Apprehending Darkness in the Shadows

**George W. Matsell. Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon. New York: George W. Matsell & Co., 1859.**

As a former police magistrate working in the Tombs who would become the leader of New York City’s first municipal police force in 1845, Chief of the city’s Metropolitan Police in 1857, and publisher of the National Police Gazette, George W. Matsell was well-suited to write a book of criminal slang. Considered the first work of American lexicography, Vocabulum records the language of the underworld. So common had the slang become that Matsell believed the work would be useful for anyone, including both “the footpads that infest the land” and also “the élite of Fifth Avenue” who use the language “to express thoughts, that could not, otherwise, find a fitting representative.”