The Regency’s ton.

I was reading Miranda Seymour’s NYRB review (November 23, 2023 issue; archived) of Antonia Fraser’s new biography of Lady Caroline Lamb (which makes for very lively reading) when I hit the following paragraph:

Initially, and on some level irrevocably, Byron adored Caroline, addressing her, in the first flush of delight, as “the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.” But the born outsider also wanted a place in the Regency’s ton, the exclusive London circle presided over by the lady patronesses of Almack’s, the city’s most fashionable club. Caroline’s grand pedigree swept her lover across that threshold. Lady Melbourne, a charming but treacherous woman with whom Byron initiated a flirtatious relationship while seeking (but seldom heeding) advice on how best to handle her reckless daughter-in-law, did the rest.

I knew, of course, that ton was a borrowing from French and in general meant (to quote the OED) “The fashion, the vogue, the mode; fashionable air or style,” but I didn’t understand its use here. For that I had to scroll down to “b. transferred. People of fashion; fashionable society; the fashionable world”:

c1770 Miss P…D…will only..take engagements from billiard table gentlemen, gentlemen of the ton, and young shop~men.
in L. de Vries & P. Fryer, Venus Unmasked (1967) 33

1815 All the ‘Ton’s’ a stage, And Fashion’s motley votaries are but play’rs.
Sporting Magazine vol. 46 93

1855 The princess, the nobles, and all the ton had disappeared.
J. S. C. Abbott, History of Napoleon vol. I. xiv. 255

1969 A waste, when all the ton will flock here for this event.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 99

1969 The ton are here in force.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 103

Odd to give two cites from Hebe Elsna (Dorothy Phoebe Ansle), an obscure romance novelist who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page — surely one would have sufficed to document its (presumably marginal) late-20th-century use? At any rate, it’s an interesting extension of meaning that I hadn’t been familiar with, so I pass it along.

Another piquant lexical tidbit occurs later, in this passage:

“Cruel and unnatural as you have behaved, you surely do not wish to be the Death of your mother,” Lady Bessborough’s maid reproached Caroline for upsetting the woman described by Byron as “the hack whore of the last half century.”

I was puzzled by “hack,” but the OED (s.v. hack noun² “A horse used for hire”) explains:

5. slang. A prostitute; (also) a procuress, a pimp. Now rare.

1699 The poor Hack that runs of Errands to fetch Wenches or Liquor.
B. E., New Dictionary Canting Crew at Pitcher-bawd

1736 Hack..a strumpet.
N. Bailey et al., Dictionarium Britannicum (ed. 2) (at cited word)

1760 The batter’d Hacks of loose Desire.
Modern Honour ii. 56

1864 Hack..a procuress.
Webster’s American Dictionary of English Language

1938 He never makes any dough out of his hack and now he’s jammed.
R. Torrey in Black Mask December 82/2

1977 A notorious London hack, perhaps even a superannuated male prostitute.
E. Roditi, Tales Turkey 111

I wouldn’t have understood any of those cites from literary works.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    As far as I recall, I’ve come across this only as bon ton, which seems to be one of those Frenchoid expressions, like cul de sac, not actually used in French – if WP is to be believed.

  2. Keith Ivey says

    I haven’t watched “Bridgerton”, but I understand that “ton” is used in it.

  3. Right after “Bridger”!

  4. PlasticPaddy says

    Does the slang “hack” for a certain kind of writer or journalist come from the “whore” word or do both come from an earlier sense (e.g., “hireling”)?

  5. Both come from the ‘workhorse’ sense.

  6. J.W. Brewer says

    If a hack is (in this sense) a whore, what is a “hack whore”? “Whore whore”? Reduplication for emphasis? English has lots of synonyms for “whore” but I cannot immediately recall seeing them strung together like that. We also of course want to know who was the most preeminent hack whore of the half-century before that, at least in Byron’s opinion. He must have had one, don’t you think?

  7. “Ton” is used in this way throughout Georgette Heyer’s novels (she began publishing in 1925 and published throughout the mid-20th century).

  8. Both questions had occurred to me.

  9. Jen in Edinburgh says

    A hack is a journalist, but you can say ‘hack journalist’ just the same.

    Or it might be sense 6.a (‘1735 Hack, any Thing that is used in common, or upon all Occasions.) or 6.b. (‘A jaded or worn-out person, esp. someone who is past his or her prime.’)

  10. See also the adjective tony, which I have only ever encountered (thrice) in Ulysses:

    Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness. Saffron bun and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy. Eating with a stopwatch, thirtytwo chews to the minute. Still his muttonchop whiskers grew. Supposed to be well connected. Theodore’s cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family.
    [Lestrygonians]

    BLOOM (In an oatmeal sporting suit, a sprig of woodbine in the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd’s plaid Saint Andrew’s cross scarftie, white spats, fawn dustcoat on his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a grey billycock hat.) Do you remember a long long time, years and years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was weaned when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was it?
    [Circe]

    He understood, however, from all he heard, that Dr Mulligan was a versatile allround man, by no means confined to medicine only, who was rapidly coming to the fore in his line and, if the report was verified, bade fair to enjoy a flourishing practice in the not too distant future as a tony medical practitioner drawing a handsome fee for his services …
    [Eumaeus]

    Is it used in the US, as Wiktionary suggests it is?

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    I have encountered tony in this sense in crosswords. But that scarcely counts as real life.

  12. I have not only encountered it but used it.

  13. J.W. Brewer says

    One says “hack journalist” because of at least a polite pretense that not all journalists are hacks. Does the “whore” sense of “hack” only refer to some subset of whores, with others not being hacks (possibly via the sense 6.b referenced by JeninEd)? If so “hack whore” would not be redundant but would be adding specificity. But I don’t know whether whores-who-are-not-hacks-in-the-relevant-sense were an ontologically-possible thing, as the words were used in Byron’s time.

  14. David Eddyshaw says

    High-class hack? Hack de luxe?

  15. @Noetica: Tony is a lot more common in America than any of the related senses of the noun ton. That’s not to say tony is especially common (like Hat, I don’t use it myself), just that the nouns are pretty rare.

    @J.W. Brewer: The use of hack whore sounds fine to me. It seems to have been a fixed idiomatic expression, and I have come across it now and then in older works. I would probably have had a much harder time recognizing hack on its own as meaning “prostitute” (whether meant literally or metaphorically).

    @Jen in Edinburgh: I’m not sure how parallel hack journalist is. In particular, I would say that in today’s usage, one may be a journalist without being a hack. It’s a decisive qualification of what kind of journalist someone is. However, whore is already derisive on its own. As I said above, I think hack whore was just a fixed idiomatic compound, which might be older than using bare hack for “whore.”

  16. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Whore doesn’t necessarily mean prostitute in the sense of being paid by different men, either – I think it would probably cover both a longterm ‘kept’ relationship and sleeping around for free.

    Are ton and tone the same thing?

  17. like Hat, I don’t use it myself

    I may have expressed myself with unnecessary prolixity, but I meant to say that I do in fact use it (very occasionally).

  18. @Noetica: I have always understood American cartoonist Tony Millionaire to have picked his moniker with that sense in mind. He’s from Massachusetts.

  19. @languagehat: Ah, I misread I saw your comment pnly after I had written and posted mine, and then I rushed to make some edits. (One instance of “derisive” in my comment also got auto-incorrected as I was hurrying.)

  20. Professional dictionaries agree with Wiktionary that “tony” is mainly American and derives from “tone” rather than “ton”. (If it were British, the variant spelling “toney” might be less rare.)

    A positive adjective seems implicit in each of “[bon] ton” // “[high] tone” > tony // “[high] class” > classy

    Right after “Bridger”!

    Perhaps relatedly, Caroline’s father-in-law was named Peniston.

  21. David Eddyshaw says

    Peniston

    Nothing is more disappointing than an atonic penis. (So I am told.)

    To me, “high tone” has quite different associations, but I suppose that just shows that my own tone is low.

  22. David Eddyshaw says

    Now I think of it, “hack de luxe” would be just right as a term for certain regular contributors to the Daily Mail.

  23. tony is a favorite of American journalists to describe places they can’t afford to live, such as in “tony suburb,” or the likes of

    The Palisades Fire is headed toward the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood — a tony enclave crammed with multimillion-dollar mansions belonging to everyone from Veep Kamala Harris to LeBron James.

  24. Bon ton (unlike cul de sac) was also borrowed into Russian, meaning it was at some point in French, whatever the situation is now.

  25. I feel like “ton” is used *constantly* in “Bridgerton”, but I just pulled up a script for the pilot and a search resulted in no hits, so maybe it stood out more in my memory – as often happens when there’s one ‘istoric word they decide to sprinkle throughout a script that otherwise is mostly still-current usages. Or maybe they’ve ramped up its use in recent episodes.

  26. For (earlier) 20th century use of _ton_ in this sense, Georgette Heyer would be an obvious writer to quote, as she uses it extensively.

  27. Kate Bunting says

    Yes, I immediately thought of Georgette Heyer (early 20th century, but consciously using vocabulary from the early 19th).

  28. It’s odd that Heyer isn’t cited rather than Hebe Elsna, because “ton” is strewn through most of her Regencies and, from there, seeded the entire genre.

  29. David Marjanović says

    bon ton

    Das gehört zum guten Ton

  30. David Eddyshaw says

    O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!

    (Sadly topical.)

  31. See also the adjective tony, which I have only ever encountered (thrice) in Ulysses

    Joyce first wrote down the phrase in Lestrygonians in Ulysses notebook UN4; it’s interesting that the editors felt the need to explain the meaning of tony: one tony relative in every family,

  32. David Eddyshaw says

    None in mine. We’re all utterly atonal.

  33. my immediate parsing of “hack” in “hack whore” fits well with what JiE wrote: either “specifically commercial, with an implication of low quality” attached to the expanded sense of “whore” as “promiscuous person”, or “worn-out, past its prime” attached to the more precise sense of “sex worker”. i think both of those are part of the sense of “hack” in “hack journalist” – the latter reinforcing the former’s collapse of “work done for wages” and “shoddy work”.

  34. @anhweol @Kate Bunting @E Bird and Heyer did a lot of research, so this would be a good thread to pull.

  35. These Hacks are writers but not journalists.

    I don’t know the show at all, but I don’t think the Brit sense of ‘hacks’ would extend to them(?)

  36. It’s a good show — I watched several episodes and enjoyed it, but stopped because I didn’t want to get hooked and have another ongoing time sink.

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