Mind your language
The word panjandrum has been popping up recently. I have noticed it from the pens of Andreas Whittam Smith, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Brian Sewell, Simon Hoggart and funny old Roy Greenslade.
It sounds like a proper word, one with an ancient etymology, although it is fairly widely known that it was invented in 1755 by Samuel Foote, the actor and satirist (1721–77). It came in a piece of nonsense that he invented to test a claim by the actor Charles Macklin (1699–1797) that he could repeat anything after once hearing it.
Behind the challenge was a feud that Foote had begun with Macklin in December 1754. Macklin, who had been Foote’s teacher, had set up a school of oratory, and Foote visited it to heckle him. On 16 December Foote rented the Haymarket Theatre to stage a comic lecture obviously lampooning Macklin.
The passage presented went: ‘So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. “What! no soap?” So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyalies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.’ That version is given by Maria Edgeworth in Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825). I haven’t read this novel, though I know the future Queen Victoria used it at the age of 10 as the basis of a story of her own. Where did Miss Edgeworth get Foote’s text? Hers is the text that the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations uses, but the OED prefers one from the Quarterly Review for 1854. A variant there is Garyulies (unless the OED mistranscribed it).
The phrase Great Panjandrum is often heard. Earlier in Harry and Lucy, Miss Edgeworth uses it herself, where the gardener praises his carnations. ‘One he called ... “The envy of the world, or the great panjandrum”.’ Panjandrum is generally used as a deflating word for an official personage. The 1st Marquess of Abergavenny (1826–1915), the Conservative party organiser, was variously called ‘the Grand Panjandrum’ and ‘the electioneering Warwick’, but in jocular rather than depreciatory terms, I think.
The nonsense passage by Foote, so strongly attractive imaginatively, found wider circulation by being illustrated by Randolph Caldecott (1846–86), but panjandrum thrives independently.
Dot Wordsworth
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