Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a rustic, a peasant; thus a fool.

1811		Lex. Balatronicum.
1826		Pierce Egan’s Life in London 9 Apr. 501/2: [A] great Herculean chaw-bacon [...] that never fought in his life, except at a Bridgnorth fair, with whips, sticks, bludgeons [...] or in a skettle alley [sic] at a lush cribb.
1832		Egan Bk of Sports 190: The chaw-bacons clapping their hands; and the friends of Brown quite satisfied it was all his own.
1841		Edgfield Advertiser (SC) 3 June 1/6: [from Sayings & Doings in the U. of Oxford] Poor Mossy, not the wisest of the wise, lays hold of one leg, gives the other to one chawbacon, and the head to another.
1846		R.S. Surtees Jorrocks Jaunts (1874) 4: The chaw-bacons who carry the produce of their acres to [Croydon] [...] retain much of their pristine barbarity.
1848		Thackeray Vanity Fair I 141: The captain has a hearty contempt for his father, I can see, and calls him an old put, an old snob, an old chaw-bacon.
1848		Bell’s Life in Sydney 23 Dec. 3/1: Accompanied with as many wry faces as a clown in a pantomine, or a chaw-bacon grinning through a horse collar.
1854		G.J. Whyte-Melville General Bounce (1891) 73: ‘Give me the pail, you lop-eared buffoon – do you call that the way to feed a pig?’ and the General, seizing the bucket from an astonished chaw-bacon, who [...] managed to spill the greater part of the contents over his own person and gaiters.
1862		Athens Post (TN) 22 Aug. 2/2: There is about the usual amount of mutton-heads and chaw-bacons at the street corners, listlessly discussing the war.
1868		Exeter & Plymouth Gaz. 30 Oct. 6/1: Mr Neele personated a ’cute yet loutish rustic [...] portraying the oddities and awkwardness of the ‘chawbacon’ with skill.
1877		J. Greenwood Dick Temple III 171: A man [...] who has been stigmatised – a – a – chawbacon to his face, and spoken of as a yokel and a muff.
1880		Bulletin (Sydney) 24 Apr. 5/4: The reporters used to calll him Bacon, of course it doesn’t matter if it was Chawbacon.
1883		‘’Arry at the Royal Evening Fête’ in Punch 28 July 38/1: It’s a sin to go wasting your days among chawbacons, ’taters and sheep.
1884		Dundee Courier 12 Feb. 7/5: What a Johnny Chawbacon you must be!
1891		Roanoke Times (VA) 12 Dec. 5/1: The [agricultural] laborer was expected to remain in the village as ‘Hodge’ or ‘Chawbacon’.
1894		Mirror of Life 30 June 7/3: ‘What! a chawbacon attempt to beat Jack Slack!’ .
1896		‘Frederick Benton Williams’ (H.E. Hamblen) On Many Seas 350: I never thoroughly appreciated the meaning of the words, boor, chaw-bacon, clod-hopper, until I saw these Gloucestershire Britons.
1899–1900		C.L. Cullen Tales of the Ex-Tanks 48: His pals threw it into him about being a chaw-bacon and a would-be welcher and he subsided.
1908		Winchester News (KY) 10 Nov. 2/1: They never are appreciated by chaw-bacons.
1912		Bulletin (Sydney) 18 July 30/1: Dear old Cholly Mathews had about as much ’air as a billiard-ball. When he was making up for Sarah Thorne’s company he was brushing his nice Sir Charles Coldstream straw-color wig on a block, when a chawbacon peeped in the window and bolted frightened. Reminds me of Tom Thorne. On his uppers? Lor’!
1922		Joyce Ulysses 160: Country bred chawbacon.
1927		(con. 1835–40) P. Herring Bold Bendigo 234: I’d much sooner see a turn-up between Bendigo and Deaf Burke than another battle with this big chawbacon.
[1940		M. Marples Public School Slang 31: chaw (Harrow, 1887. and many other schools during the nineteenth century) adj.chawish: supposedly an abbreviation of chawbacon (=country bumpkin)].
1942		Berrey & Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Sl. §391.3: rustic, bumpkin, chawbacon.
1948		H. McCoy Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye in Four Novels (1983) 193: One of these days I shall jockey this carrion, this whoreson, this chawbacon into a nice safe corner where a pistol shot will be heard by nobody else.
1989		H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 193: Those who live close to the land can be demeaned in terms of what they grown upon it. For example: [...] chawbacon.

2. attrib. use of sense 1 pertaining to rusticity.

1832		Satirist (London) 11 Mar. 87/3: [S]omehow all these chaw-bacon heroes are called Roger.
1878		‘’Arry on ’Igh Life’ in Punch 20 July 24: And as in your chaw-bacon parts you’re as good as clean out of the way.
1885		‘’Arry on the Elections’ in Punch 12 Dec. 277/2: The chawbacon life wot you’re leadin’ ain’t fit for a ’Ampstead ’Eath moke.
1900		Sydney Sportsman (Surry Hills, NSW) 31 Oct. 1/2: Dissembling their real intentions they mounted a chawbacon boy in the paddock.
1904		Salt Lake Herald (UT) 1 May 20/2: He came on as a comic country man, with the stereotyped broad grin, and chaw-bacon style.