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’. The previous edition in 1989 made it 146 prisoners with 23 surviving, but there must have been a recount.

It wasn’t just Calcutta. In Thackeray’s day, until Queen’s Regulations changed it to Prisoners’ Room in 1868, black hole was an official name for an army lock-up.

Black holes in government accounts did not have to wait for Stephen Hawking. Areas without stars were called black holes, one in the Milky Way being given in the 1840s the undignified name of the Coal Sack.

Holes in spending plans need not suck in infinite sums, any more than government debt must endlessly expand. And even Model T Fords were made in different colours before 1914. But for a government in the red, any hole, it seems, must be black.