Perhaps this interest in Victorian Christmas things has other interest attached to it as well …
Children hauling buckets of coal or working in the textile mills, women at home “happily” knitting or making dinner with out a thought of voting and only one sir name,and etc.
One thing I’d be curious to ask Cecil about is where and how the concept of the hyphenated (dual) sir names came to be “invented”. Can we blame Canada for that?
Merry Christmas,
Happy New Year,
Happy New Century,
and
Happy New Millennium to all
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Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
Cecil’s column can be found on-line at the link provided, once again, by the kindly bibliophage.
This question would probably get a more enthusiastic response in the General Questions forum, since it doesn’t really relate to the column. I’ll give you my answer anyway, though.
Hyphenated surnames came into being not too long after surnames started being used in the Middle Ages. [By the way, it is ‘sur’ names. Comes from the Old French for ‘above’ or ‘on top of’, and indicates a name used in addition to the ‘Christian’ name to distinguish you from all the others with the same first name.] Basically, once a name rose to high stature, fathers were loathe to let their daughters drop it in favor of a husband’s name. So, the children of an heiress would take a hyphenated name, so as to carry on a branch of the famous family. Like most any practice of the nobility, it eventually was emulated by the upperclasses among the commonfolk. Now, in our much less class-conscious society, almost anyone might use this practice.