The very pineapple of perfection
IN the summer of 1767, it was a source of some surprise to the writer of the Manchester Mercury that Edward Higgins, committed to Carmarthen Castle for burglary, hadn’t included among booty stolen from the home of Mrs Biven of Laugherne any pineapples. Having made himself comfortable in Mrs Biven’s kitchen —to the extent of spreading a cloth on the table and lighting two candles in silver candlesticks before eating a chicken—Higgins ‘got over a Wall into the Garden, and went into the Hot-house, where were many Pine-Apples fit to take’. Higgins, however, ‘took only four Cucumbers’.
To the 18th-century reader, his was a curious choice. The pineapple was one of Georgian Britain’s ultimate . With good reason, Sheridan’s verbally maladroit Mrs Malaprop, in , confuses ‘pineapple’ for ‘pinnacle’ in her commendation of Capt Absolute as
