sb. A garment for the upper part of the body, made of strong material and admitting of being tightly laced, used for the restraint of violent lunatics or prisoners, and sometimes as a means of punishment.
There are various forms of this appliance; in some there are long sleeves with no opening, which can be tied together at the back; in others the arms are covered by the body of the garment.
1753. Richardson, Grandison (1754), III. xxi. 271. She threatened her then with the Strait Waistcoat, a punishment at which the unhappy Lady was always greatly terrified.
1773. Crisp, Lett., in Mme. D’Arblay’s Early Diary (1889), I. 261. I shall have a strait waistcoat immediately put on him, debar him the use of pen, ink, and paper [etc.].
1837. Carlyle, Fr. Rev., III. III. viii. Within year and day we hear of her in madhouse and strait-waistcoat.
1881. Besant & Rice, Chapl. Fleet, II. xviii. They had put the strait-waistcoat over him, which pinned his arms to his sides.
fig. 1824. Lady Granville, Lett., 23 June (1894), I. 304. I put a strait-waistcoat upon my thoughts as the only way of keeping them within bounds.
1851. Ruskin, Stones Venice, I. i. 22. The English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines.
b. attrib.
1837. Carlyle, Fr. Rev., II. I. ii. Neither indeed is there madness, of the strait-waistcoat sort.
1891. C. T. C. James, Rom. Rigmarole, 159. Assuming as jaunty … a step as the strait-waistcoat tightness of my riding costume permitted.
Hence Strait-waistcoat v. trans., to confine in a strait waistcoat; Strait-waistcoating vbl. sb.
1837. Dickens, Pickw., xxxix. Ve thought ve should ha’ been obliged to strait-veskit him last night.
1842. Blackw. Mag., LI. 160/1. An easily moveable covering, shifting at will, and not fastened down, or tucked in under a mattrass, hard as a deal plank, by the atrocious strait-waistcoating of a stiff winding-sheet, completes your comforts.
1859. W. Anderson, Disc., Ser. II. (1860), 89. The maniac-like strait-waistcoating of worldliness.
1859. Sala, Tw. round Clock (1861), 213. Till their own troublesome bodies … are securely shackled and strait-waistcoated up, and carted away in police-vans to deep-holded ships.
1874. T. Hardy, Far fr. Madding Crowd, II. xi. 119. Such strait-waistcoating as you treat me to is not becoming in you at so early a date.
