From a linkboy outside a travelling theatre he was promoted to employment within.
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He looked after us with foreboding eyes as we went out of the great gate, alone, with not so much as a linkboy.
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Pepys's diary entry of 10 September 1661 mentions Pepys's use of a linkboy to light his way home along the streets of London. in his diary. An anonymous illustrated serial novel, The Link Boy of Old London, was published in the penny dreadful Boys Standard from 4 November 1882. The expression "cannot hold a candle to" (meaning "inferior to") may derive from a comparison to an inadequate linkboy.
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Henry Fielding considered Montague, his companion Captain Laroun, and Casey "the three most troublesome and difficult to manage of all my Bow Street visitors". Casey was eventually transported to America in 1750. In thieves' cant, a linkboy was known as a "Glym Jack" ("glym" meant "light") or a "moon-curser" (as their services would not be required on a moonlit night). Employing a linkboy could be dangerous, as some would lead their clients to dark alleyways, where they could be beset by footpads.
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Another appears in the first plate of William Hogarth's The Four Stages of Cruelty, putting out the eyes of a bird using a hot needle heated in the flame of his torch. Hogarth depicts a linkboy again, in plate four, Night, of his Four Times of the Day, this time huddled beneath a bench blowing on his torch. In the mid- eighteenth century Laurence Casey, who was known as Little Cazey, became the personal linkboy of the famous courtesan Betty Careless, and gained something of reputation as a troublemaker. He features in Louis Peter Boitard's 1739 picture The Covent Garden Morning Frolick, leading the sedan chair containing Betty and being ridden by Captain "Mad Jack" Montague (seafaring brother of the Earl of Sandwich).
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In that painting, little Cupid as a London linkboy wears demonic bat wings and an immense phallic torch to "remind those in the know of the proclivities of a certain patron."Hughes, Robert. (March 31, 1986) Time "Mixing grandeur and tattiness - At the Royal Academy, a retrospective of Sir Joshua Reynolds." Art section, page 78.
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Cupid as a Link Boy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, c. 1771. A link-boy (or link boy or linkboy) was a boy who carried a flaming torch to light the way for pedestrians at night. Linkboys were common in London in the days before street lighting. The linkboy's fee was commonly one farthing, and the torch was often made from burning pitch and tow.
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The faeu, in an attempt to kill itself, will attack the blade.Folklore of Guernsey by Marie de Garis (1986) ASIN: B0000EE6P8. The will-o'-the-wisp was also known as the Spunkie in the Scottish Highlands where it would take the form of a linkboy (a boy who carried a flaming torch to light the way for pedestrians in exchange for a fee), or else simply a light that always seemed to recede, in order to lead unwary travelers to their doom.William Grant Stewart (1823).
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