Victoria wasn’t Victorian. Christ wasn’t Christian. Keynes wasn’t Keynesian. Ras Tafari wasn’t Rastafarian.
Who else had a religion, attitude, movement, system of beliefs, etc., named after them, but that they themselves didn’t adhere to?
Ayn Rand?
Karl Marx perhaps?
Can you explain the Victoria one? As well as perhaps the Keynes one, though that’s from my lack of knowledge about the details.
Pelagianism was probably not what Pelagius believed.
It is still debated whether Machiavelli was being serious or not.
Nicolas Chauvin was not a sexist but a nationalist (it retains this meaning in French).
Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus was not a Fabian.
Do they have to be -isms? Schrödinger didn’t believe that the cat thought experiment was true, he intentionally made it ridiculous to poke holes in a specific theory.
Jacobitism wasn’t a Jacob but a James 
Martin Luther wasn’t a Lutheran. He was Catholic.
Darwin wasn’t a Social Darwinist.
The Kardashians aren’t really Cardassian.
“Victorian” was never used to refer to a particular belief system, but an era.
The bigger problem is that Herbert Spencer, who coined the term Survival of the Fittest while arguing that entire ethnicities (we are, after all, merely variants of the human race), were inherently unequal due to genetic and geographic/historical circumstance. The phrase is commonly misattributed to Charles Darwin and the term Social Darwinism came later.# I really would rather the term be “Spencerist” because the currently misattributed term gives a good man a bad name.
—G!
There’s a term for that. I don’t think it’s “retcon” but something similar having less to do with literary explanations and more to do with history and perceptions of culture.
I wonder if Freud was prone to uttering Freudian slips…
Jung was old!
Puritans weren’t actually Puritanical in terms of sexuality and expression which is how almost all people use the word for.
Poe wasn’t always poetic.
Anders Celsius’s thermometer was the reverse of the current Celsius scale, with freezing at 100 and boiling at 0.
And Daniel Fahtenheit lied about his stature.
Epicurus didn’t advocate Hedonism. In Ancient Greece, a core central question was “Live based on Virtue or Pleasure?” Virtue = a set of values that you base decisions on, even if they limit pleasure at the time. Pleasure = living in the Now, and learning to appreciate the situation you are in. Wherever you go, there you are. They are in truth a Duality, held separate to help contemplation.
Epicureanism got twisted by its opponents over the centuries. It was about Zen Be Here Now-ness, not Dionysian decadence.
Freud was a fraud?
John Duns Scotus wasn’t a dunce.
Oh, oh,…Bush had a Quayle (lame, I know)
Thomas Kuhn, the paradigm shift man, later on said he wasn’t a Khunian. What he meant was that the Kuhnians had taken his ideas far beyond their applicability. Every person with a new idea was calling it a paradigm shift.
The case of Keynes was curious. I consider myself a Keynsian, but that means that I think that during a recession/depression the government ought to run deficits, but during good times, should have a surplus and pay off the debts. Like Clinton did. Sometimes I call myself a Josephian. But Keynsian has come to mean (at least by its detractors) as always having a deficit.
Jane Roe a/k/a Norma McCorvey changed her mind and became a fanatical anti-abortion activist.
Ellen James wasn’t an Ellen Jamesian (she was fictional, too, of course, but she’s still a good example).