shepherd and singer in Virgil’s eighth Eclogue; later a conventional pastoral name for any young rustic.
13. “Emilia Gauntlet”: A gauntlet is the name for the glove that was part of a knight’s armor and that was thrown to indicate a challenge.
14. “undress”: “Partial or incomplete dress . . . not ordinarily worn in public” (OED).
1. “field-officer”: “Such as have command over a whole regiment; such are the colonel, lieutenant-colonel, and major” (Chambers, s.v. “officers”).
2. “shifted himself”: Changed his clothing.
3. “sensible education”: An education of that faculty that is “capable of delicate or tender feeling” (OED). The word sensible and its frequent companion sentimental became an integral part of novelistic and philosophical discourse beginning around midcentury and continuing at least until the century’s end. Though some effort was made to distinguish sensibility (related to the feelings) from sentiment (related to thought), the effort largely failed and the words were used interchangeably. Both sensibility and sentiment or sentimental became associated with a fellow-feeling that prompted sympathetic and virtuous responses to others, often others in distress or in heightened emotional states. Such responses (or their absence) then became an indicator of the moral state of the character so responding. Both terms also have a long critical history. Ann Jessie Van Sant gives a concise overview of that history in Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3–8.
4. “idea”: Image.
5. “roach”: “A small freshwater fish. . . . In phrase as sound as a roach, = F. sain comme un gardon. Old proverb” (OED). This fish was thought to be immune to disease. See Sir John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697), 5.2, for another instance of this usage.
6. “gulph of Florida”: A passage between the east coast of Florida and the west coast of Cuba and, farther north, the islands of the Bahamas. It was well known for its strong currents, running south to north, and thus was used by ships to speed their voyage as they headed from Jamaica back to England. The “Indian” shore mentioned three lines later is the coast of Florida. According to one writer, sailors who find themselves on these shores will discover that “the Natives wait to murder them all [a ship’s crew] as soon as landed, or that they have surprized them on Board after the Ship’s striking; for in those Cases they always come off Shore in their Canoes to plunder the Ship, and take the Crew if they can” (John Cowley, A Description of the Windward Passage, and Gulf of Florida [London, 1739], 12).
7. “chuck”: Directly, with full impact. First usage cited in OED.
8. “Adieu, ye streams . . . dreary night”: See Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 453 n. 1.
1. “a bite by G——”: A bite is a cheat. This exact oath appears in A New Canting Dictionary in the story of a condemned criminal who sold his body to a surgeon on the night before he was to be executed and hanged in chains. For certain heinous or troubling crimes, the condemned was hanged in chains after execution so that the sight of the decomposing body would serve as a deterrent to onlookers. Thus, the criminal in the story cheats the surgeon by selling him a useless body.
2. “rise up in judgment against him”: Perhaps an allusion to Matthew 12:42, where Christ says that “the queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it.”
3. “succedaneous”: “Supplying the place of something else” (Johnson).
1. “Apollo of Belvidere”: Famous marble statue thought to be a second Roman copy of a Greek bronze and considered a masterpiece of Greek art. The second century AD copy was discovered around the beginning of the sixteenth century. By 1511 the statue was to be found in the Belvedere gallery in the Vatican, whence it takes its name and where it stood for most of the eighteenth century. Joshua Reynold’s portrait (1752–53) of Commodore Augustus Keppel was modeled on this statue.
2. “rhodomontade”: “An empty noisy bluster or boast; a rant” (Johnson).
1. “noodle”: Simpleton or fool.
2. “do his endeavour”: An archaic expression meaning “to exert oneself to the uttermost” (OED).
3. “immodest”: Appears as “modest” in the first edition; corrected in the second.
4. “Oxford”: Smollett’s description of collegiate life throughout this section reflects the prevailing view of life at Oxford colleges for at least the first half of the eighteenth century. The sum of “five hundred a year” is princely, even considering that expenses varied from college to college and that it includes “his governor’s salary”; see Richard Newton, University Education . . . Humbly Propos’d to the University of Oxford (London, 1726), who records the exact amount of a commoner’s expenses for Michaelmas term, 1723, at £7 17s. 1d. (140–41). According to the standard modern history of Oxford, two-thirds of all students admitted between 1690 and 1810 were commoners, or students “of the second rank . . . that eat at the common table” (Johnson) and thus whose financial means were far more modest than Peregrine’s. Peregrine attends Oxford, we are told, as a gentleman commoner. Such students “were privileged and wealthy young men living a privileged and expensive life in the university.” As a rule, they “exempt[ed] themselves from all academic responsibilities” and often from religious duties. By the end of the century, tutor-governors to gentlemen commoners earned anywhere from £100 to £300 per annum. See T. H. Aston, gen. ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5, The Eighteenth Century, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 261–63, 431, 254.
5. “bucks”: The fashionable and dashing crowd.
6. “proctor”: An officer of the university, usually appointed annually, one of whose duties was to keep order among the students and punish minor offenses. There were two proctors at Oxford.
7. “ambuscade”: Ambush.
8. “Bacchanalian Orgia”: “Secret rites or ceremonies practised in the worship of various gods of Greek and Roman mythology; esp. those practices connected with the festivals in honour of Dionysus or Bacchus, or the festival itself, which was celebrated with extravagant dancing, singing, drinking, etc.” (OED).
9. “Shiboleth of their party”: Shibboleth was the “Hebrew word used by Jephthah as a test-word to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites (who could not pronounce the sh) from his own men, the Gileadites (Judges 12:4–6)” (OED). Jolter and company are Jacobite sympathizers, supporters of the cause of the deposed and exiled Stuarts, represented by James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766), son of James II and known as the Old Pretender, and his son, Charles Edward (1720–88), known as both the Young Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Oxford remained a Jacobite stronghold until as late as 1762. The shibboleth is very probably the phrase “There is no king in England but King James.” See Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 255–66, 276–78.
10. “Saracen’s head”: A common sign for taverns and alehouses. The word Saracen was applied generally to Arabs and Muslims and denoted fearsome nomadic opponents of the Roman Empire and of the Christian forces in the Crusades.
11. “finesse”: Johnson defines this word as “stratagem” and judges it “an unnecessary word that is creeping into the language.” In the preface to the second edition of the Dictionary, Johnson writes: “The words which our authours have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion, or lust of innovation, I have registered as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives.”
12. “apostate and renegado”: A denier of a faith’s principles and a deserter of the cause (of Jacobitism).
1. “absent from chapel”: Attendance at morning and evening prayers was mandatory, and students could be fined for nonattendance. The seriousness of the services and the enforcement of the attendance regulation varied from time to time and from college to college. See Sutherland and Mitchell, The Eighteenth Century, 428–32.
2. “Vane ligur . . . artes”: Virgil Aeneid 11.715–16: “Foolish Ligurian, vainly puffed up in pride of heart, for naught hast thou tried thy slippery native tricks.” The Latin in the Loeb edition reads “vane Ligus frustraque animis elate superbis,/nequiquam patrias temptasti lubricus artis.” In Dryden’s translation:
“Vain Fool and Coward!” cries the lofty Maid,
“Caught in the Train, which thou thy self hast laid!
On others practice thy Ligurian Arts;
Thin Stratagems, and Tricks of little Hearts
Are lost on me.” (lines 1055–59)
Ligurians were proverbial liars.
3. “perdie”: “By God,” or “certainly.”
4. “Come, listen . . . attain”: See Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 453–54 n. 1.
5. “Cobler there was, &c.”: The music and lyrics for this song can be found in The Musical Miscellany, 6 vols. (London, 1729), 2:170–71. Air 56 in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is set to this tune, which was widely and freely adapted to many contemporary ballads and satires. W. Chappell notes that the tune was known under several names, including “The Abbot of Canterbury,” “Derry Down,” “A Cobbler There Was,” and “Death and the Cobbler,” with a version of the first having been traced back to the time of James I. He also remarks: “There are numberless songs and ballads to the tune, under one or other of its names” (Popular Music of the Olden Time, 2 vols. [1859; repr., New York: Dover, 1965], 1:348–53).
6. “expensive”: Extravagant.
7. “appointment”: Allowance.
8. “Windsor . . . castle”: A royal residence overlooking the Thames and about twenty miles west of London and forty-five miles southeast of Oxford, dating back to the late eleventh century and William the Conqueror. It had undergone numerous restorations and additions over the centuries. Charles II commissioned the building of a splendid suite of state apartments in the 1670s.
9. “picture of Hercules and Omphale”: By Benedetto Gennari (1633–1715), Italian painter who resided in London from 1674 to 1689 and painted it for the Stuart court. He followed James II to France in 1689 and returned to Italy in 1692. Hercules, for the love of Omphale, took up her distaff and wore women’s clothes. The story, told as a cautionary tale by Philoctetes to Telemachus, appears again in Smollett’s translation of François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon’s (1651–1715) The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses (1699), published posthumously in 1776. See Smollett’s translation, Leslie A. Chilton and O M Brack, Jr., eds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 180–87. In 1750 Hercules and Omphale hung in the King’s Public Dining Room at Windsor Castle. For the location of the painting, see Joseph Pote, History and Antiquities of Windsor Castle (Eton, 1749), 421.
10. “picture of Duns Scotus”: Painting attributed during Smollett’s time to José de Ribera, also known as La Spagnoletto (the Spaniard) (1591–1652). It is mentioned as hanging in the Ball Room of Windsor Castle, not far from the King’s Public Dining Room (Pote, History and Antiquities, 417). It is currently attributed to the Master of the Annunciation of the Shepherds, active in the first half of the seventeenth century. See Michael Levey, The Later Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 112. John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308), a Scottish theologian about whose life little is known, was a renowned and much-admired medieval scholastic philosopher. By the late sixteenth century, his name, from which the word dunce is derived, became synonymous with pedantry and dull-wittedness.
11. “Merlin”: Well-known figure from Welsh mythology who first appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s (d. 1154/55) History of the Kings of Britain. A magician and prophet said to have been born of the devil and a mortal woman, he is credited with bringing together King Arthur’s parents and protecting and advising Arthur.
12. “upon the carpet”: See chap. 7, n. 6.
13. “finesse”: See chap. 24, n. 11.
1. “seeking whom they may devour”: See chap. 2, n. 30.
2. “Truth . . . prevail”: Magna est Veritas et praevalebit, a proverb derived from 1 Esdras 4.38: “As for the truth it endureth, and is always strong, it liveth and conquereth for evermore.” See John Spencer, Kaina Kai Palaia. Things New and Old, or, A Store-house of Similies [sic], Sentences, Allegories, Apophthegms (London, 1658), 588–89. After recounting the story of Ulysses and Pyrrhus’s mission to recover Hercules’s arrows from Philoctetes, the compiler continues: “Many of this Age . . . speak one thing; intend another; . . . but true Israelites are of Pyrrhus’s spirit; Magna est Veritas et praevalebit, Great is the Truth, and will prevail, is the sweet Poesie of their profession, both in themselves, and those that relate unto them.”