Image of the Bat Signal over Gotham City from the Batman comics
12 November 2020
Most of us are probably familiar with Gotham as the name of the city in which Batman prowls the streets at night. It’s an old nickname for New York City, and in the comic the fictional Gotham City stands in for the real place. But the name Gotham is older than New York.
Gotham got its start as the name of a village in Nottinghamshire, England, and in the fifteenth century the townspeople of that hamlet developed a reputation for being fools and simpletons; the village became the butt of jokes. We see this sense in the First Shepherd’s Play of the Towneley cycle of plays that is preserved in the manuscript San Marino, Huntingdon Library MS HM 1, which was copied c. 1500:
Now God gyf you care,
Foles all sam!
Sagh I neuer none so fare
Bot the foles of Gotham.(Now God give you sorrow,
You two fools!
I never saw any behave so
Except the fools of Gotham.)
The name stood as the butt of jokes for several centuries. But around the turn of the nineteenth century, Gotham started to be used as a nickname for Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in an unironic sense. It may be that the application to that city started as a jocular term, indicating the inhabitants were none too smart, but the earliest clear references to Newcastle as Gotham are quite serious and not at all derogatory. Here is a passage from the poem Kiver Awa’ from November 1804:
Heav’n prosper thee, Gotham! thou famous old town,
Of the Tyne the chief glory and pride;
May thy heroes acquire immortal renown,
In the dread field of Mars, when they’re try’d.
And a bit later, in 1825, it’s glossed in dictionary of terms from the North of England:
GOTHAM, a cant name for Newcastle
But about the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, Gotham also starts to be applied to New York City. Washington Irving uses it as a nickname for that city, and Irving is definitely using it the mocking sense, making fun of its citizenry. Here is a sample from his Salmagundi of 27 June 1807:
Straddle was equally successful with the Giblets, as may well be supposed; for though pedestrian merit may strive in vain to become fashionable in Gotham; yet a candidate in an equipage is always recognized, and like Philip's ass, laden with gold, will gain admittance every where. Mounted in his curricle or his gig, the candidate is like a statue elevated on a high pedestal, his merits are discernable from afar, and strike the dullest opticks.——Oh! Gotham, Gotham! most enlightened of cities!—how does my heart swell with delight, when I behold your sapient inhabitants lavishing their atten- tion with such wonderful discernment!
Batman makes his appearance in Detective Comics #27, May 1939, but Gotham City is not named as his place of residence until Batman #4, December 1940.
Sources:
Bell, John, ed. Rhymes of the Northern Bards. Newcastle: M. Angus and Son, 1812, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Brockett, John Trotter. A Glossary of North Country Words. Newcastle: T. and J. Hodgson for E. Charney, 1825, 84. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“First Shepherds’ Play.” The Towneley Plays, vol. 1 of 2. Martin Stevens and Arthur C. Cawley, eds. Early English Text Society, SS 13. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994, lines 257–60, 113. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Irving, Washington (as Launcelot Langstaff). Salmagundi, no. 12, 27 June 1807, 235. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Gotham, n.
Image credit: Mitch Gerads, Batman, 3.14, March 2017, DC Comics. Fair use of a low-resolution copy to illustrate the topic under discussion.