Coves, Kinchins and Morts

COVE - A man, a fellow, a rogue. The cove was bit: the rogue was outwitted. The cove has bit the cole: the rogue has got the money.

KINCHIN - A little child. Kinchin coes: orphan beggar boys, educated in thieving. Kinchin morts: young girls under the like circumstances and training. Kinchin morts, or coes in slates: beggars' children carried at their mothers' backs in sheets. Kinchin cove: a little man.

MORT - A woman or wench; also a yeoman's daughter. To be taken all a-mort: to be confounded, surprised or motionless through fear.

SLATE - A sheet.

From Francis Grose's dictionary The Vulgar Tongue (1785).


Cant, the argot which Grose catalogues, was the language of street-traders, criminals and itinerants: a language of self-protection for those planning or committing illicit acts, or wishing to have private discourse in public; it also acted as a badge of identity of the marginal or dispossessed.

Dangerous Beauty

Continuing musings on toxic cosmetics...

What is amazing to me, is that the Georgian beauties knew what they were risking in applying ceruse directly onto their skin - and that was just for starters, the white lead 'base coat' - even without a legion of scientists and rodents to guinea-pig for them. Common gossip alleged that a number of women had died from 'addiction' to various dangerous tints: in his correspondence, Horace Walpole mentions Lady Fortrose, ‘killed like Lady Coventry and others by white lead, of which nothing could break her’, even though ceruse was known to be ‘corrosive and pernicious to the skin.’ As late as 1822 The British Perfumer warned of the high toxicity of vermilion, recommending the use of less harmful cochineal papers for applying rouge instead.

But are we any better today? Our Hollywood belles inject poison into their flesh in Botox, which magazines and tube adverts attempt to incite us to also try over a lunch-time sandwich. It's becoming ever-more common for 'ordinary' people to have bits of our faces augmented or our skin stretched tauter, bags of silicone deposited in our bodies, and inches of fat sucked away.

And, again just as today when we collude with artificiality - to some extent indulging ourselves, by persisting in feeling inferior to magazine images which we know are airbrushed - so George Romney, John Hoppner, Richard Westall, Richard Cosway, etc. were all even at the time known to flatter the (already excessively made-up) women who sat for them by further 'improving' their complexions...

Popular Drinks of the Georgian Era...

ii: Hum Cap, or Hum

Very old and strong beer, often made with malt, such as Double Ale, Stout or Pharaoh; also known as STINGO.

Kinchin morts...

... or, coves in slates :--

Beggars' children, carried on their mothers' backs,

bound up in sheets.

Imagination Running Riot:

'If once our carnal appetites are let loose, without those prudent and secure guides [of virtue and religion], there is no excess and disorder which they are not liable to commit, even while they pursure their natural satisfaction; and, which may seem still more strange, there is nothing monstrous and unnatural, which they are not capable of inventing, nothing so brutal and shocking which they have not actually committed.'

Henry Fielding, The Female Husband (1746)

Ingredients:

Among the ingredients in theatrical and everyday make-up were:

white lead - known as 'ceruse' (toxic)
red cinnabar (toxic)
vermilion (toxic)
white chalk
carpenters' blue chalk
India ink
red brickdust
sandalwood red
mouse-skin patches (for creating alluring moles and decorative shapes, but more often for disguising syphilitic boils)

Interestingly, while excessive red in your custom-made complexion was considered tarty to British tastes, in France it was white that was whorish.

Saving Face

'New powdered,

patch'd and paint'd o'er,

The marks of a retailing whore.'

Ned Ward, Hudibras

The Spectator complained, in an article in 1711, that the vogue for make-up had become so excessive that women were in constant danger of 'losing face':-

'A sigh in the languishing lover, if fetched too near, would dissolve a feature; and a kiss snatched by a forward one, might transform the complexion of the mistress to the face of the admirer.'

Bridewell

'From St. Bride's Well, a holy well in London, near which Henry VIII had a 'lodging', given by Edward VI for a hospital, afterwards converted into a house of correction.' [from the O.E.D.]

By association, 'bridewell' came to be a general term for any house of correction for prisoners; a place of forced labour; a gaol, prison. As, for example, in Colse's poem of 1596, Penelope's Complaint:

"Thy giggish tricks, thy queanish trade,

A thousand Bridwel birds hath made."

Most towns had a bridewell: some, like Newport Pagnell, even had two.

In much the same way, 'Tyburn' was the place of execution for Middlesex prisoners; situated at the junction of the present-day Oxford Street, Bayswater Road and Edgeware Road, but in open land some distance from the city when it was first established.

By allusion, however, and presumably because its sheer traffic of trade made it a byword, 'Tyburn' came to be synonymous with 'the gallows.' Therefore: Tyburn blossom, Tyburn check, Tyburn coach, Tyburn collop, Tyburn face, Tyburn jig, Tyburn piccadill, Tyburn saint, Tyburn stretch, Tyburn string, Tyburn tie, Tyburn tiffany, Tyburn ticket, Tyburn tippet, Tyburn tree, Tyburn tribe, Tyburn wright.

And hence also, York's 'Tyburn' - first a gibbet, later a gallows - where Dick Turpin was hanged.