‘Toss It Off, Don’t Leave Any Heeltap'

Among the last people I expected to encounter while reading Dickens was my step-grandfather, James Aloysius Kelly, who died in 1975. We knew him as “Uncle” Kelly. He married my recently widowed maternal grandmother in 1958 and was a rare relative we looked forward to seeing. He was a housepainter, a World War I veteran, a dedicated fisherman and a serious beer-drinking man. His favorite brand was Olde Frothingslosh, brewed in Pittsburgh. He had a stein with the slogan “Just wanted to wet my whistle!” printed on the side and a whistle built into the handle. 

In Chapter 62 of The Old Curiosity Shop, Daniel Quilp, a moneylending dwarf and one of the novel’s chief villains, is heating rum in a saucepan. Sampson Brass, a sycophantic attorney, one of Quilp’s toadies, warns him that the rum is too hot to drink. Quilp ignores him and sips the “gentle stimulant,” offering Brass a taste:

 

“‘Drink that,’ said the dwarf, who had by this time heated some more. ‘Toss it off, don’t leave any heeltap, scorch your throat and be happy!’

 

“The wretched Sampson took a few short sips of the liquor, which immediately distilled itself into burning tears, and in that form came rolling down his cheeks into the pipkin again, turning the colour of his face and eyelids to a deep red, and giving rise to a violent fit of coughing, in the midst of which he was still heard to declare, with the constancy of a martyr, that it was ‘beautiful indeed!’”

 

The operative word here is heeltap. When Kelly’s mug was nearly drained, and before he refilled it, he would tell my brother or me, “Drain the heeltap.” And we did. If anyone objected, Kelly explained, “If they drink it now they won’t want it later.” So much for that theory.

 

Heeltap entered English in the seventeenth century and originally meant, according to the OED, “any of the layers of leather or other material which comprise the heel of a boot or shoe.” A century later it acquired the meaning I was accustomed to: “a small amount of alcoholic drink left at the bottom of a glass.” Later still, heeltap came to mean “the last part or remnant (of something), the fag end; spec. the crusty end of a loaf of bread, or the rind of a cheese.”