The Browser - The Naming Of Hounds

A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Topics may vary. Correspondence and criticism welcomed: robert@thebrowser.com

This week: Names, names, and more names; of streets, dogs, knights, moths and fictional characters

By the time of his death in 2008 Adrian Mitchell had written more than thirty plays, films, and operas, many of them for Peter Brook and for the Royal Shakespeare Company. But literature will probably remember him best for a four-line verse that he published in 1969 and dedicated to his wife Celia Hewitt:

When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on.

Mitchell's poem, Celia, Celia, was often in my mind in the years before Covid when The Browser kept a small office just off High Holborn, at 88-90 Hatton Garden. As Mitchell's poem suggests, there is precious little in High Holborn to inspire jollity. But thinking about Celia was enough to raise Mitchell's spirits, and thinking about Mitchell thinking about Celia was enough to raise mine.

When The Browser moved into Hatton Garden towards the end of 2015, another tenant downstairs was moving out. This was Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd, destined for liquidation after the events of April that same year when six elderly robbers had tunnelled into the company's supposedly impenetrable basement vaults over a holiday weekend and made off with a haul of jewels and bullion reputedly worth between $20 million and $200 million.

After the trial and sentencing of the robbers in March 2016, relative calm returned to Hatton Garden. But it was not the calm particular to a garden, for in Hatton Garden there was and is no garden. The lands and orchard once attached to the Bishop of Ely's Palace were paved over and sold for house-building in the 17th century. Jewellers and diamond merchants began congregating there in the early 19th century, and dominate commerce in Hatton Garden to this day.  

As with Hatton Garden, most street-names in London are illusory. There is nothing noticeably high about High Holborn, even though, at 72 feet above sea level, it is said to have the highest elevation in the City of London. There is no Court of Chancery in Chancery Lane, at the eastern end of High Holborn, and no bleeding heart in Bleeding Heart Yard (though there may have been one in 1646). There is no court in Tottenham Court Road, no palace in Fulham Palace Road, no circus in Oxford Circus, no bridge at Knightsbridge, and so on ad infinitum.

At least the Court of Chancery, perpetual backdrop to Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House, has not gone far from Chancery Lane. It continues in business as the Chancery Division of the High Court Of Justice, across High Holborn in Fetter Lane — a street-name temptingly suggestive of punishment, but of which Wikipedia pleasingly remarks:

The street was originally called Faytor or Faiter Lane, then Fewteres Lane. This is believed to come from the Old French "faitor" meaning lawyer, though by the 14th century this had become synonymous with an idle person.

With a very few exceptions I find the street-names of London more interesting and attractive than the streets themselves, perhaps because I spent so much of my Yorkshire childhood gazing into the London A-Z rather as Keats once gazed into Chapman's Homer.

I imagined then that streets with names like Saffron Hill, Leather Lane, Cowcross Street, Snow Hill and Passing Alley must have kept at least one foot in Shakespeare's London, and perhaps even a toe or two in Chaucer's London — which was not remotely the case when I finally clapped eyes on them in the 1970s.

But one could still catch a glimpse of Dickens's London, here and there in Holborn and Clerkenwell. These were still the sort of down-at-heel streets where you might go looking for a watchmaker, a printmaker, a piano tuner, a cheap lodging, or a dealer in surgical instruments. The typesetting for The Spectator, if I remember correctly, continued into the 1980s at a print-shop in Saffron Hill hard by Fagin's rookery from Oliver Twist.

Even now, in 2023, you can still get a drink or stay the night at The One Tun in Saffron Hill, the public house which Dickens described almost two centuries ago as "a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light burnt all day in the winter-time, and where no ray of sun ever shone in the summer". There, each evening, you would risk finding Bill Sikes, sitting with his dog Bull's Eye, a daunting presence even by the standards of Saffron Hill in 1838:

He had a brown hat on his head, and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck: with the long frayed ends of which he smeared the beer from his face as he spoke. He disclosed, when he had done so, a broad heavy countenance with a beard of three days' growth, and two scowling eyes; one of which displayed various parti-coloured symptoms of having been recently damaged by a blow.

The day did come when Bill Sikes drank no more in The One Tun. And that was because he had murdered his girlfriend, drowned his dog, and hanged himself from a rooftop. There was never a dull moment in Dickensian London. But you would not have wanted to live there.

Nor is it only street-names that I hoard for my woolgathering. I am tempted to say that in most cases I find the names of things more entertaining, more attractive, than the things themselves.

Take dogs. If, in real life, I came across anything resembling a pack of late-medieval hunting hounds, I doubt I would want to prolong the encounter. But when my Browser colleague Caroline Crampton recommended The Names Of All Manner Of Hounds, a manuscript listing 1,065 names for hunting dogs and greyhounds compiled around 1470 for the use of the Dansey family at Brinsop Court in Herefordshire, I was transfixed.

I dare say that nobody in their right minds would expect a book of dog-names published in 2023 to convey much of importance about human flourishing were it to be found in 2523 in the ruins of some Amazon warehouse. So what might we hope to learn now from reading a list of dogs' names compiled in the 15th century?

Lots, actually, says David Scott-Macnab, of the University of Johannesburg, in an introduction to the manuscript, which he edited for publication:

What is particularly fascinating about all these words is the possibility they hold for providing us with a rare glimpse — a snapshot as it were — of the spoken language of daily life in the fifteenth century ... High-status hunters felt little need to record the names of entire packs of hounds; they made their point with a few representative names. But dog-handlers who trained, bathed, nursed and fed the hounds on a daily basis, and who whipped them into line when hunting, must have lived by a different imperative, one that required them to know their dogs as individuals.

Almost without exception, the names of the hounds are alive with literal meaning. The language is often so plain as to be comic, though I am not sure whether comic effects were intended. What did Lusk, Lumpe, Liberall and Litillwitte do to earn such names in their first days of life? What did the dog-handlers see in the faces of Arguere, Brawlere, Flaterere, Halibutte, and Wrecche?

The irregular spelling of the period endows these names with illusory but irresistible moments of naivety and childlike penmanship which only adds to their charm. Who knew that there were dogs in the 15th century called Havegoodday, Beste-of-all, Rude-ynowgh and Makehitgood? Who could not have wanted to love, at least from a safe distance, a pack of dogs christened Blameles, Badde, Filthe, Oribull, Brayneles and Harmeles?

I do wish that The Names Of All Manner of Hounds had been on my English Literature syllabus at university in place, say, of Gawain And The Green Knight. After reading The Names I want to know more about these people (and their dogs). After reading Gawain I never wanted to hear from the fifteenth century again.

That said, even the Green Knight had a pretty cool name when he finally got around to revealing it after heads had been severed and boars had been hunted and garters exchanged. He declared himself to be, in civilian life, "Sir Bertilak de Hautdesert", a name which Gawain would have found only moderately preposterous by the exacting standards of the Round Table.

The main players in Malory's Morte d'Artur went by names which had convenient short-forms, and which have become familiar to us over time – Gawain, Lancelot, Mordred, Merlin, Guinevere and so on. Not so the minor players, whom we finally encounter en masse in the seventh of Malory's eight volumes, and who are pure Monty Python.

Here are some of my favourite less-known Knights of the Round Table:

King Uriens of Gore
King Anguish of Ireland
Sir Hebes le Renoumes
Sir Sagramore le Desirous
Sir Dodinas le Savage
Sir Bruin le Noire
Sir Ozanna le Cure Hardy
Sir Griflet le Fise de Dieu
Sir Lucan the Butler
Sir Cloddrus
Sir Hellaine le Blank
Sir Bellangere le Beuse
Sir Sentraile
Sir Suppinabilis
Sir Bellangere le Orgulous
Sir Nerovens
Sir Plenorius
Sir Arrok de Grevaunt
Sir Degrane Sunace Velany
Sir Epinogris
Sir Mador de la Porte.

I think this may well be the most entertaining list of names of any kind, real or imagined, ever compiled.

Before encountering Sir Cloddrus and his kinsmen listed above, I would have ranked the catalogue of British moths, maintained and updated annually by the Butterfly Foundation, as the world's most entertaining name-list. I will now claim it merely as the most entertaining list of names of things which actually exist.

Here, with a salute to Butterfly Foundation, are my favourite moth names, probably more alluring than the moths themselves:

Apple Leaf Skeletonizer
Barberry Carpet
Blair’s Shoulder-knot
Bloxworth Snout
Canary-shouldered Thorn
Chinese Character
Cistus Forester
Clifden Nonpareil
Dewick's Plusia
Dingy Shell
Drab Looper
Drinker
Dusky Hook-tip
Fiery Clearwing
Figure of Eighty
Firethorn Leaf Miner
Ground Lackey
Heart And Dart
Least Minor
Liquorice Piercer
Merveille du Jour
Oak Processionary
Pale Eggar
Pretty Pinion
Red-necked Footman
Rosy Underwing
Scarce Forester
Spindle Ermine
The Mullein
Twin-spotted Quaker
Weaver’s Wave

It amazes me that this list is not routinely pillaged by authors stuck for names and conceits. Where are the Diaries Of Rosy Underwing, that plucky young Londoner doing something in media? How did Frank Richards contrive to write 100 million words about British public schoolboys without ever mentioning "Least Minor"?

As for "Bloxworth Snout", my bookshelf cries out for at least two of them. One would appear in a novel by P.G. Wodehouse, perhaps as a friend of Roderick Spode. The other would pass briefly through Hogwarts, posing as a supply teacher in shape-shifting while pursuing some deeper and darker agenda.  

I tell you, this catalogue of moths's names is a literary goldmine. A dozen novels are in there somewhere waiting only to be written by GPT-4.

We have gone a very long way round, but, as the end of this letter approaches, I am finally arriving at the subject with which I had intended to begin, had High Holborn not got in the way, namely, the naming of characters in fiction.

I think of this as a peculiar skill, since names in fiction tend to operate very differently from names in real life.

In real life, when you meet a person, you cannot generally help but have a distinct and often quite detailed impression of them by the time you learn their name. They will be old or young, big or small, shy or forward, quiet or loud. They will dress this way or that, they will be here in this place and not in some other place, they will care about you or not. The name which you eventually learn is merely a label that you attach, retrospectively, to this already-existing bundle of characteristics.  

In fiction, things work the other way round. When we encounter a fictional character, they are, almost invariably, revealed to us as a name. The name is the character, pending further and better particulars. And even when the character has been fleshed out a bit, the name is still the only way by which we, the readers, can be quite sure of keeping track of that particular person in the future. When we read, "Nicholas Nickleby stepped out of the carriage", we know what is going on. But if we read, "A tall man in his mid-twenties stepped out of the carriage", we are in a quite different situation.

Critics conventionally distinguish between two approaches to the naming of fictional characters, the "Cratylic" and the "Hermogenean", both terms being derived one of Plato's dialogues, the Kratylos, in which Cratylus and Hermogenes ask Socrates whether words are intrinsically and necessarily connected with the things to which they refer, or whether words have meaning only because humans give meaning to them. Cratylus is associated with the first of those positions, Hermogenes with the second.

The Cratylic style of naming is easy to spot. You give your character a name which signals their intended role or behaviour in your story. When Charles Dickens calls a schoomaster "Wackford Squeers", we know that Squeers will not be a nice man.

The Hermogenean style — you give your characters names which are believable but non-comittal — is much harder to spot, and much harder to pull off in the first place. So much harder, in fact, that I wonder it can ever be done at all.

In life there are no random or affectless names, at least when humans do the naming. All names, all words, have associations. Parents and guardians cannot help but choose or not choose names for children which incorporate some measure of hope, or fear, or expectation, or circumstance, or convention. Avoidance of associations creates associations of its own: Ask anybody called John Smith or Jane Doe.  

If names carry baggage in life, can they shed that baggage in fiction? I doubt it, especially names that are meant to be lifelike. An author is more or less obliged, I think, to give a fictional character a name which in some way connects with the author's understanding of why that character is in the story at all — what that character is for. It is mainly a question of how subtly or crudely, how directly or obliquely or perversely, that intention is expressed.

When we first encounter Mr Knightley in Emma, for example, we do not convict Jane Austen of Dickensian predestination. We know better than to rule out entirely the possibility that Mr Knightley may prove, on closer inspection, to be a very bad lot. But after so genteel an introduction, we will be all the more disappointed, all the more surprised, if Mr Knightley does let Emma down. We will want and need good reasons why the author toyed with our expectations.  

Very occasionally an author may need a truly blank and featureless name with which to birth a fictional character, perhaps because that character's voyage of self-discovery will in large measure drive the plot of the book, and the author does not want to give the game away in advance. "Harry Potter" is the shining example of this strategy, and J.K. Rowling is surely the most gifted namer of characters since Dickens. But you have to be an author of Rowling's genius to risk making your principal character unmemorable in any detail, including by name. Signalling dullness is rarely a winning strategy when selling books.

Somewhere in here I should by now have found room for Thomas Pynchon, whose names are sometimes vaguely Cratylic (Oedipa Maas), and sometimes just plain absurd (Pig Bodine, Perkus Tooth). But since I must have long since taxed your patience, let me postpone Pynchon sine die and instead recommend a novel where names are used to shock and transform the reader's experience in a way that I find original, brilliant, and perhaps unique.

I have in mind The Tyrant's Novel (2004), by Thomas Keneally, a tale of politics and literature and great cruelty set in an unnamed country which approximates to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It is by any measure a gripping book. But what makes it a masterpiece is Keneally's device of giving all his characters simple English names and having them all speak in plain, Australian-inflected English.

The effect of this shift is to rip away the veil of foreignness which would otherwise separate us from horrors and terrors happening in some far-away country of which we know little. Baghdad blurs into Birmingham or Brisbane. The victims and the virtuous — Alan, Sandra, Hugo — are people like us. The perpetrators and the apparatchiks — Andrew, Chaddock, Douglas, McBrien — are also people like us. Even the system is quite like ours: People sit at their desks, size up their colleagues, keep their heads down, and spend most of their time deflecting existing problems in somebody else's direction.

The Tyrant's Novel might easily be compared with George Orwell's 1984 as a portrait of everyday totalitarianism; save that I wonder if Keneally's is not the better book. Orwell's stroke of genius was to imagine Newspeak, a managed vocabulary meant to make dissenting propositions unspeakable and eventually unthinkable. Keneally's stroke of genius is to express actually existing totalitarianism in a language that we cannot help but understand, a language in which we recognise ourselves and our friends.

Throughout most of this letter I have dealt frivolously with names. But Keneally's book revives my respect for the deep power of naming. Names are often the first marker used when separating "us" from "them". Things that have names are things that people care about, one way or another.

Perhaps this last consideration is why The Names Of All Manner Of Hounds so charms me. Here are a thousand and more dogs being co-opted into the world of human behaviour, being treated with humour and affection by people who must care deeply about them, being remembered and written about. Meanwhile, just out of earshot, the Wars of the Roses are being waged and the Hundred Years War has destroyed much of Europe. Caring for animals is part of human nature that I want to know more about; massacring one's neighbours is not.
— Robert