Words, Names, Persons, and Places

Fiction, Names, and Riddles

"The name of Newton-Priors is really invaluable!—I never met with anything superior to it.—It is delightful.—One could live upon the name of Newton-Priors for a twelvemonth" (30 November 1814; Letters, 284).

So Jane Austen wrote in the autumn of 1814 to her niece Anna (daughter of Jane's brother James). Before her wedding to Benjamin Lefroy three weeks earlier Anna had been writing a novel; now Jane Austen encourages her niece, even after marriage, to continue. Anna's aunt has read a new chunk of manuscript. As a mark of Anna's promise she singles out her invention of a name. "Newton Priors" strikes Jane Austen as a particularly happy name for an imaginary place.

Presumably Austen appreciates Anna's wit in playing with the real place name "Newton Abbot(s)," combining the common "Newton" (i.e., "new" + tun, settlement or town) with the ecclesiastical, medieval, and important "Priors." A "Prior" is a cut below an "Abbot." Perhaps Anna Austen's characters have been living on the site of a priory but behaving in a manner not consonant with the priory's origins. Austen is always interested in cultural layers of the past and especially in ecclesiastical foundations. Her own novels display an acute attention to the shimmer of historical significance within names. Austen achieves meaning that goes down deep into layers of English history and relationship to the land.

Would Austen be bothered with such details? An artist cannot do anything slovenly. Jo Modert's groundbreaking essay "Chronology within the Novels" made us aware of the kind of care that Austen could put into apparently casual details. Building on work by R. W. Chapman, Mary Lascelles, and Vladimir Nabokov, Modert taught us to appreciate Austen's subtle evocation of human time, the "hidden calendar game for the reader" in Emma. Jane's pianoforte arrives on Saint Valentine's Day; Frank almost confesses the true state of affairs to Emma on Shrove Tuesday (22 February), a proper time for confessions. The Box Hill expedition takes place on Midsummer Day (New Style). Midsummer madness briefly reigns. Mr. Knightley proposes to Emma on Old Midsummer Day.

Names of places and persons in Austen's novels are chosen with equal care. The name of an estate or a village is never insignificant. First names and surnames always matter. The question of naming brings out a poetic complexity in Austen—as well as different kinds of comedy. Jane Austen's family was highly conscious of names. There is evidently a family joke regarding the first name "Richard," as we see early in Austen's extant letters: "Mr. Richard Harvey's match is put off, till he has got a Better Christian name, of which he has great Hopes" (16 September 1796; Letters, 10). The joke is echoed in the third sentence of Northanger Abbey ("Her father was ... a very respectable man, though his name was Richard"). Why is "Richard" so funny? The merriment evoked goes beyond an association of the name with Shakespeare's King Richard III or with Sir Richard Crofts, villain of Charlotte Smith's Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle (1788), one of the young Jane's favorite novels. Current American slang would make "Dick" a word obscenely signifying hypermasculinity, but the evidence of slang dictionaries of Austen's day indicates that "Dick" is associated with effeminacy, male weakness, or failure—or with being a poor substitute for something else: "That happened in the reign of Queen Dick, i.e. never; said of any absurd old story. I am as queer as Dick's hatband; that is, out of spirits, or don't know what ails me." Another dictionary adds that "Dickey" is "A sham shirt," also "An ass. Roll your dickey: drive your ass. Also a seat for servants to sit behind a carriage." "Roll your dickey" seems to be getting close to the contemporary American meaning, but with an additional suggestion of imbecility or incapacity. In Pride and Prejudice the port-drinking attorney Mr. Philips is about to fire his servant—another unlucky "Richard" (P&P, I, ch. 14). Austen seems unable to contemplate the name "Richard" without associations of bumbling or failure, deficiency in masculinity—all emerging in the harsh reflections on poor Dick Musgrove in Persuasion. But "Dick" is funny even when submerged in another form; "Miss Dickins," that "excellent Governess" of the young Lady Williams (a "Kitty"), eloped with the butler ("Jack and Alice," Juvenilia, 18).

Names encountered in daily life provided amusement. The death of a farmer "Clarinbold" or "Claringbo[u]ld" stimulated Jane to a comic flight:

Everything quite in Stile, not to mention Mr. Claringbould's funeral which we saw go by on Sunday. I beleive [sic] I told you in a former Letter that Edward had some idea of taking the name of Claringbould; but that scheme is over, tho' it would be a very eligible as well as a very pleasant plan, would any one advance him Money enough to begin on. (15–16 September 1796; Letters, 9)

A name like other property is really not needed anymore by someone whose funeral has gone by. The departed farmer's surname might now be taken by somebody else as a commodity—if the purchaser could afford it. The joke about Edward becoming "Claringbould" has a slight edge. Austen has noted that her brother Edward is fond of gaining lands, and this brother is indeed going to change his surname. Adopted and made the heir of the Knight family early in life, Edward eventually left off being an "Austen" and became a "Knight."

Names might seem as unalterable and fated as a birthplace, cementing a lasting identity. Women's surnames are alterable, changing upon marriage, but a man's surname stands for his permanent identity and inheritance. That supposition is not always borne out by facts. The eighteenth century went in for dramatic changes of name. Power of will overrides the "natural" or "given." Voltaire, for one, invented his own name, as did the Italian poet Metastasio. The Czarina we know as "Catherine the Great" (1729–96) began as Prussian Sophie-Friederike Auguste. A number of men around Jane Austen altered their names. The father of the Harris Bigg-Wither who was to propose to Jane Austen (with a one-day success) had been, wonderfully, "Lovelace Bigg." On receipt of an inheritance, Lovelace Bigg changed his surname...