Ivalunk

[steepholm]

E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet (1906) is full of local and topical references that are fun to track down, but I'm currently stumped by this passage from the beginning of Chapter 14:

Nurse having gone to tea with a friend out Ivalunk way they were playing 'devil in the dark' (259)

Now, what or where is Ivalunk? Google is no help, and no more is the OED. It's possible that Nesbit is humorously adopting a phonetic spelling to reflect the Nurse's London pronunciation, but even then I'm having trouble seeing what the word behind it is. 'Ivalunk' doesn't bear much resemblance to any London district I can think of.

Quite possibly I'm missing something very obvious here: feel free to put me out of my misery.

Comments

[sovay]

Harding's Luck has a pawnshop owner who's meant to be basically quite nice, but, well, you can fill in the rest.

I don't think I've read Harding's Luck. I shall do so carefully if I decide to.

I can hardly find anything online except Nesbit herself and the Star Trek episode.

Well, this is definitely not the book I remember reading, but the detail about Cincinnati is fascinating! That was according to William Wells Newell in 1883. I am a little skeptical about all the mythological origins and connections, but the collection of variant names and rules is probably reliable.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

IIRC, that passage in Harding's Luck is fairly marble-in-jam (that is, easily skipped without spoiling the whole, but could be nasty to encounter if you don't know it's there).

https://books.google.com/books?id=r14wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA210 (scroll down past the mushy bit, on the left-hand side) has a good description of the game (and then, wow, its effect on a man with a phobia -- oh, man, this is definitely hurt/comfort stuff).

[sovay]

a good description of the game (and then, wow, its effect on a man with a phobia -- oh, man, this is definitely hurt/comfort stuff).

My idfic quota for the day has been met!

Do you think the Star Trek episode was named after the game?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I actually said idfic in my comment and then took it out again! There's a quotation about "playing blind man's buff with the Devil in the dark" (from a discussion about Cotton Mather and the Salem witchcraft trials), but I haven't found a definite source. (Now Google Books has just clammed up on me and refused to admit there are any 19C books containing the phrase whatsoever. Gah.)

[sovay]

I actually said idfic in my comment and then took it out again!

You were not wrong!

(Now Google Books has just clammed up on me and refused to admit there are any 19C books containing the phrase whatsoever. Gah.)

"Blind man's buff with the Devil" looks like it might be its own phrase: I can find it attested here in 1833 in the collected sermons of the Reverend William Howels, whom I've never heard of, and here in an 1818–19 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, describing the trickster Harlequin. "Blind man's buff with the Devil in the dark" comes from The North American Review and looks like the witch-trial history you were talking about. The quotation marks used by the author make it look like a well-known phrase, but I really can't tell. Availability on Google Books is not the most reliable documentation of historical popularity.