Cits, Nabobs and Mushrooms: New Money in Regency England

• 'Cit' meant new money from London trade; 'nabob' meant a fortune made in India; 'mushroom' described the speed of a family's rise, whatever the source of its money — the three were not interchangeable.
• Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines a mushroom as 'a person or family suddenly raised to riches and eminence... an allusion to that fungus, which starts up in a night.'
• 'Nabob' comes from 'nawab', a Mughal governor's title; the word carried real suspicion of corruption, sharpened by the long impeachment trial of Warren Hastings.
• Sezincote House, built from 1805 for nabob Charles Cockerell, directly influenced the Prince Regent's Brighton Pavilion.
• All three words were insults used by the already-arrived about the newly-arrived — no family called itself a cit, a nabob, or a mushroom.
• New money occasionally bought its way to the very top: Harriot Mellon, a former actress, inherited a banking fortune in 1822 and became Duchess of St Albans in 1827.

Three insults, three different kinds of new money

Regency high society was not simply snobbish about money; it was precise about it. Which word got thrown at a rich newcomer depended entirely on where the fortune had come from and how fast it had arrived — and getting the word wrong marks a modern writer out just as fast as using the wrong fork would have marked out the newcomer. A cit had made his money in trade, in London, over years. A nabob had made his in India, and made it fast. A mushroom might have done either — the word doesn't care how, only that the family did not exist, socially speaking, five years ago, and now apparently does.

All three words share one thing: they are insults. No family ever called itself a cit, a nabob, or a mushroom. These were words the already-arrived used about the newly-arrived, and each one carried its own small, specific accusation about exactly what was wrong with this particular kind of money.

Cit: the smell of the shop

'Cit' is a clipped-down insult — short for 'citizen', and specifically a citizen of the City of London, the square mile that was and still is Britain's financial and mercantile heart. Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines it flatly as 'a citizen of London'; the contempt wasn't in the definition, it was already fully loaded into the word by the time anyone bothered to write it down.

The insult ran on a specific piece of logic: a gentleman's money came from land — rents collected by an agent while the gentleman himself never dirtied his hands — while a cit's money came from actually working: buying, selling, and keeping ledgers inside a shop or counting-house he might still visit himself. The resentment had teeth precisely because it often ran backwards: cits were very often richer than the aristocrats sneering at them. Bernard Mandeville was already describing the anxiety in 1714, a century before the Regency, writing that fashionable women were 'frightened to see merchants' wives and daughters dressed like themselves' and calling it 'the impudence of the city'. By 1811 the fear was a hundred years old and had a one-syllable name.

Nabob: a fortune with an empire's shadow on it

A nabob was a much more specific, and much more scandalous, kind of new money: a man who had gone to India, usually with the East India Company, and come home with a vast fortune. The word is an English mangling of 'nawab', the title of a Mughal provincial governor — itself a small joke, comparing a jumped-up company clerk to the Indian nobility he was, in reality, extracting wealth from.

A nabob's money was suspect in a way a cit's simply wasn't. India in this period offered fortunes from private trade run alongside a Company job, the sale of administrative favours, and monopolies in salt and opium — and London gossiped about it fluently. Samuel Foote's hit play The Nabob had already turned the type into a stock comic villain in 1772; caricaturists James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson kept drawing him for decades; and the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, Bengal's first Governor-General, kept the word in the newspapers into the 1790s. Grose's dictionary even records a diminutive version of the joke: a 'chicken nabob' was 'one returned from the East Indies with but a moderate fortune of fifty or sixty thousand pounds' — not rich enough, apparently, to earn the whole word.

A nabob's palace you can still visit

Sezincote House in Gloucestershire is the nabob story made solid. Colonel John Cockerell bought the estate in 1795 on his return from Bengal; when he died in 1798 it passed to his brother Charles, another Company man, who had their third brother, architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, build a house nobody in the Cotswolds had seen the like of. Completed in 1805, Sezincote is a Mughal palace built in Cotswold stone: onion domes, minarets, and peacock-tail windows, a Bengal fortune made permanently and rather pointedly visible on an English hillside.

It worked, socially, about as well as money could make it work. Charles Cockerell was made a baronet in 1809, and the Prince Regent himself visited Sezincote and admired it enough to borrow its ideas — the onion domes and Indian styling that now define his Brighton Pavilion started here. A nabob's fortune could not, by itself, buy a peerage or erase the word 'nabob'. It could, evidently, redecorate the future king's seaside palace.

Mushroom: not about the money at all

'Mushroom' is the odd one out, because it isn't really about where the money came from — it's about speed. Grose defines it precisely: 'a person or family suddenly raised to riches and eminence: an allusion to that fungus, which starts up in a night.' A mushroom could have made money in trade like a cit, or in India like a nabob, or by some entirely different route Regency England hadn't bothered to name yet. What made a family mushrooms was simply that nobody could remember them being anybody, and now here they were.

This is the detail that trips writers up: cit and nabob are both about where the money came from, while mushroom is about how long ago it arrived. A family could stop being cits, in a sense, within a generation, once a son bought land and stopped visibly working — but a mushroom family stayed mushrooms for exactly as long as everyone in the room could still remember them not having a carriage.

Buying all the way in: Harriot Mellon's fortune

If any real story shows how far money alone could travel by the end of this period, it is Harriot Mellon's. She began as a working actress — about as far from gentility as a Regency woman could start. On 18 January 1815 she married Thomas Coutts, the 79-year-old head of the banking house that still carries his name; when he died on 24 February 1822, he left her his entire fortune outright.

She did not stop there. In 1827 the widowed Mrs Coutts — by then one of the richest women in England — married William Beauclerk, 9th Duke of St Albans, and became a duchess. An actress, a banker's widow, wearing one of the oldest coronets in the country: not a cit, not a nabob, not quite a mushroom, but proof that trade money could, given the right marriages, buy its way to the very top of the table this guide has been describing.

How permeable was the line, really?

Less than a nabob's architect or a duchess's biography might suggest. Sezincote and Harriot Mellon are famous precisely because they were exceptional — remarkable enough to be written about for two centuries afterwards. For every fortune that bought its way to a coronet, many more simply bought land, sent a son to the right school, and waited a generation or two for the word 'cit' to stop being said in front of them, even if it was still being thought. Money could buy proximity to the ton almost immediately. It took much longer, and often a great deal of luck, to buy actual membership — exactly the tension our guides to the ton and to Regency slang touch on in passing, and this guide exists to explain properly.

A word of caution for writers

These are wonderful words for dialogue, and slightly dangerous ones for narration. All three were used as insults by the people saying them, not as neutral job descriptions — a character who calls someone a cit, a nabob, or a mushroom is telling the reader something about their own snobbery as much as about the person they're describing. It's also worth knowing that Georgette Heyer, most modern readers' first encounter with this vocabulary, was a formidably careful researcher who some readers of her work nonetheless believe sometimes adapted real period slang for her own effect. Her novels are a large part of why these words still feel alive today — but a word that sounds perfectly Heyer-authentic is not automatically independently attested elsewhere, and it is worth checking before building a whole scene on it.

Why it matters in a romance novel

These three words are a compressed lesson in exactly how new money could, and couldn't, buy its way into a Regency romance plot. A cit hero has to spend the whole book proving his trade money doesn't make him unworthy of a duke's daughter. A nabob heroine's fortune arrives trailing rumour and a whiff of the exotic that a novelist can play for suspicion, scandal, or genuine menace. A mushroom family is comedy waiting to happen — all the visible trappings of arrival with none of the settled unselfconsciousness that comes from having always belonged. Knowing which word a character would actually have reached for is the difference between a class-conflict plot that feels load-bearing and one that's just a rich person being vaguely disliked for no particular reason.

A note on the sources

The exact year of the Prince Regent's visit to Sezincote is given as 1807 by some sources, but this could not be independently confirmed from a primary or fully corroborated secondary source, so this guide states only that the visit came after the house's 1805 completion and before his later Brighton Pavilion work. Grose's 1811 dictionary does not appear to contain a standalone entry for 'nabob' itself (only the jocular sub-entry 'chicken nabob'), which this guide takes as a likely sign the plain word was already mainstream English rather than slang by the Regency, though this is an inference rather than something a source states outright. The claim that Georgette Heyer sometimes adapted or altered genuine period slang for her own novels is attributed to informal reader and researcher discussion rather than a definitive academic study, and is presented here as a caution rather than a settled fact.

Checked against 9 independent sources, September 2026. Where the historical record is genuinely disputed, this page says so rather than picking a side.