Names

Abstract

In his excellent study of Thackeray’s language, K. C. Phillipps writes, ‘There is one minor aspect of Thackeray’s art in which he excels. This is the selection of wittily apposite proper names for his characters, with appropriate titles, property, and appendages’.¹ In The Newcomes the sheer number of such names is impressive. I count something like ninety. They include major characters, the Newcomes themselves, whose name expresses upward mobility in the new industrial and commercial society, and minor characters of every sort. One might quarrel with the idea that these names are allusive — most are, though what they allude to is various, but some are not. Charles Slyboots, who engages in clandestine correspondence with a young lady, has a simple colloquialism as a name; Lady Barwise is of course the wife of a chief justice; and what should Madame de Flouncival be but a ‘great milliner’, or Quackenboss but a fashionable doctor? The topographical names however are allusive, with a fairly rich cluster of social association.