Shovel

subs. (common).—A hat, broad-brimmed, turned up at the sides, and scooped in front, as worn by deans and bishops of the Established Church: also SHOVEL-HAT. Whence SHOVEL-HATTED.

  1833–4.  CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus, iii. 6. Whereas the English Jonson only bowed to every clergyman, or man with a SHOVEL-HAT, I would bow to any man with any sort of hat, or with no hat whatever.

  1845.  THACKERAY, From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, ii. The mitred bishops, the big-wigged marshals, the SHOVEL-HATTED abbés which they have borne. Ibid. (1855), The Newcomes, xxvi. She was a good woman of business, and managed the hat-shop for nine years…. My uncle, the Bishop, had his SHOVELS there.

  1849.  C. BRONTË, Shirley, ch. xvi. The former, looming large in full canonicals, walking, as became a beneficed priest, under the canopy of a SHOVEL-HAT, with the dignity of an ample corporation.

  1853.  BULWER-LYTTON, My Novel, xi. 2. The profession of this gentleman’s companion was unmistakable—the SHOVEL-HAT, the clerical cut of the coat, the neckcloth without collar.

  1857.  T. HUGHES, Tom Brown’s School-days, i. 2. A queer old hat, something like a doctor of divinity’s SHOVEL.

  1864.  ALFORD, A Plea for the Queen’s English, 247. I once heard a venerable dignitary pointed out by a railway porter as ‘an old party in a SHOVEL.’

  1889.  W. HAMILTON, comp. Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors, VI., p. 297, ‘A Dish of Facts and Scraps.’ Now about the same time the people of England were at loggerheads with the SHOVEL-HATTED gentry that infest the upper house of St. Stephen’s.

  2.  (common).—A hansom-cab: see SHOFUL.

  3.  (nautical).—An ignorant marine engineer.

  1889.  The Engineer, lxvii. 26 April, 344, 2. In the early days after the Crimean War, the engineers in the Navy were a rough lot. They were good men, but without much education. They were technically known as ‘SHOVELS.’

  PHRASES.  PUT TO BED WITH A SHOVEL (or SPADE) = buried (GROSE); ‘He was fed with a SHOVEL (or FIRE-SHOVEL) = a jeer at a large mouth’ (GROSE); ‘That’s before you bought your SHOVEL’ = ‘You are too previous,’ ‘That’s up against you,’ ‘That settles your hash.’

  1859.  G. W. MATSELL, Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon, ‘A Hundred Stretches Hence,’ 124.