ABSTRACT
Tabblewick, Mrs (SYC) An acquaintance of the plausible couple, who modify their praises of her beauty when a ‘lovely friend’ is present. (‘The Plausible Couple’)
Tabby (CS) A ‘grinning and goodnatured soul’, who was the ‘serving drudge’ at Miss Griffin’s school, ‘and had no more figure than one of the beds, and upon whose face there was always more or less black-lead’. She had to assume the part of Mesrour in the ‘Seraglio’. (‘The Haunted House’)
Tacker (MC) Mr Mould the undertaker’s chief mourner. He was obese, and had a bottle nose and a face covered with pimples. ‘He had been a tender plant once upon a time, but from constant blowing in the fat atmosphere of funerals, had run to seed.’ (19, 25, 38)
Tackleton (CB) The sole owner of the firm of Gruff and Tackleton, Toymerchants. Inappropriately for his line of business, he was a ‘domestic Ogre’. He had a ‘dry face, and a screw in his body . . . and his whole sarcastic illconditioned self [peered] out of one little corner of one eye, like the concentrated essence of any number of ravens’. He is engaged to be married to May Fielding, but when her sweetheart, Edward Plummer, reappears she marries him instead. At the wedding celebrations, Tackleton makes an appearance, saying that he is a reformed and sweetened character. (The Cricket on the Hearth)
Tadger, Brother (PP) A ‘little emphatic
man, with a bald head, and drab shorts’, who is a member of the Brick Lane Ebenezer Temperance Association. Mr Stiggins, who is drunk himself, accuses Tadger of being drunk, hits him on the nose, and so knocks him down head first from the ladder on which he has been standing. (33)
Tamaroo (MC) An old woman who succeeded Bailey as a servant at Todgers’s. Her nickname was given her by the ‘jocular boarders’ from a word in a popular ballad (‘Ben was a hackney coachman rare’). She ‘was chiefly remarkable for a total absence of all comprehension upon every subject whatever’. (32, 54)
Tangle, Mr (BH) A barrister, who ‘knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it – supposed never to have read anything else since he left school.’ (1)
Tape (RP) Prince Bull’s ‘tyrannical old godmother’, who was ‘bright red all over.’ She therefore symbolises the bureaucracy (or, the red tape) that hampered England’s efforts in the Crimean War (1854-56). (‘Prince Bull. A Fairy Tale’)
Tapkins, Felix (ISHW) The bachelor who flirted with Mrs Lovetown.
