Today we have Naming of Characters

Tags

Class, Dickens, Names, Nicole J Simms, TV soaps

We all have to give names to our characters. I’ve just read Nicole Simms’ latest blog (http://www.nicole-j-simms.co.uk/6-ways-i-find-names-for-my-characters/) which shows how systematically she sets about this task. It’s good of her to share these trade secrets!

Particularly helpful is the suggestion of going to baby name websites for names that were popular in the decade your story is set. And I like too the idea of noting the names of the cashier on receipts you get at the checkout. Thanks, Nicole.

I think the nearest I’ve got to being that systematic is poring over an atlas of Britain looking for suitable place names to use for my characters. Place names and occupation names are good sources: look at the traditional practice of TV soaps of using the latter for working-class characters – think of Butcher or Slater in ‘Eastenders’, or (I’m showing my age here) Elsie Tanner in ‘Coronation Street’.

The British class system can make this a minefield. You’d think that centuries of social movement would have muddled it all up more than it has, but you wouldn’t call your dustman character Piers Devereux or your son of an earl Gary Thackenthwaite.

One option is to go the Dickens route, and make up absurd names that actually are just right: Mr Bumble, Wackford Squeers, Ebenezer Scrooge!

And then there’s the whole world of names of overseas origin to choose from. Patel and Singh have been common English names for at least two generations. Poniatowski, Novotny, Fontanelli, van Dijk, Schmidt, Papadopoulos, Gomez, Le Blanc – take your pick when thinking about arrivals from the EU.

In my last story I came up with Freckleton Jessop as the name of a firm of solicitors: Freckleton from the Lancashire home village of a college friend and Jessop from the high street store (other camera shops are available).

I enjoy the search for a good name. It can take time, but it’s worth it if you get it right.

How do you set about it?

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells – and a story of splendid ladies

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Charlotte Bartlett, Disgusted Ladies, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, E M Forster, Tunbridge Wells, Votes for Women

The expression ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ may have entered the English vocabulary in the 1950s onwards as a byword for middle class conservative moral outrage, but this elegant spa town in the south east of England has a habit of regularly cropping up in literature well before that. We find references in Dickens’ Bleak House, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Fanny Burney’s Camilla, and Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon for a start.

It’s often depicted as the residence of genteel aunts and maiden ladies – a favourite being Charlotte Bartlett in E M Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View: ‘I am used to Tunbridge Wells, where we are all hopelessly behind the times’.

But not all of the good ladies of Tunbridge Wells were like Charlotte Bartlett then, any more than they are now. Just published by Matador is Disgusted Ladies by local author Anne Carwardine. It tells the fascinating story of how the town was home to a series of ordinary yet extraordinary VOTES FOR WOMEN campaigners – remarkable and courageous women who were disgusted for all the right reasons.

Tunbridge Wells in 2018, a hundred years after women were given the right to vote: no longer disgusted but still a town with a distinguished literary presence, past and present…