NINE TAILORS MAKE A MAN.
The following humorous account of the origin of this saying is from The British Apollo. “It happened (’tis no great matter in what year) that eight tailors, having finished considerable pieces of work at the house of a certain person of quality, (whose name authors have thought fit to conceal,) and received all the money due for the same, a virago servant-maid of the house, observing them to be but slender-built animals, and in their mathematical postures on their shop-board appearing but so many pieces of men, resolved to encounter and pillage them on the road. The better to compass her design, she procured a very terrible great black pudding, which, having waylaid them, she presented at the breast of the foremost. They, mistaking this prop of life for an instrument of death, at least a blunderbuss, readily yielded up their money; but she, not contented with that, severely disciplined them with a cudgel she carried in the other hand, all which they bore with a philosophical resignation. Thus, eight, not being able to deal with one woman, by consequence could not make a man; on which account a ninth is added. ’Tis the opinion of our curious virtuosos, that their want of courage ariseth from their immoderate eating of cucumbers, which too much refrigerates their blood. However, to their eternal honor be it spoken, they have often been known to encounter a sort of cannibals, to whose assaults they are often subject, not fictitious, but real man-eaters, and that with a lance but two inches long; nay, and although they go armed no further than their middle finger.”
An earlier authority than the preceding may be found in a note in Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Goodfellow, in which the following version of the origin of the saying is given. It is dated 1682:—
There is a proverb which has been of old,
And many men have likewise been so told,
To the discredit of the Taylor’s Trade:
Nine Taylors go to make up a man, they said;
But for their credit I’ll unriddle it t’ ye:
A draper once fell into povertie,
Nine Taylors joined their purses together then,
To set him up, and make him a man again.