The Boarding School

This thread links to the following threads:
“Lyrics for Miss Tickle Toby”
“Lyrics for Miss Tickle Tovey”
“Lyrics for Mrs Tickletarvey”

There are two items in the Madden Collection, entitled "(The) Boarding School":

VWML microfilm 81, item no. 705

and

VWML microfilm 88, item no. 90

Images are available at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House, London. There are no details of the printers and/or publishers and no dates of publication.

However, Microfilm 81 is a volume of London printers from 1800 to c.1855. (Madden died in 1873 so presumably it must be before then.). The item was probably not produced by H. P. Such since his publications usually carry an imprint; but it was someone who sold street literature of a similar type. Other broadsides in the same volume of Madden came from the likes of Paul and Disley, who were mainstream London broadside printers of the middle decades of the 19th century.

Milcrofilm 88 is a volume of country (i.e. not London) printers of similar date. Most of the other broadsides in that volume are by Birmingham printers, and Roy Palmer ascribes this item to William Pratt (1840s-61) though he does not say why:

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/birming2.htm

Transcriptions are given below. Publication may be linked to a piece from the music hall or similar popular entertainment. Both items are pretty smutty, but probably not unduly so by the standards of the Victorian music hall, especially in the middle decades of the C19 when it was a more distinctly working-class entertainment. The content is in a similar realm to saucy British seaside postcards and jokes about monks and nuns; but it is quite explicit for a broadside, and more explicit, for example, than most of the C17 street literature about cuckolds.

Note that, according to this street literature, the school ma’ams correct name is “Tickle Toby,” not “Tickle Tovey” or “Tickletarvey,” and it is a reference to the cane and ruler which, the texts tell us, the school ma’am employed as disciplinary implements. See

http://word-detective.com/2010/09/toby

where there is the following explanation:

As slang, “toby” has had several uses in English. The oldest, dating back to the 17th century, was as a popular term for the buttocks, most often found in the phrase “to tickle one’s toby,” meaning to spank or beat that part of the anatomy (“Our gracious Queen Elizabeth tickled their Tobies for them,” 1681). [Acknowledgement: I am indebted to my good friend Chris Bearman, now sadly deceased, for this insight. Lewis Jones.]


Transcriptions below.