"Your wife, sir, under the pretense of keeping a bawdy house, is a receiver of stolen goods"
-Samuel Johnson
I cannot find an explanation anywhere on the internet. Is "stolen goods" a euphemism, and if so what for? It's also been referred to as a joke.
This appears to be intended to be read in a straightforward manner. A 'bawdy house' is an outdated term for a brothel (house of prostitution); a 'receiver of stolen goods' is just that - someone who accepts as part of their business articles stolen from others, for storage, concealment, resale, et cetera. A receiver of stolen goods is also called, in current slang, a 'fence'.
The speaker in the quotation is accusing the wife of the listener of being a fence while pretending to be a madam ([female] operator of a brothel).
In the version I read Dr. Johnson said, “You mother, Sir, …” The insult implies that the most respectable front she could conceive of for her fencing operation was a whorehouse. And, of course, the only way to appear to run a whorehouse is to actually run one, and so she is probably also a prostitute. And if she’s his mother, not his wife, then it also implies he’s a bastard. Greatest insult of all time.
This retort was found in a joke book that was published before Boswell was born, but Boswell was "so desperate for material that he was too accepting of material he was provided." Boswell was not present when Johnson is supposed to have said this, he is reporting something he was told by someone who passed it along as something Johnson said. As for receivers of stolen goods, prior to the establishment of regular municipal police forces private individuals were hired on a piecework basis to combat rising crime in London in the 18th century, but they began to operate on both sides of the law when they realized the opportunities for profit that their position gave them; they would often steal goods themselves, returning them for bounties. Two notorious men in this line of work were Charles Hitchen (sometimes spelled "Hitchin") and Jonathan Wild (sometimes spelled "Wilde"). As Henry Fielding put it, "if there were no Receivers (of stolen goods), there would be no Thieves." Wild was eventually sentenced to death, took a large dose of laudanum (alcohol + opium) and fell into a coma; he was hanged while still drugged.
As to the joke itself, I think it comes down to this: The man's wife (or mother in another telling) is said to be accused of operating a whorehouse, but is in fact something worse--a receiver of stolen goods, which was punishable by death, while operating a bawdy house--while disreputable--was not a capital crime. It's a bit like the old joke "Who was that lady I saw you with last night?" "That was no lady, that was my wife." In seeming to excuse the woman, the speaker actually accuses her of something worse.
Jorge Luis Borges says in "The Art of Verbal Abuse" that Johnson (or the original joke teller) was engaging in a "parody of insult" in saying this.
On the surface it says "Your wife, while trying to be a madame ended up as a fence."
The subtlety lies in the definitions. While pretending to run a bawdy brothel where her prostitutes attract clientele (men) her prostitutes actually steal men.
What kind of men can be stolen? Married men.
So she acts like a hooker and steals husbands. Rich.
