Rachel Reeves, Becky Sharp and the ‘black hole’

Becky Sharp, you’ll remember, near the beginning of Vanity Fair, throws the school gift of a Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window of the coach. She responds to Amelia Sedley’s horror by saying with a laugh: ‘Do you think Miss Pinkerton will come out and order me back to the black-hole?’

This is not the £22 billion black hole that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, teases us with. I’m surprised she has persevered with it, especially as it employed black pejoratively. As I mentioned last year, UK Finance, a banking trade body, declared that black market should be replaced with illegal market lest it suggest racial bias.

Black hole, in Becky Sharp’s sense, has more obvious racial connections. It refers to the Black Hole of Calcutta, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘The punishment cell at the barracks in Fort William, Calcutta (now Kolkata), in which, on 19 June 1756, after the fall of the fort, 64 British and Anglo-Indian soldiers and civilians were confined overnight in crowded conditions, only 21 surviving until the morning’.