In chapter XI of Richard Marsh’s 1897 work of weird horror, The Beetle, narrator Sydney Atherton has discovered that his beloved childhood friend Marjorie intends to marry the politician Paul Lessingham – who is much older than Sydney (“and a wretched Radical!”). Not to put too fine a point upon it, Sydney is unimpressed. [T]o…
Tag: richard marsh
London language in 19th century novels
I pricked up my ears (figuratively speaking) at this intriguing post by Roger Pocock of the Windows into History blog, in which he discusses a list of local words from late 18th and early 19th-century London. This fascinating list was first published in 1803, in Samuel Pegge’s book Anecdotes of the English Language: Chiefly Regarding…