Regency Reader Questions: Eel-Backed

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Just re-read Heyer’s _Cotillion_ and twice it uses the idiom “eel-backed”–can’t find that anywhere, does anyone have a notion what is meant?

Thanks for the question, Meadow, and for being a Regency Reader!

Contemporary sources show the term was meant to describe a horse with a black ridge from shoulder to rump.

EEL in ichthyology See MURÆNA EEL BACKED adj Applied to fuch horfes as have black lifts along their backs Encyclopaedia Londinensis (1810)

An encyclopædia of agriculture (1825)

horse kind on the continent of Europe south of the Baltic In confirmation of this there is one peculiar variety of the horse in the Highlands that deserves to be noticed it is there called the eel backed horse He is of different colors light bay dun and sometimes cream colored but has always a blackish list that runs along the ridge of the back from the shoulder to the rump which has a resemblance to an eel stretched out This very singular character subsists also in many of the horses of Norway and is no where else known Walker's Hebrides vol ii p 158 The Highland horse is sometimes only nine and seldom twelve hands high excepting in some of the southern of the Hebrides where the size has been raised to thirteen or fourteen hands by selection and better feeding The best of this breed are handsomely shaped have small legs large manes little neat heads and are extremely active and hardy The common colors are grey bay and black the last is the favorite one General Report of Scotland vol iii p 176 An encyclopædia of agriculture (1825)

However, in the case of Heyer’s Cotillion, she is describing a real life figure of Sir Henry Halford who was in fact often chided as the “eel-backed baronet”:

time He was vulgarly known as the eel backed baronet because of the means he employed to ingratiate himself in royal favor His real name was Vaughan he had Annals of Medical History (1921)

He was considered by his contemporaries as conceited and stubborn to a fault (‘Tact and nothing else’ | RCP Museum (rcplondon.ac.uk)) thus earning him the epithet.

qualifications which are so necessary the correction of professional abuses quote literally only changing the tences from the first to the third person and the exercise of whose legitimate fluence both in the College and the 66 might doubtless achieve much removing the opprobrium that at rests with injurious weight upon learned body over which he so ably presides Who can read this with countenance unmov ed by laughter The eel backed Baronet has been gliding and serpentining in mud of medical corruption for a quarter a century is appealed to in the last year that quarter as a corrector of abuses The Lancet (1837)

Sir Henry a keen eyed self sufficient thin lipped man who had secured wealth and honour through a judicious marriage and whose obsequious manner and cringing bows to all representing power or likely to give reward had earned for him the name of the eel backed baronet had ridden in haste and without authority that he might be first to salute the Duke as King and henceforth be associated in his Sovereign's memory with an important event The Sailor King (1903)

Jennifer Kloester covers this briefly in her Georgette Heyer’s Regency World.

This seemed a particular nickname for the physician, which Heyer uses showcasing her depth and breadth of knowledge of the Regency era.  I wouldn’t expect to see it referenced more generally, aside from horses, but it does seem a fantastic insult to describe a slippery person with a black or slipper spine, which I believe is the image Halford’s critics were trying to conjure.

Thanks for the interesting journey into insult and I hope you found this helpful!

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2 Responses to Regency Reader Questions: Eel-Backed

  1. Meadow says:
    June 23, 2023 at 5:45 pm

    What an excellent, thorough answer–LOVE the pics from old sources!