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Character Names in the Waverley Novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
One of the longest established conventions in English literature is that of giving self-interpreting names to characters. Scores of instances might be drawn from morality plays, Elizabethan and Restoration drama, with its Justice Greedys and Lovelesses, and eighteenth-century novels and plays, with their Slipslops and Lydia Languishes. During Scott's day George Colman the Younger, in his The Heir at Law, 1808, entertained audiences with Stedfasts and Homespuns and references to Lawyer Ferret, Lady Littlefigure, Lord Sponge, Mrs. Holdbank, Lady Betty Pillory, the Hon. Mrs. Cheatwell, Lord Spindle, Master Drumstick, Mrs. Sudds, Old Latitat (a lawyer, of course), Lord Loggerhead, Lord Docktail, Twist, and Young Vats (the beau brewer). Later in the century, Dickens peopled his pages with Mr. Glibs, Surgeon Slashers, and Professor Wheezys; but, as most of his names were chosen solely for their comicality, they lack suggestive variety. Thackeray's social satire is at times unreal because of an excessive use of telltale soubriquets; this is particularly true of The Book of Snobs with its infinity of Lord and Lady Snobbingtons. George Eliot exhibits little subtlety in this field; perhaps the most obvious instances are those of Scrag Whale, an explorer, Greenland Grampus, Proteus Merman, and Professor Sperm N. Whale in Theophrastus Such. The convention has even survived to the present day, though with somewhat impaired vitality. Mr. Burthen, a carrier, Mr. Bulge, a wine merchant, Dr. Chestman, Hardman, a blacksmith, Louisa Menlove, Rootle, a dentist, Tipman, a valet, and Parson Billy Toogood appear in Hardy's novels; and the Earl of Frogs, Gosling, an apprentice, Grubb, Lady Hammergallow, Mrs. Jabber, and Mrs. Montague Pangs in those of H. G. Wells.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1934
References
1 Sir John Frugal, a merchant, appears in Massinger's City Madam; the flavor of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature is also preserved in these names: Frederick Altamont (Altamont—young Genoese lord in Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent), name by which the romantic Jack Bunce wished to be known: Bajazet (Bajazet—Sultan of Turkey in Rowe's Tamerlane), Mistress Chiffinch's “black boy,” a “little heathen Sultan”; Blowselinda (Blowsalinda—a country girl in Gay's “The Shepherd's Week”), “damsel” who mourned Slicing Dick of Paddington's death at Tyburn; Mrs. Mincing, Julia Mannering's maid; and Spontoon, Colonel Talbot's confidential servant.
2 Linker is also a fairly common name. Of the names discussed in this article which are real, rather than fictitious, those to which attention is not otherwise called are marked by asterisks. In such cases, the coincidence between name and character may be the result of chance. Unless otherwise indicated, definitions have been taken from John Jamieson, An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ed. John Longmuir and David Donaldson (Paisley, 1879–82); Alexander Warrack, A Scots Dialect Dictionary (London and Edinburgh, 1911); and the glossary in Sir Walter Scott, Waverley Novels (Edinburgh, 1895–96), vol. 48, the last being valuable only when the novelist used the same Scottish word as a name and as a common noun.
3 M. F. A. Husband, A Dictionary of the Characters in the Waverly Novels of Sir Walter Scott (London, 1910), a work which has been a great help in the preparation of this article. Some of the names just mentioned deserve further comment: (1) Isaac Meiklehose—Scott discusses Burns' Letters to Clarinda in a chatty epistle to Lady Abercorn on January 22, 1808: “Clarinda was in the work-day world a Mrs. Meiklehose (in English, Mrs. Great-stockings),—Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (Boston, 1894), i, 91; (2) Lady Glowrowrum—Glororum (also spelled Gloweroerem), Belford, name of a farm overlooking Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, has been referred by folk etymology to the besiegers of that castle who ”glowered over“ their opponents,—Examples of Printed Folk-Lore concerning Northumberland, collected by M. C. Balfour and edited by N. W. Thomas (London, 1904), p. 170; (3) the Laird of Gusedub—Thomas Wilkie includes in his unpublished Old Scots Songs, collected in Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire & Berwickshire A.D. 1815 the song of ”The blate wooer“ who hustled out of bed as soon as his bolder sweetheart got in with him,—
“But a great goose-dub was before the door,
And there fell he, & there fell he;
In a great goose-dub before the door,
And there fell he, I'se warrant.“
National Library of Scotland, MS. 123, p. 93.
4 Thackeray, too, indulges in this perhaps reminiscent humor, mentioning Dr. Swishtail, head of a famous school for boys, in Vanity Fair and four other works. For the prototype of Jedediah Cleishbotham, Mr. Broadfoot, teacher at the clachan of Penningham, who signed himself facetiously “ Clashbotham,” see John Patterson, Memoir of Joseph Train, F.S.A. Scot. The Antiquarian Correspondent of Sir Walter Scott (Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1857), p. 39.
5 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. James A. H. Murray (Oxford, 1888–1928),—hereafter to be referred to as N.E.D.
6 N.E.D.—Dick Tinto appears in The Bride of Lammermoor as Peter Pattieson's artist friend who furnished material out of which the novel grew.
7 Scott gave his own animals such names; for instance, his Highland terrier from Kintail was called Ourisque (ourisk, a Highland satyr).
8 N.E.D.—The name Aiken Drum may have been suggested to Scott by an interesting process of association. There is an old song about“ Willie Wude,” whose clothes were made of food,—“And he play'd upon a laddie, a laddie.” A man came down from the moon, by name Aiken Drum, a player on the razor, and ate poor Willie's garments; he died, however, of the attempt to make way with the stockings, which were of “the gude sheep tails.” Thomas Wilkie op cit., pp. 49–52. For the relations of Wilkie and Scott, see History of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club, xxiii (1919), p. 50, and Thomas Wilkie's unpublished Old Scots Songs … A.D. 1814, Nat. Lib. of Scotland, MS. 122, p. 40.
9 The Gentleman's Magazine, cxxvi (1819), 132, col. 1.
10 The Lives of those eminent Antiquaries Elias Ashmole, Esquire, and Mr. William Lilly (London, 1774), 47–48; the passage is quoted by Scott in his edition of “Some Traditionall Memorialls on the Raigne of King James the First,” Secret History of the Court of James the First (Edinburgh, 1811), i, 264–266, and in note 4 to The Fortunes of Nigel.
11 N.E.D.
12 N.E.D.
13 N.E.D.
14 gowl, bellow, yell,—George Watson, The Roxburghshire Word-Book (Cambridge U. Press, 1923).
15 N.E.D.—Several other Waverley characters borrow names from supernatural beings: Aiken Drum, Robin Goodfellow, “a queer-looking, small-eyed boy of the Aultoun of St. Ronan's,” “the original Puck of the Shaws dramaticals,” Kelpie, Mother Nicneven, Pixie, and Mother Redcap.
16 N.E.D., s. v. blazon.
17 N.E.D.
18 N.E.D.
19 N.E.D.
20 N.E.D.
21 N.E.D.
22 Sir James Wilson, Lowland Scotch (Oxford U. Press, 1915).
23 N.E.D.—Cf. Master Michael Mumblazen in Kenilworth.
24 Quoted from Jamieson, who says in the preface to the Supplement, dated Edinburgh, May 20, 1825: “I have, to the utmost of my power, availed myself of the antiquarian lore of … Sir Walter Scott, Baronet. I owe much to the works acknowledged by him, and to others, which the general voice of the public ascribes to him, as the only living person who is deemed capable of writing them. On every application, however much occupied by his own literary engagements, he has manifested the greatest promptitude in forwarding mine.”
25 N.E.D.
26 Both Scott and Lockhart assign My Aunt Margaret's Mirror to 1828; it was first published in The Keepsake for 1829, ed. F. M. Reynolds (London, n. d.), which may have appeared in time for the Christmas trade of 1828.
27 Throughout, the line of demarcation between English and Scottish dialectic words may seem to have been drawn too straight, but the study has demanded a certain degree of arbitrariness.