George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris & London, 1933

  “…. twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word 'bloody'. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says 'bloody', unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is fuck. No doubt in time fuck, like bloody, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational. The indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret--usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example fuck. ...."

Jane Birkin's English Bull

Eric Elmosnino is awkwardly
elegant and louche as Serge Gainsbourg
in the appropriately titled Gainsbourg (2010)  There is more than a suggestion of Rowan Atkinson’s Bean as he shyly or slyly sips a cocktail. Like Gainsbourg, I fell in love with Jane Birkin’s Engish bull.

Une servante, sans vous dire un mot, vous précède

Des escaliers, des couloirs sans fin se succèdent

Décorés de bronzes baroques, d'anges dorés,

D'Aphrodites et de Salomés.

Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Speckled Band, The Hideous & Distorted Child (1892)

“…. A moment later we were out on the dark road, a chill wind blowing in our faces, and one yellow light twinkling in front of us through the gloom to guide us on our sombre errand.

     There was little difficulty in entering the grounds, for unrepaired breaches gaped in the old park wall.  Making our way among the trees, we reached the lawn, crossed it, and were about to enter through the window when out from a clump of laurel bushes there darted what seemed to be a hideous and distorted child, who threw itself upon the grass with writhing limbs and then ran swiftly across the lawn into the darkness.

     "My God!" I whispered; "did you see it?"

     Holmes was for the moment as startled as I.  His hand closed like a vise

upon my wrist in his agitation. ….”

Charles Dickens, American Notes, Buried Alive (1842)

[Charles Dickens, American Notes, Philadelphia, Eastern Penitentiary, Buried Alive (1842)]

“[119] …. Standing at the central point, and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occassionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemakers’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and fade of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired.

 He never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair. His name, and crime, and term of suffering, are unknown, even to the officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his cell door, and in a book of which the [119] [120] governor of the prison has one copy, and the moral instructor another; this is the index of his history. Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated …. [120] 

 [120] …. Every cell has double doors: the outer one of sturdy oak, the outer of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed …. [120] The first man I saw, was seated at his loom, at work. He had been there six years, and was to remain, I think, three more. He had been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods, but even after his long imprisonment, denied his guilt, and said he had been hardly dealt by. It was his second offence. He stopped his work when we went in, took off his spectacles, and answered freely to everything that was said to him, but always with a strange kind of pause first, and in a low, thoughtful voice. He wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it noticed and commended.

He had very ingeniously manufactured a sort of Dutch clock from some disregarded odd and ends; and his vinegar-bottle served for the pendulum. Seeing me interested in this [121] contrivance, he looked up at it with a great deal of pride, and said that he had been thinking of improving it, and that he hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside it “would play music before long.”

He had extracted some colours from the yarn with which he worked, and painted a few poor figures on the wall. One, of a female, over the door, he called “The Lady of the Lake.” [121]