When I’m writing a story, I tend to have several books, close at hand laid out on the kitchen table where I write. Rather than apples or peaches, my fruit bowl tends to be a repository for historical reference books!
After finishing a story, for reasons of space and mental clarity (always a challenge!) I put away the current selection and replace them with books relevant to the next story’s historical era and social references. As mentioned before on this blog, there are a couple of books that tend to be universally useful.
One of these is Cant – A Gentleman’s Guide: The Language of Rogues in Georgian London by Stephen Hart. The origins of Cant, the criminal slang for the London underworld had their basis in Elizabethan times, if not far earlier. As Paul Baker notes in Fabulosa! The Story of Polari, “Cant was used by criminals in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, although its roots have been traced back as far as the eleventh century.”
So for me, this slim book is a handy reference whether I’m writing a story in Tudor, Stuart or Georgian times! I also have frequently consulted modern reprints of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and James Caulfield’s Blackguardiana. The only problem with these two wonderful books is that I pick them up to check a single world and get utterly distracted by other definitions and anecdotes!
The at-a-glance layout of Cant, in a jokey tourist-style guide for modern visitors to Georgian London, is just as helpful and can be less of a distraction. Usually, I like to add the occasional distinctively archaic word in my stories, just to give an authentic atmosphere. I try to desist from going overboard and confuse my readers as well as myself.
So I was metaphorically rubbing my hands with glee with writing An Unlikely Alliance, my latest release and an MMM Regency romance. Abe Pengelly, one of my trio, is a card-carrying member of the London underworld. So to my disproportionate joy, I could have him greet my other two characters, Clem and Humphrey with “Bene lightmans” which means “Good day,” and “How dost my buff?” (“How are things going?”)
In his youth, Abe was briefly a “cracksman” (housebreaker) doing a bit of “crack lay” or housebreaking, through an open “glazer” (window) with the proceeds or “whack” shared with the rest of the criminal gang. When the “Upright Man” or gang leader he worked for “roasted” or arrested and subsequently transported (“marinated” or “lumped in the lighter”), Abe turned to the less hazardous occupation of “fencing” or receiving stolen goods. From then on, he has become a purveyor of information, rather than “trinkets”.
I had great fun sprinkling those Cant words throughout Abe’s thoughts and speech in An Unlikely Alliance while remembering to exercise a modicum of restraint!
Ellie Thomas Romance 