What is a Thimblerigger?

Okay, so by now you have probably googled what a thimblerigger is. But what if you had never heard of the term before? It’s not a modern term so I certainly had not seen it mentioned in any of the historical fiction I had read. Until I read The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, that is. I have also recently read Hard Times by Charles Dickens and Far From the Madding Crowd also by Thomas Hardy.

A village fair in 1850’s England

I have read these books to try to immerse myself in the world of 19th Century England. My new work in progress starts in England and this is not something I have written about before. My other novels, Conflict at Hanging Rock and Breaking Free are set solely in Australia. So in order to get a feel of what life in 19th century would have been like, I really needed to do a lot of research.

But reading these books has had the added advantage of alerting me to things I would not necessarily have found just with my usual research. It is one of those unknown unknowns. If you haven’t heard of terms like thimblerigger, furmity, hiring fairs, how do you research them?

Knowing about thimbleriggers has added a delightful little scene to my new manuscript where the young Mary Ann and her brothers are at the village fair.

Oh, and for those of you who haven’t bothered to look up what a Thimblerigger is, it is a person who ran a stall at a village fair where he asks people to gamble which cup the pea is under and then tricks the gambler by switching the pea to another cup. In more recent times the term has come to mean a swindler more generally.