Exactly contemporaneous with [John Camden] Hotten [in the UK] there appeared America's first essay into slang lexicography, George Washington Matsell's 'Vocabulum' (1859). It was the first such volume to appear in the United States, and would remain pretty much unique for some time to come. Its only possible predecessor is a short glossary appended by Edward Judson to his moralising series 'The Mysteries and Miseries of New York' (1848), itself cribbed from Eugene Sue's 'Les Mysteres de Paris' (1842-43). Despite modern America's wonderful profligacy as regards slang, the progress of such vocabulary during the nineteenth century seems to have been generally restrained. Indeed, American slang was a relatively late arrival in its own country. Dialect, a linguistic development that can be generalised as a primarily rural phenomenon, grew up much faster. A glance at the 'Dictionary of American Regional English' (1985, 1991) shows many local usages that go back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The citations in 'DARE''s slang equivalent, the 'Historical Dictionary of American Slang' (1994) tend to start somewhat later. There are earlier terms, of course, but on the whole these are imports, usually from England. There are few early to mid-nineteenth-century terms that cannot be found in Grose or Hotten. Slang, however widely it may spread, is very much a creature of the city. If dialect is the language of the field and farmyard, then slang is that of the street and tavern, and in nineteenth-century America, certainly prior to the Civil War, the cities that provided such spawning grounds were relatively rare. There would be an explosion of slang in the last half of the century, as cities grew and communications between them expanded to match, but in 1859 Matsell's effort was very much that of a pioneer. Nor are these the only factors that might have inhibited the study and indeed the spread of slang. As far as language was concerned, the citizens of republican America were more 'Victorian' than those Victorians who lived much closer to the eponymous monarch herself. If such standard English words as 'leg' and 'shirt' were found beyond the pale (the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett caused a certain frisson when his 'New York Herald' refused to print the former as 'limb' and the latter as 'linen') then the full-blooded expressions of genuine slang presumably caused even greater outrage. And as Jonathan Lighter, editor of the 'HDAS' has pointed out, the very idea of an intellectual, let alone academic, consideration of the language of the streets was 'de facto' suspicious. In the first place, the linguistic conservatism of contemporary British lexicography, epitomised by Samuel Johnson and his epigones, had dismissed slang, if it even bothered to notice it, as the language of the unlettered and thus the unimportant. It was too coarse, too rough, in modern terms, too 'street'. And even with Johnson long dead, for the British academics of the mid-nineteenth century, the members of the Philological Society or the contributors and subscribers to the publications of the EETS, there were 'more serious scholarly tasks at hand, such as the editing of medieval manuscripts and the reconstruction of lost languages'. Even that most democratic of lexicographers, Frederick Furnivall, seems to have eschewed the language that he must have encountered among his shopgirls and self-improving working men. Thus in nineteenth-century Britain, where slang had been established for centuries, one can count the slang collectors on very few fingers. To study the vocabulary in America, where Britain's intellectual standards still counted, and where there was precious little slang to work with anyway, one requires fewer still.

Insofar as he issued a slang dictionary in mid-nineteenth-century America, Matsell is therefore a pioneer. The vocabulary he offered, and the motivation behind his work, however, are less original. Chronology militates against Matsell's having been able see Hotten's work, but he presumably had a copy of Grose, probably in Egan's edition, since much of his word-list apes that which he would have found there. This is not to belittle Matsell: if American slang was still primarily an import, such similarities were inevitable. His motivation is similarly second-hand. Matsell terms himself a lexicographer, albeit much to his own surprise. 'To become a lexicographer, certainly never entered into my calculation, or even found a place in the castle-building of my younger days; and if a kind friend had suggested [it] to me... I would have simply regarded him as a fit subject for the care of the authorities.' And in the strictest sense, his demurrer is right. The 'Vocabulum' is not a 'dictionary' as such; it harks back to the work of Thomas Harman, another law officer who attempted to offer his professional peers, and by extension the law-abiding public, a key to the language of those whom they wished to see controlled. It is a tradition that has yet to die: 'The Signs of Crime', 'a Field Manual for Police' (1976), in essence a crammer for ambitious British bobbies by the then Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Powis, includes a 36-page 'glossary of words commonly used by thieves, cheats and ponces'. Like these men, Matsell was working primarily to educate his own employees. 'Experience has taught me that any man engaged in police business cannot excel without understanding the rogues' language' and he intended to remedy that want.

Matsell was undoubtedly the most colourful of such policemen-turned-lexicographers. When he edited his glossary he had recently retired after a dozen years as New York City's first ever Chief of Police. He would return in 1874 under a new title, Commissioner, but it would be a brief tenure. A former Tammany Hall politician, Matsell was a notorious character. As a politician he had been a keen supporter of a properly organised police force, replacing the random collection of municipal functionaries who had hitherto struggled to maintain law and order in the ever-expanding metropolis. When in 1845 such a body, the New York Police Department, was established, Matsell got the job. It was a generally popular appointment, although one critic apostrophised the gargantuan Chief, who weighed more than 300 lbs (around 22 stone), as 'a Beastly Bloated Booby'.  Matsell proved nothing if not accommodating in his enforcement of the city statutes. His was a very passive regime, bending cheerfully to the current political wind. Political connections far outweighed the demands of the law. If a given ward chose to enforce drinking or gambling laws, then Matsell's men would jump to close down saloons or raid illicit casinos; if such enthusiasm was not forthcoming, the police were certainly not in the business of encouraging it. In outward show, however, Matsell was exemplary. He put the police into uniforms, on the lines of their British contemporaries, and instituted proper training. He established a rudimentary system of communication between his office and the various precincts. But in the end Matsell was perceived to be at least as sinful as those whom his men pursued. His enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had him branded a 'slave catcher' by Horace Greeley's 'Tribune'; his financial affairs were seen as dubious at best; he skimmed the profits of the city's gambling dens; his dealings with the restoration of stolen property echoed those of London's Jonathan Wild, the eighteenth-century 'thief-taker' who personally fenced the stolen goods he had confiscated from the original robbers; he ran a lucrative 'referral' trade, passing on arrested people to a coterie of lawyers who paid him a kickback for every new client. It was even claimed that he extorted money from clients of the well-known, and much vilified, abortionist and specialist in contraception Madame Restell, also known as Ann Lohmann and actually an Englishwoman born Caroline Ann Trow. It was further suggested that Matsell worked as her partner. Whatever their relationship, Restell gained a renewed notoriety in 1874 when, by now an old woman, she was driven to suicide by the repellent and ridiculous 'vice crusader' Anthony Comstock, who greeted the news that she had cut her throat rather than face prison with the comment that, to his great satisfaction, she was the fifteenth individual who had chosen such a course after falling beneath his scourge. Matsell responded to all such attacks with an outraged innocence, inviting 'the most searching investigation' and blaming 'evil disposed persons, seeking the advancement of their own ends', but his tenure does seem to have brought him many material rewards. His basic salary can hardly have funded the twenty-room house in Viola, Iowa, where he and his family spent their summers. It boasted a 3,000 acre estate and a brimming wine cellar. Their parties were legendary.

What brought Matsell down, ironically in a town where the police have long been associated affectionately with the Irish community (not for nothing do the slang terms 'shamus', 'shamrock' and 'muldoon' all mean policeman), was the accusation that he allowed too many Irish immigrants to enter the force. Matsell claimed that their representation echoed that of the population at large (some 28 per cent of the citizens, 27 per cent of the force) but his accusers had found a lever to topple him, and they used it. Even Matsell's own origins were investigated. He claimed to have been born in America; his attackers alleged that he had emigrated from England. He was then tried for 'alienage' - no alien could be chief of police - but after a trial that was described by the 'New York Times' as 'a kind of judicial saturnalia', he was acquitted. It did not hinder his cause that both the judges were Democrats, as was he, and that one, Mayor Fernando Wood, had presided over his original appointment. He survived this time, but the pressure remained. In 1857, when the NYPD was reorganised as the Metropolitan Police Department, he lost his job. He turned his attentions to the 'National Police Gazette', 'the only authentic record of Crime and Criminal Jurisprudence in the United States'. It aimed, declared the advertisement Matsell included in the endpapers of 'Vocabulum,' at 'the enforcement of justice, honesty and truth', but its 'chaste and forceful' articles tended towards a tabloid celebration of lurid excess, mixing lowlife, sex and sport, all areas of interest very dear to its editor's heart. Matsell returned, amid much controversy, as one of New York's Police Commissioners, in 1874. This time, however, he lasted but two years. Ironically once more, it was Tammany Hall, his original backer, that saw him off. His alleged failing was in keeping the streets clean; in fact the politicians resented his attitude to the liquor laws. The laxity of thirty years past was no longer acceptable. Illegal drinking had to go, and with it went George Matsell's job.