Friday, 20 November 2009

Bags of Mystery


More suspicious slang from 'Passing English of the Victorian Era', a dictionary which I suspect is not entirely to be trusted. The list of different types of Victorian beard is quite good, mind you:

Bags o' Mystery. (Peoples'). A satirical term for sausages, because no man but the maker knows what is in them.
     'If they're going to keep running-in polony fencers for putting rotten gee-gee into the bags of mystery, I hope they won't leave fried-fish-pushers alone.'
     This term took its rise about 1850, long before the present system of market-inspection was organised. But this term remained long after sausages were fairly wholesome. The 'bag' refers to the gut which contained the chopped meat.

irrelevant image
shamelessly snatched

(1856-60). A full beard, first seen upon the faces of the English army upon their return to England from Crimea. The new departure was instantly dubbed with the name of the most popular of the three great battles (Alma, Balaclava, Inkermann), the name probably being chosen by reason of the brilliancy of the charge of the Light Brigade. French writers who had visited the Great Exhibition of 1851, and who had been struck by the absolute absence of the moustache (except in the case of some military men), and the utter absence of the beard, without exception, were astonished upon return visits half-a-dozen years afterwards, to find Englishmen were bearded like the pard. Britons upon the principle of reaction always going the whole hog, grew all the hair they could, and the mere moustache of Frenchmen was nowhere in the fight. Interestingly enough, exactly as the wild, unkempt beard of 'The Terror ' dwindled into the moustache for the young, and the cotelette (mutton-chop) for the elderly, so the Balaclava (which abated the razor, as a daily protesting sacrifice to anti-gallicanism) toned down by '70, into the various beards of to-day the Peaked, the Spade, the Square, and other varieties of Tudor beards. These remained until the Flange, or Dundreary (see 1872-73),came in and cleared the chin, to be followed by the Scraper. To-day the 'York' prevails the short, pointed beard still worn by the Prince of Wales.

Banbury (London, 1894). One of the more recent shapes of 'jam', 'biscuit', 'cake', 'confectionery', 'tart' (qq.v.) a loose woman.
     Witness took several names and addresses, and some of the females described themselves as 'Banburys'; and said they got their living as best they could. — Raid on the Gardenia Club, The People, 4th February 1894.


  1. You have solved an age-old mystery in my family! My grandmother passed on to us this family recipe for 'Banbury tarts' and we always wondered where or what Banbury was. It was an odd name for a middle-class lady from Cleveland to come up with.

    I'm still not sure where she would have heard of it, but at least now we know what it means!

    By the by, not that you asked, but Banbury tarts are delicious! :)

  2. It's perhaps worth mentioning that Banbury is a pleasant English town, north of Oxford. Quite why it gave it's name to a pastry, I couldn't say ...

  3. When it came to "Bags of Mystery," I was originally very skeptical indeed. How could I have missed such a locution in all my years of poring over Victorian newspapers and ephemera?

    Turns out I was wrong. Here is an item reported from London in a New Zealand newspaper (The Otego Witness) of 8 January 1870:

    "In a case heard at the Marylebone Police Court, a young woman had obtained some saveloys from a pork butcher under false pretences. The magistrate asked whether saveloys were not a kind of sausage. A voice in the court replied: 'They are bags of mystery.'"

    The same phrase occurs in an item in the "NZ Truth" of 26 October 1912; under the title "THE 'BAG OF MYSTERY'" it declares that it is a "matter of simple fact" that "London horses, when they die, are sent to Germany to be manufactured into German sausage."

    These items convince me that the term is indeed of some vintage, and thundered loudly enough in the index to be heard in news reports transmitted to New Zealand ...

  4. Cheers Russell, that's interesting to know and raises it in my estimation somewhat. There are definitely some questionable definitions in this dictionary, not least barbecue as French:

    "Any animal, bird, or large fish cooked whole, without cutting, from beard (barbe) to tail (queue)."

    But, on the other hand, the OED actively takes the trouble to dismiss this etymology (rather snootily) which suggests it was believed in some circles. Here's what the OED says:

    ad. Sp. barbacoa, a. Haitian barbacòa (E. B. Tylor) ‘a framework of sticks set upon posts’; evidently the same as the babracot (? a French spelling) of the Indians of Guyana, mentioned by Im Thurn. (The alleged Fr. barbe à queue ‘beard to tail,’ is an absurd conjecture suggested merely by the sound of the word.)

  5. Lee, any idea what exactly the term 'pushing school' is...I have some impression it is a place where girls learnt the art of prostitution.

  6. No idea off-hand ... can you give me the context in which it appears?

    best wishes,