Lag Fever, Flash Men and Late Fashionable Worlds

Abstract

This chapter engages the rich social, linguistic, and aesthetic repertoire of the flash (originally a cant language of thieves and convicts), using the convict phenomenon of 'lag fever' to complicate the idea of colonial belatedness in Australia. It argues that the flash language of thieves, gypsies, and convicts can be understood as an early kind of 'world language' that connected underclasses with upper classes within and across metropolitan Regency London and the southern climes and convict spaces of colonial Australia (Botany Bay, Newcastle, and Van Diemen's Land). Connecting genealogies of masculine style and self-fashioning, and print-visual form, with the social arenas of fashionabili..