Flash Romanticism: The Currency of Urban Knowledge in "Tom & Jerry"

Abstract

To know city as Romantic writers knew it and to know, with Wordsworth, life ... in selection of language by men (598-7), requires knowing language really used in city, because available styles of representation delimit what and how any society knows. The best records of everyday language of Romantic-era London are dictionaries of cant and popular street literature, like Pierce Egan's concisely-titled Tom & Jerry: Life in London; Or Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn and His Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, Oxonian, in Their Gambles and Sprees Though Metropolis. Engraved by George Cruikshank and published monthly starting in 1821 for shilling an issue, Life in London combines picaresque narrative (Williams 217), caricature, and slang dictionary (although it does not always define slang that fills its pages). The first examples of cant dictionaries in mid-18th century catalogued specifically criminal, low-life terminology; but, as Janet Sorensen shows, by late 18th century this vulgar language had become coterminous with language of the and included all classes of slang, puns, and fashionable phraseology: at same time as wide set of popular practices and beliefs were criminalized and rendered invisible, Sorensen writes, a set of 'criminal' linguistic practices became highly visible and came to be understood as an expression of popular British culture and uniquely British liberty in dialectic of social repression and rhetorical rehabilitation of (Sorensen 438). I say current classes of slang, not only because these dictionaries register historically-specific, current--as in contemporary--forms of speech, but also because slang functioned in Romantic literature as form of currency, medium of exchange that Londoners or cits, to register and capitalize on their urbanity in lieu of three dominant figures of realist narrative--character, plot, and an interpretive narrative voice. Cits called this language (1) and style of flash genres--which include ballads, dictionaries, annotated engravings like Thomas Rowland-son's Dr. Syntax series, and Newgate and silver-fork novels--implies that common public, everyday city readers, privileged this medium of exchange, flash, over character, plot, narrative voice, and forms and effects of cultivation, morality, immorality, idealism, individuality, and self-knowledge that writers typically ascribed to these narrative features. Whereas sympathy with characters and adherence to plots implied property transfer, marriage, inheritance, growth, development, education, and change, exchanging flash was an impersonal mode of interaction that left individual characters and readers alike unexposed and unaltered. Flash was medium of urban narrative and urban knowledge. Immensely popular, even among educated upper-classes, Egan's Life in London profitably built upon antecedents like The Newgate Calendar and Johnson's Life of Savage; and, as would be case with Dickens's novels, theaters and hack writers staged and published pirated versions of Life in London before it was finished. The text remained in print throughout 19th century. The 1869 edition, edited by John Camden Hotten (who contemporaneously published The Dictionary of Slang), introduces work as the book--the literature--of that period, one work which many elder gentlemen still remember far away in distance of their youth (1). And sure enough, re-envisioning his boyhood self with book on his lap, William Thackeray imagined, behind great books which he pretends to read, [behind even Scott's The Heart, of Mid-Lothian], is [Life in London'], which he is reading (qtd. from The Roundabout Papers in Egan 2). As what people were really reading, as text tucked inside more austere and now-canonical texts, Life in London might index what features everyday 19th-century readers actually attended to as they read. …