Its seems always to be irrelevant people and places that only get initials, but I never understood why the authors couldn’t just give them names. I like the style now, because it’s old fashioned, but wasn’t it just distracting back then? Any particular reason?
Example, from Tristram Shandy:
It was a convention. The idea was that you were talking about a real person, but didn’t give a name out of respect for privacy. It made things more “realistic.”
There are various theories about it. Before the late eighteenth century fiction had mostly been in the form of romances with clearly mythological or historical settings. Contemporary events were more the realm of satirists and newspapers, who would sometimes avoid trouble by referring to their subjects as Mr. S_____ and so forth.
This practice carried over into the then-new form of the novel, the realistic story in a contemporary setting.
What I think is kind of silly is obscuring dates. I was reading one book (by Anthony Trollope) where in one chapter the year was mentioned to be 18–, in another chapter it was 186-, and in another chapter it was 1869. And those chapters all took place in the same year (or two). Smooth move, Trollope…
Those are just a few of the nine billion names of G-d.
Catch-22 had a character named Major ------ de Coverley.
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
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