The strange rise of ‘watch on’

‘Here’s a piece of filth for you,’ said my husband encouragingly. He was ‘helping’ me, as a cat might help wind wool. He’d come across a letter to the Guardian from 2015, in which Pedr James, who had directed a television dramatisation of Martin Chuzzlewit, drew attention to the name in the book for the proprietor of a ‘boarding house for young gentlemen’, Mrs Todgers. ‘Given her occupation, Todgers suggests to me that Dickens was well aware of the slang meaning which remains with us even today.’ This, the director suggested, exemplified double-entendres in the novel.

    That reading seems to me misconceived. Dickens did not need concealed sexual references to add humour to his narratives. He liked ridiculous names, and thought they supported the comic aspects of his work. He was fond of the –dg sound, as in judge. In Martin Chuzzlewit, he has Mrs Gamp chewing at the sound, referring to life as ‘this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale’. Among Dickens characters exhibiting the sound are Badger, Swidger, Gummidge, Grewgious and, if it comes to that, Scrooge. Perhaps, though, Dickens really meant the Artful Todger. What of Mr Dick in David Copperfield? That way madness lies.

But it is pointless appealing to Dickens’s habits if the word todger was not found in his day. In his Dictionary of Slang, the all-knowing Jonathon Green takes tadger as the word in northern dialect from which it derives, and finds no earlier example than 1966. We’d only been Todger-watching because I was chasing up a strange neologism, the phrase watch on in the sense of ‘look on’. To me watch has the sense ‘look on’ and requires no extra on. In its article on the related watch into, the OED quotes Martin Chuzzlewit, which is where we came in, and makes a peculiar error: ‘Didn’t I watch him into Codger’s commercial boarding-house?’ Here, ‘Codger’s’ should be ‘Todgers’s’.