One of my favourite books as a child was Charles Mackay’s Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852). Many of these follies are familiar: cataclysmic economic delusions like the South Sea Bubble; the popular admiration of thieves and rogues, and the so-called “Magnetisers’ seeking health-benefits from er… magnets.
There is one chapter which is particularly memorable: 'The Popular Follies of Great Cities.' In it, Mackay follows the 19th century equivalent of internet memes as they percolate the streets of Victorian London:
walk where we will, we cannot help hearing from every side a phrase repeated with delight, and received with laughter, by men with hard hands and dirty faces, by saucy butcher lads and errand-boys, by loose women, by hackney coachmen, cabriolet-drivers, and idle fellows who loiter at the corners of streets. Not one utters this phrase without producing a laugh from all within hearing. It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question; in short, it is the favourite slang phrase of the day, a phrase that, while its brief season of popularity lasts, throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour, and gives them reason to laugh as well as their more fortunate fellows in a higher stage of society.
The phrases themselves are unbelievably asinine and make modern memes look a little less exceptional. Here is a small selection of the ‘follies’ which infected the lower classes of London.
One was to shout Quoz! in the face of the serious interlocutor:
When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his comrades, he looked him in the face, and cried out Quoz! and the exclamation never failed in its object. When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip, and an impatient shrug of his shoulders.
That’s it, that’s the joke. Alas, “Quoz had its season, and passed away as suddenly as it arose”, ready to be replaced with a new folly. The next was “What a shocking bad hat!”, derived from the political stratagems of an eminent hatter who, upon seeing the worn-out hat of a potential voter, would exclaim: “What a shocking bad hat you have got; call at my warehouse, and you shall have a new one!” This phrase seems to have been particularly obnoxious:
[T]housands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat shewed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the war-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats. He was a wise man who, finding himself under these circumstances “the observed of all observers,” bore his honours meekly. He who shewed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice… The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed, in the pauses of their mirth, “Oh, what a shocking bad hat!” “What a shocking bad hat!
Another memorable and durable phrase was “Flare up!” Its origin was the Bristol Reform riots and the great fires attending them. The populace was said to have ‘flared up’, a description which, for whatever reason, took hold in the imaginations of the metropole. It ‘answered all questions’ and ‘settled all disputes', suddenly becoming the most comprehensive phrase in the English language:
The man who had overstepped the bounds of decorum in his speech was said to have flared up; he who had paid visits too repeated to the gin-shop, and got damaged in consequence, had flared up. To put one’s self into a passion; to stroll out on a nocturnal frolic, and alarm a neighbourhood, or to create a disturbance in any shape, was to flare up. A lovers’ quarrel was a flare up; so was a boxing-match between two blackguards in the streets; and the preachers of sedition and revolution recommended the English nation to flare up, like the French.
Like modern memes, “Flare up!” was often repeated for mere love of the sound. Mackay talks of the drunkard reeling home shouting nought but the words ‘Flare Up!’, for “Drink had deprived him of the power of arranging all other ideas; his intellect was sunk to the level of the brute’s; but he clung to humanity by the one last link of the popular cry.” Eventually the phrase grew monotonous and fell into desuetude, although not before inspiring an ill-begotten newspaper entitled ‘Flare up!” hoping to profit from the craze.
The wheel of memetic contagion kept turning in London, fetid in both hygiene and mind. Other popular follies include childish songs like “Cherry Ripe! Cherry Ripe!” and “The Sea! The Sea!” One of most popular was the “vile Jim Crow” song, accompanied, naturally, with a twirl at the end of every verse:
Turn about and wheel about,
And do just so—
Turn about and wheel about,
And jump, Jim Crow!
Delightful. It seems Victorian Londoners liked nothing better an absurd and confrontational question. One season saw nothing but the rage of “Does your mother know that you’re out?” directed, naturally, at the foppish dandy. Another, the existential interrogatory “Who are you?” For some reason, this latter question burned itself into popular memory longer than the others. Where it came from, no-one knows, for “like a mushroom, seems to have sprung up in a night, or, like a frog in Cheapside, to have come down in a sudden shower.” The basic jest was to shout the question at an unawares stranger. From Mackay’s description, it seems quite degenerate:
The phrase was uttered quickly, and with a sharp sound upon the first and last words, leaving the middle one little more than an aspiration.
Part of the joy of “Who are you?” was that it was an ordinary phrase and thus more refined persons could be brought into the revelry:
When its popularity was at its height, a gentleman, feeling the hand of a thief in his pocket, turned suddenly round and caught him in the act, exclaiming, “Who are you?” The mob which gathered round applauded to the very echo, and thought it the most capital joke they had ever heard, the very acmé of wit, the very essence of humour.
Mackay was generally indulgent of these city follies, regarding them as the opiates of a separate, lower class. There is something quite refreshing about his easy dismissiveness. Today, we have dispensed with social class and dissolved the difference between high and low culture. In theory, all speech is equally valid; all text equally worthy. Without these older social categories, there is no way to dismiss modern discourse. Thus, a new folly: the highly educated but nevertheless brain-rotted Westerner. This wretch is permitted the childish joy of smearing the public commons with inanity, correctly intuiting that no-one can stop him or even articulate cogent criticism.
U mad bro?