Dickens and His Lists of Names

Abstract

Novelists, it seems, tend to use proper names in a particular way to express an attitude or to reveal character. Dickens is one of the more supreme examples among English novelists in this respect. Since Ihave dealt with this tendency elsewhere, 1Ishould like to note briefly the lists of names that Dickens left in his' 'Book of Memoranda, compiled between 1855 and 1865,2 a kind of notebook in which he put down or jotted hints and suggestions for stories, pieces of imagery that apparently he wished to use later, outlines of characters, titles that could be used, of which some note will be made later, and some lists of names to use in the stories. Dickens, a close observer of speech, also preserved oddities of speech. 3 The names a novelist uses in his works indicate to some extent the way in which he or she modifies or otherwise transforms raw material, so to speak, into a final form. Actually, Dickens transforms the names as little as possible, sometimes not at all. The few modificatioQs seem to be for the better, however. Names that are real ones have become less and less like fiction. Parents visit some terrible sounds upon their children, not curses or verbal abuse, but names. Weare all familiar with that soI1of thing and some of us live through it and with it, etc. Dickens apparently scanned public lists of names, possibly also newspaper stories also, to find ones that to him revealed character. Two such lists are taken from the Privy Council Education lists. 4 He noted the following names for girls: