The authorship has been attributed to John Jackson (1769-1845), an ex-prizefighter (champion from 1795-1803) who taught Byron and a number of his friends. The aristocratic poet termed him his ‘old friend and corporeal pastor and master’ and noted in his ’Hints from Horace’ that ‘men unpractised in exchanging knocks / Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box.’ It was a quintessential flash relationship: the lord and the butcher’s son turned publican, united no doubt in language as much as in friendship.

Poor Tom was once a kiddy upon town,
A thorough varmint, and a real swell,
Full flash, all fancy, until fairly diddled,
His pockets first and then his body riddled …

Who in a row like Tom could lead the van,
Booze in the ken, or at the spellken hustle?
Who queer a flat? Who (spite of Bow Street’s ban)
On the high toby-spice so flash the muzzle?
Who on a lark, with black-eyed Sal (his blowing),
So prime, so swell, so nutty, and so knowing?

Here the use of thieves’ cant is not merely comic, or anthropological, but takes on a sort of Homeric pathos. According to my edition, Byron’s main source was the book that Ainsworth would later use: Memoirs of the First Thirty-Two Years of The Life of James Hardy Vaux, A Swindler and Pickpocket; Now Transported for the Second Time, and For Life, to New South Wales (1819).

I wonder if ‘The Hon. F.L.G.’, author of The Swell’s Night Guide was, in fact, Thackeray himself, author of The Book of Snobs, playing around with Yiddish slang, uncertain of how best to use it, whilst protecting his identity? That, I do admit, is a very tenuous link and I’m sure there are apt slang and non-slang words to describe the originator of such an idea, but I would prefer to remain totally ignorant as to what they are, if you don’t mind.

‘I’ll gully the dag and bimbole the clicky in a snuffkin.’
‘Nuffle your clod, and beladle your glumbanions,’ said Vizard, with a dreadful oath. ‘This way, men: if they screak, out with your snickers and slick! Look to the pewter-room, Blowser. You, Mark, to the old gaff’s mopus box! and I,” added he, in a lower but more horrible voice, ‘I will look to Amelia!’

Is this where Took and Feldman got the idea for Rambling Syd Rumpo?

On reading about Aram and the way he was recreated in the Victorian popular mind as a tortured soul whose philosophising in some way excused his crime, I immediately thought of Joey Barton, a talented, if not exceptional footballer; intelligent, a one-time footballing thug, perhaps a tortured soul, loathed by all except the fans of the club paying his wages at a particular time, but who now appears to have found salvation in the modern popular mind through his use of the musings of the great philosophers. It wouldn’t surprise me if, one day soon, he announces his retirement from football to write a new translation of Descartes.