In Jé Wilson’s NYRB review (March 7, 2024; archived) of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner, there is a description of Comyns’ childhood that begins “She grew up as Barbara Bayley in Warwickshire, in a manor bordering the River Avon, a few miles from Stratford. The fourth of six children, five of whom were girls, she spent much of her time running wild outside with her siblings.” Later it says “In keeping with the general neglect, the Bayley girls were left to tumble up when it came to education.” I was unfamiliar with the phrase “tumble up,” and my wife said she was too, so I did some investigating. The OED (entry from 1915) has (s.v. tumble):
II.7.b. to tumble up: to make haste, originally (Nautical) from below deck. slang.
1826 The command was repeated by the boatswain and his mates, who were piping and roaring down the hatchways—‘Tumble up, tumble up from below.’
W. N. Glascock, Naval Sketch-book 1st Series vol. I. 81832 Tumble up smartly, my lads.
F. Marryat, Newton Forster vol. II. iv. 48
[…]
And Green’s has it in two senses:
1. to rush, to hurry.
[…]
2. to rise from bed.
But these senses don’t appear to correspond to the use in the context of the quoted sentence, where it seems to mean something like ‘make do as best they could.’ Is anyone familiar with this sense? Is it too recent to be in the dictionaries? (Incidentally, Comyns is pronounced as if spelled Cummins; it’s historically the same Irish name as Cummings.)
A less than decorous ascent? Cf. fail up?
Could be!
Florence Hill Winterburn, The Mother in Education 216 (1914) references a “young woman whom unfortunate family circumstances had caused to ‘tumble up’ rather than be rightly and regularly educated,” but who nonetheless passed her college entrance examinations by dint of careful study. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t9z03wb5r&seq=248&q1=tumble
Frances Trollope, The Wild Wheel (1892): A character had been “early left an orphan to tumble up as he could without any education at all,” but now was “the head of an improving business” and debt-free.
A squib in the Journal of Education, in 1906, describes a family in which the mother “manages in some mysterious manner to turn out the children in spick and span attire on special occasions, but otherwise lets them ‘tumble up’ as they can.”
From the Western Teacher in 1898 and again in the American Journal of Education, in 1908: “Children will tumble up somehow or other even under the rule of an educationist; and after all, the real training of every human being comes largely from experience and from contact with his kind.”
I must have encountered the nautical sense of tumble up, describing things like the crew manning their battle stations when a warship goes to general quarters. I don’t think I understood it to be a fixed expression though. Nor do I have any familiarity with the sense that is apparently related to haphazard education.
Cf. fail up?
That was my first thought, but is more calculated: we’ll promote this numpty to where he can’t do more harm.
So the nautical sense is in response to ‘All hands on deck! Man the to’gallants!’
I’ve never heard any of these senses. I guess the image for the first two senses is sailors rushing up ladders to work and by extension children rushing up stairs to bed. I don’t see how the haphazard-education sense evolves from those. “Muddle along/through” seems like a cousin. Also “scramble”.
New to me too.
Jon W: Thanks very much; those are all parallel, and clearly suggest a sense of the phrase that the OED has missed.
I saw that Mr. and Mrs. Pocket’s children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up.
—Great Expectations
“It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole’s children have tumbled up somehow or other.”
—Bleak House
Google Books scrapes up a few others from Victorian literature:
“When you’re worried into your grave, she’ll have no mother at all, and’ll have to tumble up as other folks do.”
A Soldier’s Children, and Five Other Tales in Verse by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1888)
Children, whose mothers desert them to work in the mills sometimes to keep themselves from starving; but oftener I fear that they may have money to spend on dress and drink, and who care not what becomes meanwhile of their infants during the day time. So the children tumble up anyhow; not a few die after a brief struggle for life, and for such I doubt not it is far better than a life of sin spent in the world.
The Christmas Hamper by M. J. H. Hollings (1872)
“A disorganized nursery and a vain, frivolous mother! You have said yourself that if ever a child died of pure neglect, little Kitty did.” “The boy will tumble up somehow. Anyway, I have decided.”
“John Harvey” by Margaret Sutton Briscoe (1895)
But considering how old all these are, and how rare this usage must have been to escape Green’s notice (and Partridge and Farmer-Henley too), it seems like an odd thing for a book reviewer in 2024 to write. Maybe she’s a big fan of Dickens?
And searching on “left to tumble up” also finds relevant examples, again mostly Victorian literature, but a few from living authors. One of them, Janet Todd, is a scholar writing on Jane Austen (“… Longbourn in Pride and Prejudice, where the more indulged Bennet girls have been left to tumble up into womanhood”), so again I wonder if she picked up the phrase from old literature.
I’m familiar with “I wasn’t brought up, I was dragged up” as a self-deprecating reference to difficult childhood conditions.
I took “tumbled up” above as a variation on this, meaning children bringing themselves up as best they can, without guidance.
i wonder whether that citation from Bleak House could be the origin of the generalized “get by somehow” senses, combining a longstanding “brought up / dragged up” idiom with the nautical “get chaotically to your stations” use? especially with dickens deciding to recycle it in Great Expectations, i could imagine it becoming a pervasive phrase for a season or two, and sticking with enough victorian writers to have a certain staying power in some literary circles. (i’m sure we can all come up with cases where our idiolects have absorbed a phrase like that from a literary quip, whether encountered directly or pre-trimmed into an anecdote or aphorism)
It looks to me like it must have emerged from the much older “tumble down” on the one hand, in relation to buildings and other constructions – i.e., much the same thing but in reverse – combined with the nautical phrase.
Dickens was certainly familiar with the latter and knew how to use it in a non-nautical context:
‘Has morning come already?’ asked Nicholas, sitting up in bed.
‘Ah! that has it,’ replied Squeers, ‘and ready iced too. Now, Nickleby, come; tumble up, will you?’
Nicholas needed no further admonition, but ‘tumbled up’ at once, and proceeded to dress himself […]
– Nicholas Nickleby
I took “tumbled up” above as a variation on this, meaning children bringing themselves up as best they can, without guidance.
And you were right — good language instincts!
Here’s a recent usage with no obvious Victorian-lit backstory: “Where some children grow up under the loving care of kind parents, Mez was left to tumble up on his own after his mother abandoned him, after his father took up with an abusive woman.” This from a review of a memoir by the current pastor of a “community church” (dissenting coventicle, the established Kirk might say) in Edinburgh written by a Canadian blogger who appears to be “Reformed” yet shies away from self-identification as “Calvinist.” (Indeed, he is reportedly a fan of the Heidelberg Catechism while passing over the Westminster Standards in silence.) The memoir-writer’s hardscrabble early years on the mean steets of Yorkshire might have been “Dickensian,” I suppose.
https://www.challies.com/book-reviews/is-there-anybody-out-there/
Huh. I hope the OED is paying attention…
I doubt they are, but people without OED access can contribute at https://pages.oup.com/ol/cus/1646173949115570121/submit-words-and-evidence-to-the-oed
There at least used to be a separate place for people with access to contribute.
If Jon W and the others who have provided evidence here want the fun of sending it to the OED, I hope they’ll do it, but if nobody else wants to, I will (and mention their screen names).
Go ahead!
I second Mollymooly: “scramble (upwards)” seems the best fit.
I must have subconsciously absorbed the expression from Dickens, because I immediately understood it in the sense ‘be brought up in a haphazard fashion’.
Go ahead!
Done.