/ · John S. Farmer’s Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes · Appendix

Appendix

THERE are still one or two “waifs and strays” to be mentioned:— I. In Don Juan, canto XI, stanzas xvii—xix, Byron thus describes one of his dramatis personæ. In a note Byron says, “The advance of science and of language has rendered it unnecessary to translate the above good and true English, spoken in its original purity by the select mobility and their patrons. The following is the stanza of a song which was very popular, at least in my early days:—” (“If there be any German so ignorant as to require a traduction, I refer him to my old friend and corporeal pastor and master John Jackson, Esq., Professor of Pugilism.”) John Jackson, to whom is attributed the slang song of which the foregoing stanza is a fragment was the son of a London builder. He was born in London on 28 Sept. 1769, and though he fought but thrice, was champion of England from 1795 to 1803, when he retired, and was succeeded by Belcher. After leaving the prize-ring, Jackson established a school at No. 13 Bond Street, where he gave instructions in the art of self-defence, and was largely patronised by the nobility of the day. At the coronation of George IV he was employed, with eighteen other prize-fighters dressed as pages, to guard the entrance to Westminster Abbey and Hall. He seems, according to the inscription on a mezzotint engraving by C. Turner, to have subsequently been landlord of the Sun and Punchbowl, Holborn, and of the Cock at Button. He died on 7 Oct. 1845 at No. 4 Lower Grosvenor Street West, London, in his seventy-seventh year, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, where a colossal monument was erected by subscription to his memory. Byron, who was one of his pupils, had a great regard for him, and often walked and drove with him in public. It is related that, while the poet was at Cambridge, his tutor remonstrated with him on being seen in company so much beneath his rank, and that he replied that “Jackson’s manners were infinitely superior to those of the fellows of the college whom I meet at ‘the high table’” (J. W. Clark, Cambridge, 1890, p. 140). He twice alludes to his ’old friend and corporeal pastor and master’ in his notes to his poems (Byron, Poetical Works, 1885-6, ii. 144, vi. 427), as well as in his ’Hints from Horace’ (ib. i. 503): And men unpractised in exchanging knocks Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box. Moore, who accompanied Jackson to a prize-fight in December 1818, notes in his diary that Jackson’s house was ’a very neat establishment for a boxer’, and that the respect paid to him everywhere was ’highly comical’ (Memoirs, ii. 233). A portrait of Jackson, from an original painting then in the possession of Sir Henry Smythe, bart., will be found in the first volume of Miles’s ‘Pugilistica’ (opp. p. 89). There are two mezzotint engravings by C. Turner. II. In Boucicault’s Janet Pride (revival by Charles Warner at the Adelphi Theatre, London in the early eighties) was sung the following (here given from memory): The Convict’s Song. THE FAREWELL. THE [WERDHICK?] THE COMPLAINT. THE [SUFFERING?] THE PRAYER. THE MORRELL.