"1823" OK

[Jonathan Lighter]

Robin has had a problem getting through and he's asked me to forward the
following to the list:

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I can't quite solve the OK problem, but I can provide some background.

Crucially, the lines immediately preceding the supposed "OK", "All you
maidens who love the game, / Put on your mourning veils again," were written
by David Haggart in 1821.

David Haggart, alias The Switcher, was hanged in Edinburgh in 1821, having
spent the last few weeks of his life writing an autobiography, _The Life of
David Haggart_, (1st ed., 1821).  At the end of this, he has a poem
beginning, "Able and willing, you will me find ..."  Towards the end of this
(p. 150), he writes:

      Now, all you ramblers, in mourning go,
      For the Prince of Ramblers is lying low;
      And all you maidens, who love the game,
      Put on your mourning veils again.

      And all you powers of music chaunt,
      To the memory of my dying rant--
      A song of melancholy sing,
      Till  you make the very rafters ring ...

The following year, Mary M'Kinnon, an Edinburgh prostitute, was convicted of
murdering one of her clients, and hanged in 1823.  Various songs were
written about her, and although I haven't managed to trace the one Jonathon
Green cites, it seems likely that this would have been an adaptation of
Haggart's lines, crafted to suit Mary M'Kinnon's situation, and sold around
the time she was executed.

A probably irrelevant connection between David Haggart and Mary M'Kinnon was
that they were both studied by the eminent phrenologist George Combe, David
Haggart from life and Mary M'Kinnon from a cast of her skull.  Combe
reported his findings in both cases, going as far as to include his
interviews with David Haggart in the death cell as an appendix to Haggart's
_Life_.  Unfortunately for the eminent Mr. Combe, he had failed to notice
that Sinfu' Davey wasn't being entirely candid with him.  Indeed, even in
the shadow of the gallows, Haggart managed to send up Combe something
rotten.  Combe finally got the point and had the interview pulled from the
third edition of the _Life_, but by then it was too late.  The Blackwoods
Crew, notably William Maginn (as Ensign O'Docherty) assisted by James Hogg
and John Wilson, gleefully eviscerated Combe's account in one of the reports
of the Noctes Ambrosianae.  Combe later glumly admitted that publishing his
conclusions about David Haggart was the biggest mistake he made in his
entire life.

Robin

DOCUMENTATION:

Haggart's _Life_:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VFwUAAAAQAAJ&dq

“An Interesting Account of the Trial and Sentence of MARY McKINNON, who is
to be Executed at Edinburgh, on Wednesday the 16th of April next, for the
Murder of William Hewat, by Stabbing him in the Breast with a Table Knife,
and her Body given for Public Dissection.' :
http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15348

For a detailed contemporary account of Mary M'Kinnon's trial  (p. 140ff):

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=P2QJAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PA140&dq=account+of+Mary+M'Kinnon&hl=en&ei=DrOfTfrGMsmi8QOAu-CoAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=account%20of%20Mary%20M'Kinnon&f=false

Links to thee poems about Mary M'Kinnon (though not the OK one):
http://www.campin.me.uk/Embro/Webrelease/Embro/13law/13law.htm

On James Hogg, Mary M'Kinnon, and Combe's phrenological frenzy, see Peter
Garside's introduction:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0PYlm9IOXycC&dq


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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