Do you know what the Victorian slang term "Chevaliers d'Industrie" means?I didn't, when I came across the following anecdote from the New York Times in 1854 (which we'll get to in a minute). But Andrew Steinmetz, writing in 1870 in The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims, tells us that the term was used to refer to a certain elegant brand of con men:
Chevaliers d'industrie, or polite and accomplished sharpers, have always existed in every city, from the earliest times to the present. The ordinary progress of these interesting gentlemen is as follows....To secure credit they ally themselves with men of respectability, or those who pass for such. When they have no titles, they fabricate them; and few persons dispute their claims.
And sometimes things were made very easy for the con men. Take this sad story from August 1854, which shows that even 150 years ago, people needed to be careful about informing everyone of their personal whereabouts:
A New York physician went to Europe with his family...and being possessed of a weakness termed vanity had his departure heralded in the city papers and placarded his door with "Gone To Europe." This was a fine chance for the Chevaliers d'Industrie. They broke into the house and spent a week there, eating and drinking what they could find, and stole all that they could carry away. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 29, 1854, p. 2]
It is a good thing that this New York physician did not live in the age of Facebook, isn't it?
Cartoon from NYPL Digital Gallery.
3 comments:
What a lovely, polite term for men who certainly aren't!
Oz was graced with a few such con artists Count von Attems and Francisco Miranda being just 2 of the more colourful of them.
Announcing impending trips abroad in newspapers was popular with both old money, the nouveau riche and by those who wanted to scale the social ladder in the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. You could find numerous such announcements in the Brooklyn Eagle, and other papers, of the period. Criminals, like Francesca Mandlebaum (New York's most famous fencer of stolen goods in the 1860s-82) and her army of burglars, second story men and sneak thieves, would use that information to plan heists.
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