When a tramp appeared before the magistrates, his clothing was commented on by the local M.P.. The magistrate clearly knew his ‘Hamlet‘: the hero calls his Uncle ‘A King of Shreds and Patches, indicating that he is not a true king, having murdered Hamlet’s father and usurped the throne.
Had this story been about forty years earlier, he could have been referring to Nanki Poo in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’ – the ‘Wand’ring Minstrel’ – a ‘thing of shreds and patches’.
“Robt. Miller, a tramp, who passed the night of Saturday the 5th inst. in the Sleaford Union workhouse, took him before the magistrates at Sleaford on the following Monday, when R. A. Christopher, Esq., M. P., adjudged him to be committed to Falkingham house of correction for 14 days’ hard labour, and directed that the fragments might be stitched on calico and put together, so that on his next appearance in public he will be very much like ‘a thing of shreds and patches’.”
The Stamford Mercury, 11th August, 1848.