That appears to be the case in this instance Nerd.

There was an visible explosion in the pre-Victorian ear of "naughty" slang. Though how much of that was due to the willingness of publishers to include such words in their books ~vs~ actual new coining of words is unclear. A modern example would be the use of the word fuck, which is quite old, yet wasn't put into print on a regular basis until the 1960s.

But it is true that a fair amount of the words that Americans and Canadians use, that are not common in the U.K. still have their origins in the mother country.