Sexual meaning of chimney and chimney sweeps in the 18th century?

[Garson O'Toole]

Many thanks to Robin Hamilton for the warning about the unreliability
of dates within the works of John Stephen Farmer. I have located an
earlier version of the ballad in Google Books that mentions
chimney-sweepers. If the date at WorldCat and the date in the pages of
the text are accurate then this may be an instance in which Farmer has
support.

Citation: 1718, Mr. Pope's WORMS: And a New Ballad on the Masquerades,
LOVE's Invention: or the Recreation in Vogue, An excellent new Ballad
upon the Masquerades, Second Edition, London. (Google Books full view)
(The publication date of MDCCXVIII is given with the publisher
information on a page of the text. Several WorldCat entries associate
the volume with Alexander Pope.)

Your Chimney-Sweepers with an Air,
Cry, Sweep your Chimnies clean;
And Shou'd you meet a Scavenger,
He'll tell you what they mean.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ksYIAAAAQAAJ&q=chimney#v=snippet&

Garson

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Robin Hamilton
<robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton2 at BTINTERNET.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Sexual meaning of chimney and chimney sweeps in the 18th
>              century?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>> Citation: [1720 date given for Masquerade Ballad] 1897, Merry Songs
>> and Ballads: Volume 3 edited by John S. Farmer, Privately Printed for
>> Subscribers Only.
>
> I'd be very bloody careful about any date that tracks back to an origin in
> John Stephen Farmer -- he was well ahead of his time, but he could sometimes
> be quite catastrophically wrong.  (As, for instance, dating a version of The
> Stalling of the Rogue to 1756 (?) from Bampfield Moore Carew when it's
> actually from Harrison Ainsworth in 1848.)
>
> Tracking the actual mechanism of quite why and how Farmer screwed up so
> royally is a joke and a half.  Part of it is that he was (as another person
> on this list said) pathologically sociopathic.  He virtually never left the
> house other than to attend meetings of the Spiritualist Society.
>
> Why there's a hole the size of a mountain in _Musa Pedestris_ around the
> years 1725-1800.  When the buggers were hymning Jack Sheppard on the Street,
> Farmer had cotton wool resolutely stuffed in his ears.
>
> Just a stray thot.
>
> Robin
>
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