Ye Olde News

A selection of dragons, wyrms and other mythological creatures from various 17th and 18th century calligraphy copybooks which were drawn with single lines to practice (and show off) penmanship strokes.

"My dear Will -

Thursday morning - a beautiful, heavenly day - and here I am writing to a depraved, false man, who in spite of a professed love for a certain small child, basely deserts her in the hour of need."

-Nell to Will, March 11, 1897.

Will's betrayal in this instance was insinuating that Nell's one-year-old niece Dorothy would not win the "Baby Show" at the local fair.

A selection of animals from various 17th and 18th century calligraphy copybooks which were drawn with single lines to practice (and show off) penmanship strokes.

A selection of birds from various 17th and 18th century calligraphy copybooks which were drawn with single lines to practice (and show off) penmanship strokes.

Today marks the 148th birthday of Will - the recipient of most of the letters from my "Rachel & Co." collection (a box of 1000+ absolutely delightful letters from the 1890s that I purchased at a flea market.)

Will shared his birthday with George Washington, which was a considerably more important holiday in the 1890s than it is now, and often (jokingly) complained about this fact.

On his 20th birthday, in 1897, Will received a letter from his friend Nell reassuring him of whose birthday she found more worthy of celebration:

"You ask which I think is more important – your birthday or that of George Washington. Yours, of course. There isn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind, my good friend. We are going to celebrate George’s birthday here, instead of yours, for the reason, I suppose, that, as you say, the opinion of the common drabble is apt to be wrong and the herd have decided that George’s birthday is the greater event of the two."

The letter was sent with a box of homemade fudge - "Sweets to the Sweet" - Will responded "Sweets from the Sweet" in thanks - and a mysterious gift referred to only as "Mrs. Piper".

"I send along with this letter, a little birthday gift, in the form of “Mrs. Piper”. I hope you will love and cherish her and never use any slang before her, for she is a dear old lady and slang shocks her very muchly."

My best (wild) guess is that "Mrs. Piper" may have been an elf-on-the-shelf style rag doll sent to ensure Will behaved himself at college, but alas I fear her true nature may be lost to history.

@lesbrarians I don't have the whole diary photographed, but here's a post where I go through the research process I used to identify this diary's author.

Unfortunately the datasets I used don't contain any information about class (other than occasionally listing the groom's profession) so I don't have anything quantitative comparing social status.

I do however have a few personal observations I made during the project and another project on the history of nicknames (that turned out to be so frustrating to research that I never finished it).

The first is that names with biblical origins were not nearly as popular among the upper classes as the lower. There are obvious exceptions to this (mainly with high tier names like John and Ann), but as a general rule you do not see many Regency-era aristocrats with biblical names, i.e. Ruth, Deborah, Hannah, Timothy, Matthew, Joshua, etc.

I suspect, at least to a certain extent, this was an anti-Puritan holdover among the upper classes post-Cromwell, combined with the House of Hanover bringing in new, trendy names in the early 18th Century.

Speaking of the House of Hanover... the inverse of this - names more popular among the upper classes than the lower - occurs with what I personally refer to as Hanoverian names.

Hanoverian names are names that were not popular, and often not even existent, in England prior to the German House of Hanover coming to power in 1714.

Examples of Hanoverian names include: Amelia, Augusta, Augustus, Caroline, Charlotte, Frederick, Georgiana, Louisa, Maria and Sophia.

The upper classes, especially the aristocracy, appear to have adopted these names much more quickly than the lower classes. I'd assume this was, in part, caused by wealthy people sucking up to their new Hanoverian monarchs by naming their children after them. Also just a natural result of the trendiness and conformity enforced at court.

Hanoverian names would eventually spread to all classes, but in the Regency period there was still a fairly noticeable class divide.

This is obviously a very simplified explanation and there are myriad other factors (religious denominations, regional cultural variations, etc.) that go into name popularity.

Hope this helps a little.

Thank you so much!

Rachel & Co. have unfortunately been put on the back burner for me the last few years due to other projects and some personal/family health issues - so there may not be much new content since you last caught up.

The project is not forgotten though! All thousand+ letters are still stored on a bookshelf in my room.

I'm working on another big project at the moment (hopefully a book), but after I've gotten that up and going I hope very much that I can get back to Rachel more regularly.

A selection of Atchison, Kansas' most eligible bachelors of 1885 - for the perusal of those of you who find yourself matrimonially minded...

source: The Atchison Daily Globe, January 6, 1885.

Wikipedia has a type of article called a "name list" for most given names, which include a brief summary of the name's history/origins as well as a list of prominent people (both real and fictional) who have/had the name in question. That's usually where I start when I'm trying to find "patient zero". You can find a Wikipedia name list by searching for '(Name you're looking for) name' or '(Name you're looking for) given name' in cases where it's also used as a surname.

If you were born around the Randi spike in the early 1980s, my best guess for "patient zero" there would be the actress Randi Oakes, who was on CHiPs from 1979 to 1982.

Unfortunately I have only ever posted a handful of them - as I tend to focus on letters children wrote themselves - so it's not much of a tag, but I added one that's just "toddler transcription".

Probably my favorite example is George Lincoln's phone call to Santa in 1911.

I'll try to post more in the future as so many people seemed to enjoy them.

My go-to resource for seeing name popularity over time is behindthename.com.

The United States has tracked name popularity since 1880, and behindthename has a great tool in every entry where they visualize that data. (They also have info available for quite a few other countries, though many of them only have data going back a decade or so).

Here is the visualization for Sage's popularity in the US.

As you can see, Sage is a VERY modern name.

It did not appear in the top 1000 names in the US until 1991 (as a masculine name) and 1993 (as a feminine name).

The highest it has ever ranked was #143 (as a feminine name) - or .11 percent of all given names - in 2022 and 2023 (the 2024 stats haven't been released yet). So 1 out of every 1100 AFAB babies born in the US in 2022/2023 was named Sage.

(In the invented terminology of my Regency name survey that would place it in 'D tier' for 2022/2023.)

Prior to 1880 the name appears extremely rarely. Sage is also a surname, and most cases I can find of it being used as a first name pre-1880 appear to be instances of a family surname converted to a personal name, e.g. John Smith married Jane Sage and named their son Sage Smith.

Most sudden increases in name popularity have what I refer to as a "patient zero" - a celebrity or fictional character with the name that causes it to spike in popularity. I was curious if there was a similar cause for the small, but noticeable spike in Sages that last few years, So I literally just googled "sage character". It's obviously impossible to prove causation without personally interviewing parents to see where they were exposed to/why they chose the name - but the increases in babies named Sage does coincide with the release of the video game Valorant which has a character named Sage, in 2020.

And no, I am not being facetious here - this is actually how name popularity works. Many, many common names owe their popularity - or even their existence - to fictional characters or celebrities. Just ask the 4000+ Khaleesis born in the last decade. I would not be named Samantha without Bewitched. Virtually all Beths owe their name to Little Women (chiefly the 1949 movie adaptation), Madisons to the 1984 Tom Hanks movie Splash, and all the Jessicas/Olivias/Mirandas/Imogens and many more out there can thank Shakespeare.

I'll be interested to see where Sage ranks in the 2024 stats.

Hope that was helpful!

Thank you for sharing! I always love stories like this. Nicknames can really create a lot of very entertaining confusion over time.

There's a young woman in on ongoing research project I'm working on who is only ever referred to as "Mart". I reasonably assumed her full name was Martha and was operating under this assumption for months before I found out her full name was actually Margaret. The "Mart" was apparently a result of there being so many Margarets in her class at boarding school that they appear to have all chosen different nicknames.

Yet another selection of some of the better names I've come across in Regency era newspapers recently.