Among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its
contents, but by its address. My name (for the purposes of this
article) is Thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson.
Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p." When I see it
wedged in the middle of my name I am conscious of an annoyance
altogether disproportioned to the fact. I know that taken in the lump
the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons. There is not a pin to
choose between us. In the beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or
other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself Thomson
and that man called himself Thompson. Why he should have spatchcocked
a "p" into his name I don't know. I daresay it was pride on his part,
just as it is my pride not to have a "p."
Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist.
He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the
Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding. When the novelist was asked
to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs,
he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell." That is probably
the case of the Thompsons. They don't know how to spell.
But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own
forms with obstinate pride. We feel an outrage on our names as if it
were an outrage on our persons. It was such an outrage that led to one
of Stevenson's most angry outbursts. Some American publisher had
pirated one of his books. But it was not the theft that angered him so
much as the misspelling of his name. "I saw my book advertised as the
work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled. It is so easy
to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is
full length on the title-page of your booty. But no, damn him, not he!
He calls me Stephenson." I am grateful to Stevenson for that word. It
expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson.
Thompson, indeed!
I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, Sir
Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford. He was
addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers
(whoever they may have been) boiled within him. "Do I look like a
person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on. And
as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like
a person of the name of Thompson? Now do I?" And yet I suppose one
may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of
Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own. I should like to try the
experiment on Sir F. E. Smith. I should like to address him as Sir
Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.
It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys
us when people play tricks with our names. We want to be ourselves and
not somebody else. We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and
the fathers that begat us. We may not know much about our ancestors,
and may not care much about them. Most of us, I suppose, are in the
position of Sydney Smith. "I found my neighbours," he said, "were
looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I
only got as far back as my great-grandfather, _who disappeared
somewhere about the time of the Assizes_." If we go far enough back we
shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the Assizes,
or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't. But, such as
they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those
fellows, the Thompsons.
And there is another reason for the annoyance. To misspell a man's
name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do
not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that
you need not trouble to find out. It is to offer him the subtlest of
all insults--especially if he is a Scotsman. The old prides and
hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and
I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by
calling him Mr. M'Donald or _vice versa_. Indeed, I recall the case of
a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a
political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he
knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as
Thompson makes me boil.
Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity. I like a
man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or
steals another. I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the
author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was
Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and
went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house
of the Duke of Northumberland. He even put the Percy arms on his
monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own
name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to Godriche.
I am afraid Bishop Percy was a snob.
There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for
reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and
so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually
"something rotten about him," as Johnson would say. He stamps himself
as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste."
When he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire (de
Sisac)." On removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and
put up a plate with "Fellaire, de Sisac." Changing residence again, he
dropped the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac."
It is possible of course to go to the other extreme--to err, as it
were, on the side of honesty. I know a lady who began life with the
maiden name of Bloomer. She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs.
Bloomer-Watlington. Her husband died and she married a Mr. Dodd,
whereupon she styled herself Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd. She is
still fairly young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing health.
Already I have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into
a single line on the envelope. I see the time approaching when I shall
have to turn over and write, let us say,
[Illustration: handwritten "Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd"]
There is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all
this. It is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may
have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others.
After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it
is the better.
But the spirit of the thing is right. Let us avoid disguises. Let us
stick to our names, be they ever so humble. Let us follow the great
example of Cicero. His name originated with an ancestor who had a nick
or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a
vetch--_cicer_. When he was standing for public office some anxious
friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but
he declined, saying that he would make the name of Cicero more glorious
than the Scauri or Catuli. And grandly did he redeem the promise. The
Scauri and the Catuli live to-day only by the fact that Cicero once
mentioned them, while we know Cicero far better than we know our next
door neighbour. It is a good precedent for Thomson. I have a mind to
make that name outlast the Cecils and Marlboroughs, if not the
Pyramids. And cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."