Does hunx have an origin?

I was reading Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. A character calls an old man, "an old hunx" during an argument. I was wondering if Trollope was writing in an accent or if hunx was an old slang word. I tried Googling it, but only found websites relating to "Hunx and His Punx." The reference can be viewed here on Project Gutenberg.

Here's the entry from OED 1:

Ashley Thorndike (Shakespeare's Theatre, 1916, 33) states that one of the favorite performers at the Bear Garden in Shakespeare's day was a blind bear named Old Hunks; he does not give a source, but the pre-Civil War quotations suggest allusions to the poor beast.

There is a reference to the word in Folk-Etymology: A Dictionary of Verbal Corruptions Or Words Perverted in Form Or Meaning, by False Derivation Or Mistaken Analogy, an 1882 book by Reverend A. Smythe Palmer.

And in Specimens of English Dialect (Skeat & Elworthy, 1900):