James Hardy Vaux's 1819 dictionary of criminal slang

The full title of this work is James Hardy Vaux's 1819 dictionary of criminal slang and other impolite terms as used by the Convicts of the British Colonies of Australia with additional true stories, remarkable facts & illustrations by Simon Barnard. It is two hundred years since the first publication of Vaux's work and with twelve convicts in the family prior to 1808 this was an obvious work to borrow from the library.

The alphabetical listing of terms provides a short explanation of the term.
For example: Kelp: a hat; to kelp a person, is to remove your hat to him.

A more detailed explanation to the use of the term with examples of use and how it came to be is usally then provided by Simon Barnard.
For example: Kelp is a pun on cap. According to an eighteenth-century treatise on thieving, 'pinchers' bumped into their victims and picked their 'cly' when they raised their hands to secure their 'kelp'. etc (p129)

A cly is a pocket.

Pinch: To purloin small articles of value in the shops of jewellers, etc; while pretending to purchase or bespeak some trinket. This game is called the pinch - I pinch'd him for a fawney, signifies I purloined a ring from him; Did you pinch any thing from that crib? Did you succeed in secreting any thing in that shop? This game is a branch of shoplifting; but when the hoist is spoken of, it commonly applies to stealing articles of a larger, though less valuable, kind, as pieces of muslin, or silk handkerchiefs, printed cotton, etc. See: Hoist (p185)

Pinch-Gloak: A man who works on the pinch

Many hours could be spent following these terms.

'Is that bum trap missing a flesh-bag?' article in The Guardian 20 August 2019