If you’ve read Jane Austen’s Emma, you may have noticed an odd little detail. Just a single word, in fact. You have to have read the right edition to have seen this, because some modern editions have changed the word in the mistaken belief that Austen herself made a mistake. But she didn’t. The word is used to refer to Mrs. Elton’s handbag; it’s called a “ridicule.” The supposed mistake is that “ridicule” — which is no longer used to refer to a handbag — is very close to “reticule,” which is.
“Ridicule,” however, as a word for a handbag, has an OED citation two years older than “reticule.” Both words appeared in English in the late 1700s, which is also when the handbag became a popular alternative to pockets. The styles had changed, apparently, and the new dresses didn’t have any pockets.
Both words probably came from French, which already had the word “reticule,” derived from the Latin term “reticulum” — a small mesh bag or net. Now, “ridicule” actually is a different word, coming from the Latin “ridiculum” — a joke. What might have happened was that calling a handbag a “ridicule” carried the double meaning that it was a handbag AND a joke, and it was so popular it entered the language (for a while). In any case, the OED found a printed example dated 1799 (they found it in the British Museum, no less) that uses “ridicule” as a term for a handbag. Another citation is from 1804 in the Ladies Monthly Museum (which was a magazine rather than a museum); it reads: “A Kerseymere Spencer of the same Colour, with Tippet. Purple ridicule.” (No, I have no clue what a Kerseymere Spencer might be.)
Emma was published in late December 1815 (cool trivia: the date on the title page of the first edition is 1816; they probably weren’t sure they’d get it finished before the new year). Austen certainly knew about the use of “ridicule” at that point, but the word started to cause editors to wonder, first in an 1892 edition that added a footnote to “ridicule” reading “a corruption of ‘reticule’ — Johnson’s Dictionary.” And therein lies yet another mistake; neither “ridicule” nor “reticule” are mentioned in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language; that was published in 1755 when sensible people were still keeping things in their pockets. In any case, if you look at the context of its use in Emma, Austen surely used the term with the double meaning for Mrs. Elton, who was depicted as a vulgar woman, and for her purple and gold handbag, which must have looked quite the ridicule indeed.
