Molly Canons: The Role of Slang and Text in the Formation of Queer Eighteenth-Century Culture

This discussion will focus on the role of slang and canting languages in the development of queer subcultures during the long eighteenth century. In particular, it will address the subcultural vocabulary of London mollies, a queer lexicon which emerged from the criminal slang known as thieves’ cant. While previous criticism has offered brief discussions of how the mollies borrowed from criminal slang, I want to examine the complexity of their oral tradition, which points to a number of overlapping communities, both criminal and working-class. In reviewing work done by Rictor Norton, Sally O’Driscoll, and Stephen Shapiro, this article will expand upon a conversation that has mostly treated linguistic factors as secondary to the development of molly culture, rather than as a force which defined their lines of affiliation and performative practices. It will also trace productive uses of molly slang within texts which may have been designed for a molly reading public, analyzing how particular terms gained strength at the intersection between private speech and public print. This was more than an ad hoc language; rather, it was an alphabet of survival, allowing them to cohere as a community while creating a linguistic afterlife which would preserve their language and values. A canon of critical work already exists on the mollies as an urban phenomenon in eighteenth-century London, but existing discussions tend to treat the insider language of the mollies as a blunt tool for avoiding detection. Alternatively, “mollying cant” is read by some critics as a wholesale fabrication, created by hostile writers to amplify the effeminacy of the mollies, or a purpose-built argot designed to “baffle” authorities. Paul Baker is the only writer to explicitly discuss the relationship between mollying cant and the later dialect of Polari, which was enthusiastically taken up by a specific community of British gay men between 1940 and 1970. Baker’s linguistic study, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men, offers a compelling but too brief discussion of this linguistic legacy. Most treatments of molly culture dwell upon the performative aspects of their community, and relatively recent work by Sally O’Driscoll and Tanya Cassidy has analyzed the mollies in relation to class politics, but there are few discussions of the molly language as an overlapping cultural development. This discussion attempts to fill in these gaps by analyzing the emergence of a linguistic community that fused prison slang, actors’ “parlyaree,” and global dialects which represented London’s changing social landscape. I argue that the mollies were at the center of this dialectical flourishing, and rather than simply repurposing cant terms, they braided sympathetic cultures together with hostile epithets in order to create a new queer language. In order to track the language of the mollies, we must examine their development as a culture, which is itself contested. There are a number of interrelated dates which saw molly house raids and organized persecution, but there is no agreed-upon point of emergence. The historian Alan Bray discusses a community of class-disparate men who held secret gatherings, and whose activities were discovered by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners during the first decade of the eighteenth century. In fact, persecution of mollies began as early as 1698, when the Societies launched their first sting operation to arrest Captain Edward Rigby. His trial inspired ballads and broadsides, along with the re-printing of past sodomy trials. The mollies emerged, in part, from this galaxy of textual insult. Randolph Trumbach notes that “there are descriptions of molly houses in 1709, 1714, and 1729,” dates which correspond roughly to pogroms and sting-operations carried out by the SRF. Several pamphlets about the mollies …