There seems to be tendency, when writing about authors who have three names, to refer to them by their second and third names.
James Fennimore Cooper is sometimes just called Fennimore Cooper; Arthur Conan Doyle is sometimes called Conan Doyle; William Clark Russell is called Clark Russell (in one instance by Conan Doyle!)
Is there an actual reason for this? Is it some kind of convention? Is it something the authors themselves preferred?
I’ve noticed that their works are catalogues professionally under their last names: libraries will have them as Cooper, Doyle, and Russell. But in critiques and essays, the 2nd name 3rd name thing seems quite common.
This “compound surname” thing is rather fluid. Wiki sez about Conan Doyle:
I’m guessing that the practice is influenced by the fact that “Arthur Doyle” is quite a common name, and putting in the middle name makes identification more obvious. Same deal for “William Russell” and “James Cooper”.
I think it’s sometimes the misapprehension that the middle name is actually part of the surname, especially when it’s unusual first name material, like Conan or Fennimore, so like Arthur Conan-Doyle etc. Doesn’t explain why they’d do it themselves, though, maybe they prefer that name like you said.
On the other hand the compound surname is a thing. As an off-the-top-of-my-head example, actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s surname is Baron Cohen, not Cohen. His cousins, Filmmaker Ash and Psychologist Simon, hyphenate to make it more clear.
I always thought (in the case of Conan Doyle, for instance) it was sometimes a way to sound a bit more aristocratic, like changing Honore Balzac to Honore de Balzac.
Just to be picky, the Welsh actress who won an Oscar for her role in “Chicago” is professionally known as “Catherine Zeta-Jones.” She styles her last name “Zeta-Jones,” with the hyphen. It’s not a habit other people picked up for clarify who they were talking about, like “Conan Doyle,” it’s her doing.
She was born Catherine Zeta Jones, with Zeta as a middle name, but chose Zeta-Jones as her acting name, I’d presume for one of the two invariable reasons:
Just to sound different, or
Because someone named “Catherine Jones” was already in the union.
As Kamino Neko notes, “the compound surname is a thing.” But a person using their middle name as a first name is also a thing—sometimes preceded by an initial, as in L. Frank Baum, sometimes not, as in Paul McCartney.
Are we supposed to think of “Conan Doyle” or “Fenimore Cooper” or “Bernard Shaw” as being more like a compound surname, or being more like a first name-last name? Or is this even a meaningful distinction when people were more commonly referred to by last name (e.g. in [Conan] Doyle’s stories, the characters call each other “Holmes” and “Watson”)?
Of course, this is fairly common with first names: Billy Bob and Mary Sue. (As a database manager, I often had to write special code to permit these to be stored properly!)
One thing that use to bug me back in the day of record & CD stores: Andrew Lloyd Webber was usually filed under “W” while his brother, classical cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, was usually filed under “L.”
Could be worse. Our first merge of payroll files into another branch’s database during a consolidation; their database came from a really old IBM mainframe, all their programs used A(25) instead of X(25) field for names with the predictable result - all employees with apostrophes or hyphens in their names failed to load. Then we had to explain to a dozen employees why we were misspelling their names now. Some of those hyphen people were a bit touchy.
Another one that gives some older databases fits is the “ñ” as in “piñata.” Mr. Castaño really hates getting mail to Mr. Castano. But at least that’s in the middle of the name, and doesn’t have much effect on alphabetical sorting. But then you have the initial letter, such as an A with umlaut, or one of those Swedish As with the circle on the top (no idea what that’s called…) That forces the name totally out of sequence!
Even as a fairly well-read Holmesian, I have never found a good explanation of how Arthur C. Doyle became the patriarch of the Conan Doyle clan. I think yours is the likely explanation: it sounded cooler.
On the other hand, David Lloyd George added his uncle’s name to his own and is invariably referred to in official writing of the time as Mr Lloyd George.