In Jé Wilson’s NYRB review (March 7, 2024; archived) of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner, there is a description of Comyns’ childhood that begins “She grew up as Barbara Bayley in Warwickshire, in a manor bordering the River Avon, a few miles from Stratford. The fourth of six children, five of whom were girls, she spent much of her time running wild outside with her siblings.” Later it says “In keeping with the general neglect, the Bayley girls were left to tumble up when it came to education.” I was unfamiliar with the phrase “tumble up,” and my wife said she was too, so I did some investigating. The OED (entry from 1915) has (s.v. tumble):
II.7.b. to tumble up: to make haste, originally (Nautical) from below deck. slang.
1826 The command was repeated by the boatswain and his mates, who were piping and roaring down the hatchways—‘Tumble up, tumble up from below.’
W. N. Glascock, Naval Sketch-book 1st Series vol. I. 81832 Tumble up smartly, my lads.
F. Marryat, Newton Forster vol. II. iv. 48
[…]
And Green’s has it in two senses:
1. to rush, to hurry.
[…]
2. to rise from bed.
But these senses don’t appear to correspond to the use in the context of the quoted sentence, where it seems to mean something like ‘make do as best they could.’ Is anyone familiar with this sense? Is it too recent to be in the dictionaries? (Incidentally, Comyns is pronounced as if spelled Cummins; it’s historically the same Irish name as Cummings.)
A less than decorous ascent? Cf. fail up?
Could be!
Florence Hill Winterburn, The Mother in Education 216 (1914) references a “young woman whom unfortunate family circumstances had caused to ‘tumble up’ rather than be rightly and regularly educated,” but who nonetheless passed her college entrance examinations by dint of careful study. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t9z03wb5r&seq=248&q1=tumble
Frances Trollope, The Wild Wheel (1892): A character had been “early left an orphan to tumble up as he could without any education at all,” but now was “the head of an improving business” and debt-free.
A squib in the Journal of Education, in 1906, describes a family in which the mother “manages in some mysterious manner to turn out the children in spick and span attire on special occasions, but otherwise lets them ‘tumble up’ as they can.”
From the Western Teacher in 1898 and again in the American Journal of Education, in 1908: “Children will tumble up somehow or other even under the rule of an educationist; and after all, the real training of every human being comes largely from experience and from contact with his kind.”
I must have encountered the nautical sense of tumble up, describing things like the crew manning their battle stations when a warship goes to general quarters. I don’t think I understood it to be a fixed expression though. Nor do I have any familiarity with the sense that is apparently related to haphazard education.