‘This is a page that’s devoted to… “porn refs”, I’ve called it.

And just the kind of collision of those two ideas, what you could do with fingers and the places you could go into, you know, with fingers, just felt absolutely right for the book.’ “Jink” for money, “Jenny Linda”, which apparently was slang for rhyming slang for window - winder, Jenny Linda.įingersmith was a word I’d come across before starting the novel, which was a word for pickpocket, but also for midwife. The ones I’ve asterisked are ones that I particularly liked. It’s kind of underworld that Dickens writes a bit about. So that gave me a sort of grounding in, you know, thieves and the Victorian underworld. And I mean, there’s how many pages in it? Well over 1,000, I think. And I think the very first bit of research I did was I went through this whole wonderful dictionary of historical slang by Eric Partridge, and just basically, gloriously copied out every word that I liked. This was my third novel with a Victorian setting. So I already had a kind of grounding, but this was set in the 1860s, which was much earlier than the first two. So I had to get to grips with the new decade. And then it was just a question of finding the ones that felt right for for the novel, for Sue. And I just was kind of in love with all these words, really.

But you know, they’re lovely things: “to fig out”, to dress one’s best a “fencing crib”, which is a fence shop…all the really juicy stuff. Most of these words I never used in the end, just because there are so many of them. ‘So this was kind of a starting point for the book, really: making a long list of thieves’ slang.

1998 novel by sarah waters