A Victorian Two-Penny Hangover | Hacker News Reader

A Victorian Two-Penny Hangover

historic-uk.com

30 pointsvinnyglennon20 comments

I saw this when it was doing the rounds as a meme a while back and wasn't convinced then - it seems very improbable that people could sleep like that. AFP claims that this is false [0] and interestingly they link to a copy of the original photo [1] which is captioned as actors for the film the great train robbery (although it confusingly talks about it being a re-enactment).

The only sources given for this in the original article are two from literature - and if you read them they're not actually describing what the article claims.

Wikipedia of course mentions it, but the source is this very article. This was added on the 2nd November 2020.

[0] https://factcheck.afp.com/false-claim-circulates-online-hang...

[1] https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/dublin-irela...

The article also claims Pickwick Papers was published in 1936 and refers to the "Great Exposition", which I'm pretty sure is the "Great Exhibition"

I dunno, have you ever read a Dickin's novel? "Great Exposition" sounds about right to me.

I like the big X on the debunked picture on AFP. Often just repeating the lie if only debunk, makes the lie stick even more. Hope the big X takes care of that.

I found it suspicious when I read the part about cutting the rope. Hard to imagine that being cost effective in such poverty.

Dickens' version has them just "letting go" of the rope at one end, which is much more believable. In real life, rich or poor, people don't cut good rope.

splicing is fun and all, but it's a real time-sink.

I don't think they're saying that the practice of sleeping on ropes wasn't a thing, but that it has no connection to the etymology of the word "hangover". In fact, the original article even says as much:

> The term hangover is unlikely to have come specifically from this practice, it more likely refers to the lasting after effects of alcohol felt the next day. However the two-penny hangovers remained a grim reality of Victorian England regardless of the tenuous link to the etymology of alcohol. Particularly as ‘two-penny hangovers’ have also been mentioned in Paris, and the French for ‘hangover’ is ‘gueule de bois’ which is literally ‘mouth of wood’ so nothing to do with ‘hanging over’ at all. But a fairly accurate description of how your mouth feels after a night drinking gin!

I did some more research into this yesterday, and still am not convinced that people sleeping over a rope was a thing.

There are a large number of sites repeating the exact same story / wording - complete with the rope cutting and often with the photo from a film I mentioned in my previous post. This has the feeling of an urban legend about it.

There is one other photo that pops up [0] is variously captioned as being in the US or in Germany in the 1930s. At most this picture shows people sitting down, leaning against a rope - not hanging over it. This is akin to what George Orwell described (someone describing to him) - not people hanging over a rope.

The other quote occasionally given in reference to it is from Dickens, which if you read it describes a hammock type system.

I cannot find any other sources, but there is a lot of noise (including wikipedia edits) from last year when it was doing the rounds. I found this forum discussing it in 2008 [1] where one person claimed to try sleeping over a rope and found it impossible to do so.

[0] https://forum.casebook.org/filedata/fetch?id=656729&d=123915...

[1] https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/scene-of...

I’m pretty sure this is a false etymology. Folk etymologies always have a story that is almost too just-so.

A claim that the word “hangover” is derived from the historic practice frequented by British sailors during the reign of Queen Victoria, who bought “access to bend over a rope” after a heavy night of drinking was recently shared hundreds of times on Facebook.

However, this claim is false; an expert called the claim “nonsense” and said the term is a derivative of an earlier word meaning “after-effect”.

https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/is-the-term-hangover-derive...

https://www.etymonline.com/word/hangover

The article's author even admits this probably isn't the etymology (but only near the end):

"The term hangover is unlikely to have come specifically from this practice, it more likely refers to the lasting after effects of alcohol felt the next day."

self-aware wanking; the least satisfying kind!

I often wonder if the ‘gin hysteria’ of the Victorian times was hyperbolic. I can’t imagine that everyone who partook in drinking gin was unable to self regulate their intake. What seems to be a common thread with humanity is that those without hope or prospect seem to want to self medicate heavily. Sounds like those marginalized by the industrial revolution found their medicine in gin...

That sounds like an argument for widespread abuse...which would make the hysteria reasonable.

Even today, liquor stores find 90% of their business is from 10% of their customers. A significant part of modern (American anyway) people spend 80X as much on alcohol as the general population. That's a problem.

Hysteria is an overreaction by definition. Not sure how that could ever be considered reasonable. Abuse needs to be addressed, including root causes where possible. Alcohol is definitely a public health problem, as are other drugs. Getting hysterical is not a great way to address it.

Ok resorting to dictionary definitions isn't helping. The title is hyperbolic, that's where we started from - "gin hysteria". Its a stand-in for 'great societal concern' or for 'widespread abuse', isn't it?

Was it warranted, that's the question I was following. And I think it was (and perhaps still is to a lesser degree). Since Britain was a situation of 'most people drunk most of the time', and here in America its '1 in 10 are overindulging', surely its less severe.

Agreed. I think what Im getting at is that (in my mind at least and I certainly could be wrong here) I just dont think it was some huge majority of people drinking gin to the point of being drunk all of the time. I recently was "lucky" enough to be in between contracts for longer than I want to be. I had nothing to do and no prospects. I could have gotten sloshed and wasted all day every day. But I didnt. Why? Because 1) I hate to feel hungover and 2) I dont really like being drunk except on very very rare(and as I age getting rarer) occasions. I just dont think people are wired to all be alcoholics on a mass scale. Its certainly a problem with too many people but not as much as described in gin hysteria. However Im a sample size of 1, and I wasnt there.

Probably about as accurate and un-biased as Reefer Madness.

"I feel hanging" is also another colloquialism related to this. Means as you'd expect, not good.

Come to the backend with python, it's cosy and the update cycle is at a human speed.

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