[A humble request: If you can, please donate to help me carry on tracing word histories. Thank you.]
The phrase like herrings in a barrel means: crowded or confined tightly together.
—Synonyms: (as) thick as herrings and to be packed like sardines.
The phrase like herrings in a barrel occurs, for example, in a theatrical review by Charles Spencer, published in The Daily Telegraph (London, England) of Monday 16th April 2007 [page 27, columns 6 & 7]:
A former operating theatre has briefly been turned into a playhouse. The Old Operating Theatre, strikingly housed in the roof garret of the 18th-century St Thomas’s Church, is the oldest in Britain, having opened for business in 1821. The place closed in 1862, when St Thomas’s Hospital moved to its present site by the Thames, and the old operating theatre remained forgotten until it was rediscovered in 1956 and restored.
It is the bright idea of Soma Ghosh and her newly formed Metal and Bone theatre company to perform two one-act plays on a surgical theme in the old operating theatre, which is also a wonderfully atmospheric museum, full of grisly sights. The audience stand or sit on the steeply raked, horseshoe-shaped tiers where medical students were once “packed like herrings in a barrel” to observe the operations, while the actors perform where the surgeons used to practise their grim trade.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase like herrings in a barrel that I have found:
—Note: In early use, this phrase often referred to the transatlantic slave trade:
1-: From A Voyage to Congo, in the Years 1666, and 1667. By the R.R. F.F. Michael Angelo of Gattina, and Denis de Carli of Piacenza, Capuchins, and Apostolick Missioners to the said Kingdom of Congo, published in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, some now first Printed from Original Manuscripts (London: Printed for Awnsham and John Churchill, 1704) [volume 1, page 637, column 2]—in the following, the writer is Denis de Carli:
The Ship I went aboard of, when it was ready to sail, was loaded with Elephants Teeth and Slaves, to the number of 680 Men, Women, and Children. It was a pitiful sight to behold, how all those People were bestow’d. The Men were standing in the Hold, fastned one to another with Stakes, for fear they should rise and kill the Whites. The Women were between the Decks, and those that were with Child in the great Cabin, the Children in the Steeridg press’d together like Herrings in a Barrel, which caus’d an intolerable heat and stench.
2-: From An Answer to the Printed Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq; spoken in the House of Commons, April 19, 1774 (London: Printed for T. Evans, and J. Bew, 1776) [page 172]—“the lobbies” refers to the lobbies of the House of Commons:
It is reasonable enough to believe indeed, that their trembling anxiety and expectations were great. Since, according to the words of this orator, they had been crammed into the lobbies almost all the spring, summer, and autumn, waiting for the winter’s return of light to know their fate.
It was no wonder therefore, that being so long crammed together, like herrings in a barrel, when “the figure of their deliverer was shewn them, in the well-earned triumph of his important victory in their favour, that from the whole of that grave multitude, there arose an involuntary burst of gratitude and transport.”
3-: From The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell 1774-1777 (New York: Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial press, 1924), by the English explorer and diarist Nicholas Cresswell (1750-1804) [page 244]:
On Board the Brig “Edward,” New York Harbour—[…] Tuesday, June 24th, 1777. On board all day. […] All these Ditches and fortified places are full of stagnate water, damaged sour Crout and filth of every kind. Noisome vapours arise from the mud left in the docks and slips at low water, and unwholesome smells are occasioned by such a number of people being crowded together in so small a compass almost like herrings in a barrel, most of them very dirty and not a small number sick of some disease, the Itch, Pox, Fever, or Flux, so that altogether there is a complication of stinks enough to drive a person whose sense of smelling was very delicate and his lungs of the finest contexture, into a consumption in the space of twenty-four hours.
4-: From The Pennsylvania Journal, and The Weekly Advertiser (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) of Wednesday 7th February 1781 [erroneously dated Wednesday 5th February 1781 – page 1, column 3]:
Peter at New-York.
A Dialogue Between Peter, lately enlisted in an Hessian Regiment; and his cousin George, a soldier in the same Regiment.
[George on duty on the Warff at New-York.]George G—d d—n me! that’s Peter, the son of my Uncle the Cap-Maker.
[…]
Pet. […] I would be glad to go and take a cup with you to refresh myself after the sufferings of the voyage: For this cursed ship was so narrow that we were all jam’d together like pickled herrings in a barrel.
5-: From The History of Julia Benson: In a Series of Letters; Founded on well-known Facts. Tending to Guard the Mind from the Indulgence of Unlawful Pleasures, and the Fatal Effects of Female Resentment (Dublin: Printed by Charles Lodge, 1784) [volume 2, letter 30, page 46]:
“I wrote considerably more books on divinity, astrology, mathematics, philosophy natural and moral, cookery, farriery, physic, politics, trade and commerce, mechanics, criticism, &c. than would, on a moderate computation, fill Westminster-hall, though packed like herrings in a barrel.”
6-: From a speech on the slave trade, that the English Member of Parliament and abolitionist William Dolben (1727-1814) delivered in the House of Commons on Friday 9th May 1788, as transcribed in The Parliamentary Register; Or History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons (London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1788) [volume 23, page 606]—in the following, “he” refers to William Dolben, and “their” to the African slaves:
He neither alluded to their sufferings at home at the hands of their cruel countrymen, nor to their sufferings from their unfeeling masters, the planters in the West-India islands, but to that intermediate state of tenfold misery which they suffered in their transportation from the coast of Africa to the West Indies. […] When put on ship board the poor unhappy wretches were chained to each other hand and foot, and stowed so close, that they were not allowed above a foot and a half each individual. Thus crammed together, like herrings in a barrel, they generated putrid disorders, and all sorts of dangerous diseases; so that when their overseers came to look over them in the morning they had daily to pick numbers of dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their carcasses from the bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers, to whom they had been fastened.
7-: From Remarks on the slave trade, published in The American Museum: Or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, &c., Prose and Poetical (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) of May 1789 [page 429, column 1]:
We do not recollect to have met with a more striking illustration of the barbarity of the slave trade, than in a small pamphlet lately published by a society at Plymouth, in Great Britain […] Here is presented to our view, one of the most horrid spectacles; a number of creatures, packed, side by side, almost like herrings in a barrel, and reduced nearly to the state of being buried alive, with just air enough to preserve a degree of life, sufficient to make them sensible of all the horror of their situation.
word histories 