Keeping characters straight

Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

The Wikipedia entry on Our Mutual Friend lists 19 major characters and 17 minor characters. That's a lot of characters to keep straight, for Charles Dickens himself as well as for his readers. Good writers have ways of keeping characters distinct from one another. Names alone are not enough, for we readers easily forget or confuse names. Something else is needed, a personality quirk for example,  to make one character stand apart from another.

Dickens, with so many individuals in his small town of characters, is a master. Sometimes, as in Little Dorrit, he gives minor characters distinctive speech patterns. In novels as in real life, it is often easier to recognize people by their voices. (Last week I saw an old friend but didn't recognize him until I heard him speak.)

Jenny Wren in a illustration from Our Mutual Friend

Odd names, easy to remember and hard to confuse with other names, is another trick Dickens used. In Our Mutual Friend we find characters named Bradley Headstone, Georgiana Podsnap, Pleasant Riderhood, Melvin Twemlow and Sloppy.

Mostly, however, Dickens relies on nicknames to keep his characters distinct in this novel. Not every character has a nickname, given either by the narrator or by other characters, but many of them do. Even the novel's title is a nickname. John Rokesmith, the main character, is referred to as Our Mutual Friend several times early in the book. Nicodemus Boffin, the man who bestows that nickname on him, is called Noddy by his wife, but more commonly he is referred to as the Golden Dustman because after a career shoveling dust he inherits a fortune.

Bella Wilfer, the main female character, is sometimes called the "boofer lady." That is how a boy says the words "beautiful lady." A girl who makes dresses for dolls is called Jenny Wren so often we forget that is not her real name. Mr. Fledgeby, painfully shy around women but ruthless in business, is called Fascination Fledgeby. Roger Riderhood is often called Rogue Riderhood, a name that suits him. But because he so often refers to himself as an honest man, the author prefers calling him the Honest Man.

We are never told the name of Jenny Wren's father. He is simply referred to as Mr. Dolls. When John Rokesmith, itself a false name, becomes John Harmon again and marries Bella, they have a baby always referred to as The Inexhaustible.

With so many characters in a novel with so many pages, I had surprisingly little difficulty telling everyone apart. The two characters I did confuse were two young attorneys, both without clients. One is Mortimer Lightwood and the other is Eugene Wrayburn. Neither has a nickname.