Gelett Burgess and Names for Characters

WRITERS OF FICTION have commented extensively on the names of their characters.C. S. Forester became one exception when he was intervi.ewedby. a member of the American Name Society; and Gelett Burgess, American humorist and novelist, became another when he devoted a two-thousand-word essay to names.!.Near the end of a long career in letters, Burgess prepared his essay as a good-humored guide for younger writers and for other readers interested in using names outside of literature.In his essay, Burgess was chiefly interested in methods of selecting and originating names and in the effects that names produced.In general, his comment was based on his own experience and observation and possibly on a study of actual names published twenty years before by George R. Stewart. 2 To illustrate his essay, Burgess drew examples from his imagination and from t.he works of such writers as Shakespeare, Bunyan, Dickens, James, Kipling and O. Henry; and these examples can be identified with Burgess' own character names to reveal his own application of his theories.In the following discussion, unless otherwise specified, examples of Burgess' .namesare from Find the Woman (1911), a novel of "fancy to rival fact~" Since the seventy-eight names among the 342 pages of this novel are introduced at about the rate of one new name for each four and onethird pages, double the proportion of all the names in his' novels (418) to the total number of pages (3,637), Find the Woman must have made the heaviest demand on Burgess' name-producing pow-1 Gelett Burgess, "Make a Name for Yourself," The Saturday Review of Literatw'e, 30 (25 January 1947), pp.9-10; 41. "C. S.

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