Hugger-mugger is a word for doing things on the quiet. It has also come to mean a mess. The secret sense, at least, is centuries older than Victoria.

Etymonline dates it to the 1520s, meaning secretly, privately — one of a cluster of rhyming, reduplicated words of the time that meant much the same thing. Where it came from is not settled. One suggestion is an older form, hucker-mucker, perhaps from Middle English mukre, to hoard up or conceal. Wiktionary calls the origin unknown. The sound does the work anyway: it is a whispering, huddled kind of word.

Its most famous outing is in Hamlet. After Hamlet kills Polonius, the King has the body buried fast and without ceremony, and soon regrets how it looks: the people muddied, / Thick, and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers / For good Polonius' death; and we have done but greenly / In hugger-mugger to inter him. In hugger-mugger: hastily, secretly, as if there were something to hide.

The word never went away. The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined it as by stealth, privately, without making an appearance, with the example they spent their money in a hugger mugger way. In 1874 John Camden Hotten's Slang Dictionary still had it — underhand, sneaking — and recorded a second sense too: in a state of hugger-mugger meant muddled.

Modern dictionaries keep both: Wiktionary gives secret, clandestine and also disorderly, chaotic, confused. Perhaps that is not surprising. Things done in a hurry and in secret often end up in a heap.