"grog"

[Stephen Goranson]

West includes the quote with "grog [rum]" in the chapter "The Emergence of the
Author: 1714-25." It's presumably from some edition of volume II of The Family
Instructor. Apparently Vol. 1 was first publshed in 1715 and Vol. 2 in 1718.
Google has Vol. II in the eighth ed. corrected 1764 which has "ginger" not
"grog" (p. 291)
http://books.google.com/books?id=v3QPAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR9&dq=intitle:family+intitle:instructor+date:1700-1799&lr=&as_brr=1#PPA291,M1

Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer (London, England), [British
Library collection] Tuesday, January 31, 1749; Issue 465. p. 1 (?) col.
1 (from
the Jamaca Gazette):
"...but short Allowance of Grog was worst of all..."

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson




Quoting "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>:

>    The Wikipedia edit apparently misquoting Defoe was added on
> 12/16/2006, see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grog&diff=next&oldid=93208639
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grog&diff=next&oldid=93208639
>> .  For support, it cites Richard West, The Life and Strange Surprising
> Adventures of Daniel Defoe, London, 1998, p. 227.  Perhaps someone can
> check that cited source?
>
>
>
> John Baker
>
>
>
> Joel S. Berson wrote:
>
>> The OED has as its first quotations 1770 and 1773, and the etymology
>> from Vernon's grogram.  But there is the claim that "two earlier
>> examples are known, in an 1818 book by Daniel Defoe and in one of the
>> Roxburghe Ballads, said to date from 1672-85. However, it is not
>> possible to substantiate either" (World Wide Words, Michael Quinion,
>> http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gro4.htm).  Wikipedia says the
>> Defoe work is "The Family Instructor", but does not give publication
>> details (article "Grog").
>>
>> First, the "1818" is an error.  Defoe is 1661?--1731, 1818 is not 22
>> years before Vernon, and there are editions of "The Family
>> Instructor" from 1715 -- although there is a 1718 edition (ESTC)
>>
>> Second, why has it not been possible to substantiate Defoe?  Simply
>> because no-one has gone to read an edition?  Does ECCO or EEBO
>> contain an edition earlier than 1740?
>
> I was told about the two possible antedatings only after I wrote the
> "grog" piece and I then looked into them in some detail, putting a
> detailed note in a later issue of the newsletter (but not online).
>
> Wikipedia says it is in Daniel Defoe's The Family Instructor of 1718,
> which has a Barbados slave boy say that "black men" in the West Indies
> "make the sugar, make the grog, much great work, much weary work all day
> long." However, the Defoe citation is given in later editions of the
> book
> and in quotations from it (I'm still trying to get access to a first
> edition) not as Wikipedia cites it, but as "makee the sugar, makee the
> ginger; much great work, weary work, all day, all night". This looks
> like
> sloppy citing rather than a later revision of the work.
>
> The Roxburghe Ballads citation appears in volume 7, edited by Joseph
> Ebsworth and published in 1893, in a ballad whose title is Pensive Maid
> and whose date is given as 1672-85: "In a public-house then they both
> sot
> down / And talk'd of admirals of high renown / And drunk'd as  much grog
> as come to half-a-crown." Ebsworth was a scrupulous editor, and his
> dating
> ought to be on the mark (though I can't find any date for the ballad in
> the volume). But it's a one-off example in a collection bedevilled by
> fakes and which has later additions (there's one about the 1745 Jacobite
> rebellion, for example). The reference to admirals, and the general tone
> of the piece, hints that it might have been written after 1740 in
> knowledge of the Vernon tale. The only firm date I have is that the
> ballad
> must be older than its reproduction in a book of comic songs of 1818
> compiled by Thomas Hudson.
>
>
> --
> Michael Quinion
> Editor, World Wide Words
> E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
> Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org
>
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>
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