Assoc. Professor Clara Tuite presented a plenary lecture at the recent Settler Social Identities conference
Lag Fever: Flash Culture, the Moon’s Late Minions and Gentlemen of the Shade in Colonial Australia
25 July 2018
Assoc. Professor Clara Tuite (the University of Melbourne)
Plenary Lecture, 'Settler Social Identities: Rational Recreation in the Long Nineteenth Century' conference, 25 July 2018, Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
- LAG FEVER. A term of ridicule applied to men who being under sentence of transportation, pretend illness, to avoid being sent from the gaol to the hulks.
Francis Grose, Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811)
This plenary lecture engaged the rich social, linguistic and aesthetic repertoire of the flash (originally a cant language of thieves and gypsies), focusing on the convict phenomenon of "lag fever" in order to complicate the idea of colonial belatedness. Clara's discussion encompassed the flash lexicons of Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) and the New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1819) that accompanied the convict Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux, as well as the popular Romanticism of Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1820).
The lecture explored Regency flash - simultaneously classical and new - as an example of the transformative capacity of the lag, a retroactive celebration of the disjunctive and anachronistic powers of quoting and recirculating in a new time and place. Clara's exploration of the interpenetration of flash cultures in colonial Australia and Regency London threw new light on the liminal yet transformative Regency cultures of scandalous celebrity, exile and convictism.
Image: William Fernyhough, Portrait of Sir Thomas Mitchell,
In Album of portraits, mainly of New South Wales officials (1836)
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Mitchell is holding a silhouette portrait by Fernyhough of the Wiradjuri man, John Piper, Mitchell's guide on his third expedition into the interior of New South Wales.
