This digital edition has been produced taking the text version of the original supplied in digital form at Google Books Internet Archive - that is, by capturing it with a mouse at on-screen and dropping it into a single html file, which is then divided into the six files that constitute the text of the present version. As so often with the online texts in Gutenberg and Google, the original available in this format is saturated with scanning errors and unmarked by any editing process other than the addition of the standard notices.
In order to correct the text, I have kept the read-on-screen version in .pdf format [online] before me. By applying a series of find/replace commands to the to the code view of the new html version, it has been possible to substitute a wide range of recurrent scanning errors in the digital original for their proper forms (e.g, *, to “ [= “]. By substituting <br> for </p> and adding at the start of each paragraph, it is possible to reproduce the familiar lineation of fiction publishing.
Beyond these global changes which might be applied to any fiction text, I have also modified the actual form of of the printed original in certain obvious respects. For instance, the negative verbs forms which are produced as [e.g.,] don ’t, fac., in the printed novel are here silently corrected to don’t. Likewise the contraction printed as I ’ll - which often appears as as I, ll l^ll, I*11 or even 111 in the digital version is rendered here as I’ll, - including with the ungrammatical phrase me ’ll as in his father an’ me ’ll talk. (In his Fairy Legends, Croker argues that the “lower Irish” speak more grammatically than their English counterparts and is certainly aware of their departures from the rule.)
I have corrected the archaic any thing, any how, any way, some one, to anything, &c., simply on the basis the difference is not significant. It is tempting but dangerous to correct such obvious misspellings as out of doore (p.8) to out of doors since that spelling occurs in two other phrases in Chapter 1- viz., out thro’ de doore and right forenent the doore. This being so, it is probably intended to mark the rotive r in Irish door, a sound not stressed by English speakers. Again, the annotations in Fairy Legends show that Croker was perfectly familiar with Irish durras and may even have ‘heard’ an extra vowel, or muted syllable at the end of the Hiberno-English equivalent.
In very many places, it’s has been produced as its when it pertains to Barney’s speech, or that of his family, although there is no practical difference in the pronunciation of the contracted verb phrase it is and the possessive adjective thus spelt. Since this orthographical trope, so to speak, so clearly pertains to the intended protrait of the Irishman as an illiterate, I have left it uncorrected in all cases. Additionally, when the contraction occurs as its where one would expect it’s in deference to the rank of the character concerned - as in Mr. Temple’s letter to his wife (viz., “its a settled thing”), I have left that unaltered as marking the very informal rules upon which the application of each spelling is decided.
It is certain that a phonetic difference exists between upper-class English renderings of come, enough and know and their Hiberno-English counterpart; but whether the difference is sufficiently marked as to necessity resorting to the spellings cum, enuff and knoes to notarise it, or whether those spellings do actually convey it, is a moot question. More probably, in fact, the mispellings are indicative of a supposed deficiency in orthographical skills - which is strictly beside the point in the context of narrated dialogue but has wider implications as regards the typing of the characters as illiterate as well as regional or even ‘forrin’ - at least in the sense that Barney uses the term in his imaginary altercation with a London policeman.
Clearly the writer thinks that something susceptible of phonetic transliteration distinguishes the one manner of speech from the other but what finally emerges is not so much a phonetic study of colonial difference as a crude demonstration of linguistic inferiority, on the side, and a self-regarding display of linguistic superiority, on the other. In this sense, the whole apparatus of accented orthography - that is, the registration of dialect features in a more or less self-consistent series of misspellings - is put at the disposal of a dislikable form of ethnological snobbery (aka, racism) rather than the more acceptable ends of social comedy or educational reform.
The matter is complicated by the fact that the English servants in the novel also speak in grammatical and phonological forms which elicit strategic mispellings, and that the narrator persistently conducts the narrative of the middle-class young ladies’ pursuit of proper husbands in the manner of a condescending observer whose wit and wisdom, like his vocabulary and syntax, far exceeds the capabilities of the characters - and whose audience are supposed to share in the same superior equipment.
In view of this, what emerges is a form of differential condescension involving, perhaps inevitably, occasional obiter dicta on the part of the narrator as regards the failings and (less often) the virtues of the two classes whose conduct is disparaged. Arguably there emerges at the course of the narrative an implied conception of ethical and linguistic normality and, insofar as this attaches to anyone, it seems to attach to the English merchant who brings Barney as his servant from a Munster cottage to his Finsbury home.
The fact that J. C. Croker was Irish - albeit Anglo-Irish, of non-aristocratic descent (at least in the immediate sense) and, at first, an employee in a commercial firm in Cork before becoming clerk in the Admiralty - his life-long occupation - has some bearing on the matter. In his own works on Ireland, the ‘bulls’ of the natives are reproduced with obvious familiarity with the originals and occasionally defended on the grounds of language-difference; in this novel, however, they are simply represented as the product of an amalgam of ignorance and cunning, locquacity and deceit. Viz.,
The conscience of our young Irishman was of a most conveniently elastic nature. He had a superabundant share of that low cunning so frequently found in his rank of life, with a remarkably open countenance, and a simplicity of manner quite beyond the conception of a man so unsuspicious as was Mr’ Stapleton. He had emigrated under the firm intention of “making his way,” - honestly if he could, but at all events ” of making it. “Projects floated through his brain, little thought of by those who dived not below the surface of his thoughts, tending to some wonderful fortune, or luck, as he would have called it, which transplantation from his native soil was to effect. [44]
It would appear from the textual comparison alone that Mrs. Croker took a rather different slant on the native Irish than her husband. What then, was the nature of the negotiation between them that led him to permit his name to be attached to the title? The answer to this question has to do with the nature of the treaty between and the Irish and the English Protestant middle class (albeit upper-middle class) in the period in question.
In biographical terms, the arrival of the Nicholsons in Ireland, for whatever reason, and their journeying there with Croker, already spells out the terms of a treaty between “enlightened” English travellers with a faintly evangelical disposition but nevertheless an ear to native thoughts and feelings, on the one hand, and an informed resident of the country, also Irish in the privileged sense of Irish and educated and Protestant, on the other.
In this accord the hyphen in the hyphenated term Anglo-Irish takes on a special significance as signifying a channel of communication between lower and higher elements in the imperial community: the Irish, considered primarily as an uneducated mass with a diverting imaginative capacity and a curious cultural inheritance (having no other inheritance in the material sense) and the English, considered as a rational and reformed community whose standards of speech, thought and action encounter perpetual resistance in the peripheral regions of the Empire.
It is, however, when the periphery visits the centre that the true dynamic of the colonial relation is laid bare; and, in this novel, Barney Mahoney is not merely an entertaining native but a “Paddy on the make”, in Roy Foster’s sense: that is, his fundamental lack of sense and moral rectitude, explicitly connected with the Catholic practice of confession (which renders the job of rectitude a professional specialism of the priest, leaving the confessor free to offend and reoffend between visits to the confessional), renders him a danger to the moral fibre of English society.
In one place the question of ordinary morality and confession are brought into sharp focus - if only to disparage the dishonest reliance of the majority religion in Ireland on that sacramental expedient:
They will rigidly fast at the {40} will and pleasure of their priests [...] Yet will they again and again, and without hesitation, or any attempt at concealment, commit offences [...] consoling themselves with the observation, “Shoore, its Sunday I’ll go up, or Monday, may be; some day next week, anyway, to the priest, an’ make a clear and clane breast of it.” The mental reservations of Barney were completely in this tone. He perceived his master would be strictly observant of his conduct; he believed him sincere [...]; “As why shouldn’t he, seein’ he was a protestant, an’ deprived o’ the blessin’ an’ comfort of absolution. If its the care o’ me own sowl I had,” thought he, “’twould be the nat’ralest thing in life to keep meself out o’ jeopardy an’ all manner of harum, an’ devils doin’s; bud hav’nt I de priest to de fore, which is a blessin’ not allowed to heretics.” {41}
This might be characterised as Irish Protestant ideology if it did not have more than a grain of truth to it (a concession that would make a good deal of trouble for the critic if it were not for the recent banking scandals in Celtic Tiger Ireland.)
If the novel in hand has a moral it is this: Irishman, remember where you came from when you tread the carpets of the drawingrooms of Finsbury. In this sense it is a corrective to the more sympathetic attitude of Thomas Crofton Croker in his Researches in the South of Ireland (1824) and his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1835) - both of which are curiously over-determined in their titles.
If Matthew Arnold was later to postulate that the proper relation between Ireland and England was that which subsists between a Victorian wife and her husband, or - in other terms - that the Irish imagination was essentially “feminine” in its resistance to the “despotism of fact” and therefore needed the guiding hand of an ideal husband, then just such a relation is rather strangely produced in the Croker marriage.
To that marriage, T. C. Croker brought all the materials of the Irish imagination insofar as could glean them from a close familiarity with Irish life which included a very fair competence in the Irish language. In his own person, he was quite capable of forging the ideal union between Irish material and English narrative - that is, between the matter of Ireland and the story of Empire.
In fact, however, the the internal psychological relation involved in that achievement was reproduced (or, more properly, repeated) in his marriage to Marianne Nicholson. Both shared a common perspective on Irish matters, though hers was more fully informed by the ethos of the English reformation - a form of mild, cultural evangelism which colours her narration - and less given to apologetics on the part of the Irish.
In that sense, hers sensibility was a corrective to his. Within the bounds of the marriage it signifies that he submitted to the authority that she wielded simply as an Englishwoman and which he, as an Anglo-Irishman could acknowledge without baulking at the implied offence.
For the Anglo-Irishman of his kind, the son of a serving officer in an English regiment, who had been classically educated and was socially adapted to pass in polite society anywhere in Britain, a relation of close geographical and cultural proximity to the Irish rural masses as a question of cultural capital in an unusual commodity rather than identity in the sense that he himself was branded with the cultural commodity he purveyed.
To say that Croker traded in Irishness is certainly too strong, or too nearly pejorative - though, in practice it retains an element of truth considering the benefits that accrued to him in the book-mart. He did not do so in the blatant sense that characterises the works of Lover or of Lever; yet he did, like them, maintain an internal barrier between self and subject - a sort of paling which has its origins in the colonial history he inherited.
Yet that paling was, to a considerable extent, emotionally permeable in the sense that his sympathies really did extend to the natives whose cultural heritage he genuinely regarded as an enrichment of spirit akin with the folkloric materials of the Brothers Grimm (to whom he sent his Fairy Legends, thus triggering the first growth of what has subsequently come to be called Irischekunde - and which flourished up to Heinrich Böhl and beyond, in our own scholarly day.
By comparison with T. C. Croker, Mrs. Croker shows herself on virtually every page to be a disapprover, if not actually an evangelist. Her sense of the charm of the Barneys of this world is rapidly revealed as a delight in exposing the blatant elements of deception and self-deception which, she thinks, make up the character of the Irish peasant: not only unlimited grasping self-importance which refuses to see to demarcations established in English society to prevent its rise through the class system, but also a form of shameless delight in tricking and cajoling the English to accept him at his own estimate.
Again and again she demonstrates that no one is really fooled - or not for long. And if Barney Mahoney believes himself to be a lineal descendent on his mother’s side from the Callaghans, who he takes to be the Dukes of Lismore - then his intrusion into the London home and even the dressingroom of the Earl of Cork constitutes an effective moment of exposure.
We hear that, having given him an interview for as long as it amused him, Lord Cork, is heard descending the stairway in a peal of laughter - presumably at the ridiculous character of the migrant Irishman. We learn, in passing, that Lord Cork has never been next or near to Friday’s Well and the Mall - nor has he ever set foot in Ireland at all.
This affords an opportunity for some out-of-place reflections by Barney’s part about the injury to Ireland deriving from the Act of Union and the creation of an absentee aristocracy, but it is hard to know whether Mrs. Croker is deriding or advancing that argument in such a context. At any rate, the Earl of Cork is unlikely to believe for half a moment that the Callaghans are the holders of the title of Lismore Castle which, famously, belongs to the Dukes of Devonshire. (Mrs Gaggarty’s ‘Curse ’em Street’ for ‘Curzon Street’ is a comparable misconception.
(Elsewhere in the Croker corpus, we learn that James II, on his way to the Boyne, was so afrrighted by the ‘height of the windows’ of Lismore Castle at its situation on the banks of the Blackwater that he had to remove to Kilkenny for the night. (See annotations in Historical Songs of Ireland.)
Barney Mahoney went into two editions in 1832 and was not reprinted thereafter. It’s initial success suggests that the viewpoint was agreeable to an English reading public which was just then deciding how to regard the large numbers of Irish retainers turning up on their doorstep. In the first chapter, Mrs Croker offers a curious view of the role of the potato in fostering the large families of the ‘lower’ Irish.
In little more than a decade the potato would fail and the Irish would descend on Britain in even greater numbers, to be met with by the sort of horrified reactions which caused Charles Kingsley to describe them as white monkeys and Thomas Carlyle to suggest extermination.
In reality, Barney Mahoney is an Irishman of approximately the type of Teague in George Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals - a character who demonstrates his fidelity to his Anglo-Irish master and overturns the plot to desploy him of his inheritance. With him he shares a natural propensity to adopt the post of man-servant, but there the comparison ends since Barney is precisely the opposite of Teague in his stupid, misunderstanding and dishonest pursuit of his own self-interest.
He is not, of course, the only Callaghan in Anglo-Irish literature (if he speaks truly of his pedigree.) Sir Branallagh O’Callaghan, in O’Keeffe, lays claim to descent from another of that ilk who rose so high in the days of Irish kingship that he populated Scotland “with his own hand.” Doubtless, he was an able warrior - as were the menfolk of the O’Callaghan sept who form the dramatic personae of Carleton’s story, “The Battle of the Factions” which stands beside “Wildgoose Lodge” as an exposition of the mindless violence of which the Irish peasant - for whatever reason - was deemed to be uniquely capable (although Carleton in some places equals Thomas Moore in his assertion that the true cause of agrarian disturbances in Ireland is to be found in the land-holding system).
It is one of the ironics of Anglo-Irish literature that Carleton, an Irishman of peasant extraction by birth if a Protestant by conversion (though the question of his parentage and descent must remain shrouded in uncertainties), provided the most sanguinary portraits of his rural semblables, his own peasant kind. Approaching the cottier population of nineteenth century Ireland with an antiquarian eye, unfrighted by the treat of rebellion or assassination, the Crokers saw a different landscape and a different population from that familiarised by Carleton - though unquestionably they trail upon his coat as literary pioneers - one in which the signal characteristics of the local people were superstition on the cultural plane and folly on the social.
Yet, while superstition was a commodity which could readily be converted into cultural capital - as, arguably, W. B. Yeats was later to do (drawing to a quite significant extent on Crofton Croker in the process) - folly was an unmitigated vice and one which Barney Mahoney shares not with Yeats’s peasants, who are rather more often cast as embodiments of ancient wisdom, so much as with Maria Edgeworth’s fictive dynasty - not Thady Quirk so much as the O’Shaughnessy’s who become the Rackrents for purposes of holding the title and the estate associated with the title Castle Rackrent.
Mrs Croker’s ‘Irish’ E.g, if yees ’ud find ayther industhree or since widin side o’ ye, ma boughal. - where since is intended to mean sense as pronounced by Mrs Garatty - otherwise produced as sinse to reflect the Munster Irish accent. Note that the spelling of industree suggests a heavy stress on the final syllable, which is unlikely to occur in any Irish accent though it might slip into ballads.
...
At some points one does ask if the language is not, in fact, approaching the pitch of Synge-song when an assortment of unlikely Biblical references is amalgamated with the oracular mode of the Earl of Cork’s house-keeper Mrs. Garatty - who seems in this passage, at least, something like a Widow Quinn avant le mot: “Ogh, thin! be the piper that piped afore Moses, bud the blud’s in yees, a’ boughal; an’ ’tis yees’ll be fit to go alone, I’m judgin’, woncet yees’ll get a thrifle o’ exparience to the fore.”
... the appeal to the ’gentle reader’ to share in a malicious portrayal of the straightened Scottish spinstress in her Curzon St. abode is a piece of overt buttonholing, and the mark of an assumed willingness to share a position with the author in her purvey of contemporary English - as well as Irish - society. Pitting Barney against such a creature is a piece of two handed satire, and the assumption that the author and her readers comprise possess an impregnably superior position comes under heavy pressure in the episode. A transparent absence of pity for the persons satirised is what makes the overt demand for fellow-feeling with the writer all the more repulsive. [88]
It is noticeable that the author uses the wrong gender in calling Barney Mr Stapleton’s “protegée” [98]
Note also that Mrs. Temple says (writes?) ancles for ankles, and prophane for profane (a variable spelling at that date?) - these being perhaps among the unnamed emendations that her husband’s preface, perhaps disingenuously, speaks of sending belatedly to the printer. [145]
Mrs. Temple is to Mr. Temple what Mrs Bennet is to Mr. Bennet in Jane Austen’s novel, which supplies the plot of much that transpires in the London scenes of this novel. So intent is she on plotting wedding matches for her nine daughters to the exclusion of everything else that we are told in one place that “vulgar soul” misunderstands the sentiments of Fanny Stapleton (the ingenue in the story). Other spelling blips assignable to the author incl. staid for stayed [178], ideot for idiot [210]. ...
Note the traveller’s cases: the imperials were unstrapped - i.e., larger cases intended for journeys in the Empire (a term in use by the end of the 18th c., though the publication of this novel anti-dates by a few years the reign of Victoria and by several decades the bestowal of the title Empress of India upon her).
In the main, this is a narrative of English snobbery as much as Irish inferiority; that is to say, the comical and dispicable position of the Irish is inserted in a narrative which takes its primary ground and context in the social system of contemporary Britain. In its appeal to its audience, for instance, the reference to the tradesman and his educated son in Hastings is indicative of the sort of ’squeam’ which the author presumes that she shares with her audience: “The son had the look of a man of education, perhaps, but not of high birth” and he had “a perpetual dread of some ill-bred sally, or coarse expression, from his father, coming to reflect ridicule on him.” Yet, he bore this “the patience of a martyr, for he was the only, and he knew himself to be the adored, son of his father, and he was a widower.” This to balance contempt for the father with admiration for the finer feelings of his son, but - more importantly perhaps - to chart the rocky waters of social consciousness at the time and place in question.
The author seems to hint that Mrs Temple doesn’t realise that St. Leonard’s bears an apostrophe since, in her dialogue, it is produced without whereas it appears with the apostrophe in Lady Saunder’s. The latter, no less unpleasant than superior, is more or less what Mrs Temple aspires to be - though the name Temple might well be supposed to derived from a knowledge of the Irish historical context were it connotes a family that produced Sir John Temple and Sir William Temple, the former of great fame among the Anglo-Irish and the latter a name universally known as the patron of Jonathan Swift. You cannot, in fact, disparage a Mr Temple, if the name is anything to judge by; though you may consider that he has married a woman less socially and intellectually sufficient than himself.)
Remarks on “the depravity of London servants” [185] deserves comment - as do all the overt reflections on the moral character of Barney.
Mr. James Jones, a clerk in government office, with literary pretensions but no literary works, is a curious similitude of Mr. Croker and a caricature on the pretensions of members of his class who are not redeemed from obloquy by actual publications. His appearance, however, serves to locate the author(s) fairly exactly on the scale of social castes and classes which populates the novel. For the moment, Barney is working for them. [189]
We get some sense of the status conferred - or subtracted - by the possession of an Irish servant in this: “His [Barney’s] brogue, it is true, afflicted the ladies in some degree; but, [...] in dread of their [acquaintances’] supposing that they had imported the “raw article,” they never failed to volunteer the information, that “Thomas, the new man-servant,” had previously lived in a very fashionable family near Grosvenor Square.” [196]
”horrid dialect” and “uncouth accents” of the Jones’s country cousins. [219] Note that there is an extended and - in fiction - quite unusual discussion of the mispronunciations of Yorkshire inhabitants, especially as bearing on the words sugar and pair. [226ff.]
Faced with the more extreme pronunciations of the Yorkshirewomen, Barney suddenly sounds quite intelligible: “Miss Jones desired I’d get a coach, Ma’am, when you’d have your luggage all ready.” [229] This is the disappointment of the Irish middle class at finding that the mass of English people speak English worse than their own despise inferiors. It is one of the Pearson girls, for instance, who is described as “the savage” by the Joneses, not Barney of rural Munster.
Predictably, perhaps, Mr. Barton is also declared to be a “horrid savage” by the egregious Mrs. Temple. Incidentally, her idea that one of her daughters should marry him if he offered exposes her to the final degree of contempt on the part of the author, albeit unspoken, and the addition of the reasons given - “that a table of your own” is an attractive proposition, and that he “cannot live forever” gives a sufficiently revolting picture to her processes of mind.
Nor is the general effect improved by the acquiescence of her daughters in the scheme to catch him: “I never saw the city, but it cannot be so odious as Fenny Hollows,” was the filial reply of Miss Temple [268] - setting the scene for their ludicrous attempts to catch him in the next chapter. And when, in his turn, the old dry-salter, father of “educated” Tom, proves to be unassailable from the marriage standpoint, he is finally derided as “a greater savage than any they had ever met with, even in Lincolnshire.” [280]
The ability to “read” theatre as fiction is not, apparently, native to the Irish (Barney) or the Yorkshire ladies (Pearsons). In fact, Miss Pearson’s answer to reassurance about the imaginary nature of the dramatic events on stage seems to assert that the very distinction between real and fictive is irrelevant to her: she is genuinely blind and deaf to any artistic representation: “‘Agh naw n’t what ye call fiction,’ she answered” [258]. In this context, Barney’s passionate over-reaction to the same stage-performance is a mark of sensibility, if also a mark of his fatal lack of sophistication. And his present masters - however little respect the authors may have for them (though really they are quite like the authors)
Occasional inverted commas are missing or redundant - as in the paragraph which paraphrases the thoughts of the Temple sister anent Charles Stapleton and any other young man within their catchment area; here a double-inverted comma obtrudes at the end, where no corresponding comma is indicated as opening a speech parenthesis (which is in any case unnecessary in this instance.) [271]
Author - or printer - has tête-á-tête for tête-à-tête
Note that the crooked butler tells his cronies that Barney is an Irishman ’which is what you wouldn’t guess in by his tongue” - an untruth so obvious that it can only be spoken to flatter Barney but which nevertheless harps upon the underlying question of accent, origins and social value (or credit). It only remains for Barney to see through this deception ... [288] When Screw, the malignant ex-butler, speechifies before the members of the club to whom Barney is now to be introduced - and it is not long before we are plainly told that they are a confederacy of house-burglars - he utters precisely the sentiments about London servants and their vices which the employers have uttered in other places, and which constitutes the raison d’être for the employment of Irishmen - notwithstanding their lowly class standing: “
The question of dialect and slang - but mostly thieves’ slang
The narrative of Barney is wrapped up with great haste, all the transactions of the his involvement with the thieves being bundled into a single paragraph. Where the author could have invested detail in the “cant” of low-life London, she concentrates instead on taking the shortest route to the moral denouement which happily ...
The “science of the author of Pelham” [289] was E. Bulwer Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii, and Eugene Aram - also the one-time husband of Rosina Doyle Wheeler. Edmund Gosse has an essay entitled “The Author of Pelham” - see under Rosina Bulwer, infra.
Seeing that the thieves put Barney up to a piece of burglary, it is clear that the underlying place of “plate” - that is, silverware downstairs and finer commodities upstairs (jewellry, banknotes, &c.) are their object but also that these commodities are intrinsic to the value system of the novel: social place is about property - and it is only on the general premiss that property is “good” that the finer distinction between the respectable property-owner and the arriviste can be made - though arriviste, parvenu, &c., are too overtly snobbish as terms to describe the differentiation between ideas of cultured and uncultured persons intended by the author.
In the end, it materialises that the both the title and the character are misleading in relation to a novel which has sets takes as its subject the the class structure of contemporary Britain in a London-based perspective which, untypically, takes in far-off Munster as part of its wider purlieus.
The reason for this scope is that the authors are, to a greater or lesser extent, members of the Irish Protestant middle class with a passport to English society and letters; hence, for instance, the Irish poet who, on one occasion, visits the Jones household and who greets Barney as a compatriot - or, at least, speaks kindly of him to his hosts: “If I mistake not, we are from the same district,” said the poet; “I was born in the county of Cork myself, and was revelling on the long-unheard accent of my country.” [205]
Sympathy to Catholics: "the lad had never lost sight of the principles of honesty, early implanted in him by his parents, and enforced by the admonitions of his not forgotten priest, Father Connor." [292] Note that the denizens of the Scape Goat pub become the Scape Goat Gang - the name of the place being arrived at by back-formation (supposing the pub to have existed first and not to have been established to provide a rendez-vous for the "gang." On reflection, it might be that Barney is intended in some sense as a sacrificial victim, but certainly not a scape goat in the usual sense; on the other side, the gang are a college of scape graces, and perhaps the Scape Goat is the closest possible formation consistent with the naming of English Pubs (The Cock and Bull - the Bull)
[... In progress.]