Boz, Ba and Derry Down Derry: Names and Pseudonyms in Victorian Literature

In nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, names are frequently shown to be unstable, unreliable and occasionally dangerous. From the limericks of Edward Lear to the fiction of Charles Dickens, Victorian literature seems to pre-empt Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist reading of name and signature, which insists that a name can never belong to the thing or person that it names, but has an independent existence in the system of signs that make up language. However, the Victorian interest in names and naming, which was rooted in both the philosophy of the period and in the prominence of names in the newly commodified marketplace, was also characterised by a faith in the power of naming and a concern about the responsibility that a name entailed.