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Treasure Island vocabulary
113 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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Bow Street Runners
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synonyms: ~thief-taker ???
► definition
Definition:[1749 - 1839]Britain's first professional police force, founded by the magistrate (and author) Henry Fielding
► uses
Uses:
He talked o' keel-hauling, did he? I'll keel-haul him!"
All the time he was jerking out these phrases he was stumping up and down the tavern on his crutch, slapping tables with his hand, and giving such a show of excitement as would have convinced an Old Bailey judge or a Bow Street runner.
Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island (1883)
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With a washerwoman, who exposes hard-bake for sale in her parlour-window, dwelling next door, and a Bow-street officer residing over the way, you may imagine that his society is a source of consolation to myself and to Mrs. Micawber.
Charles Dickens. David Copperfield (1850)
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They had information of his exciting the peasantry, and sent a Bow Street officer after him. He found out where he lived and captured him (having been informed that he was not there by the inmates of the house), and took him to the Duke, who had him searched.
Charles Greville. The Greville Memoirs, volume 2 (Nov. 22, 1830)
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The Constables and the Bow Street men from London—for, this happened in the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police—were about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas,
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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RUSSIAN COFFEE-HOUSE. The Brown Bear in Bow-street, Covent Garden, a house of call for thief-takers and runners of the Bow street justices.
Francis Grose. 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
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Bit usually means the smallest silver coin in circulation; also a piece of money of any kind. Charles Bannister, the witty singer and actor, one day meeting a Bow Street runner with a man in custody, asked what the prisoner had done; and being told that he had stolen a bridle, and had been detected in the act of selling it, said, “Ah, then, he wanted to touch the BIT.”
John Camden Hotten. The Slang Dictionary (1913)
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