I’ve heard two people in the past week make a jocular remark about things just growing ‘Like Topsy’. They were both life peers as it happens, Lady Altmann and Lord Norton of Louth. Is one still allowed to make this proverbial reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
In a way the simile is the same as saying something is like the curate’s egg meaning ‘good in parts’, even though the curate’s egg was nothing but bad. The orphan Topsy said she expects she just grow’d, though naturally she did once have a mother.
Asked where she was born, Topsy insists: ‘Never was born!’ This reminds me of The Caretaker, where Aston asks the drifter Davies: ‘Where were you born then?’ To which he replies (darkly): ‘What do you mean?’ Harriet Beecher Stowe had never had the benefit of reading Pinter, though it is very likely that Pinter read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
‘Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?’
The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual.
‘Do you know who made you?’
‘Nobody, as I knows on,’ said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added:
‘I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.’
Dickens read Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it came out in May 1852 and I think he was influenced by that exchange when in the June 1852 instalment of Bleak House he puts down Jo the crossing-sweeper’s replies to the coroner: ‘No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? Knows a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both.
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