I hope I can come at this in the spirit of collaboration instead of pedantry, but: the opening of second stanza didn't quite get the prosody right, which to my mind is the most important part of a double dactyl! The rest of the poem is perfect (extra points for using the popular higgledy-piggledy opening in a way that actually makes sense!), so if you'll permit a suggestion:
Higgledy piggledy,
olden French bakery
storing its loaves in a
double-doored shed.
Then an inspector sees
atypicality:
one stray cow casually
licking the bread.
Haley Heynderickx's "The Bug Collector" is absolutely the last song I expected to be the soundtrack to a Lil Nas X life update. I first heard this album at the last live event I went to before COVID, and it became the soundtrack to my quarantine -- if you still sometimes feel the need to scream "I NEED TO START A GARDEN," it can be the soundtrack to your now!
My top three desired jobs as a child, in order of how much they'd suck now:
1. Actor - Would be bad for the same reasons that being a musician in real life didn't go well with being immunocompromised during a global pandemic.
2. Cake decorator - This would probably be fine? I'm not as passionate about it now, but it'd potentially be an ok job.
3. The Next Jim Henson - Potentially the best, because I was never sure exactly what I was going to create that would be as good as the Muppets -- but assuming that I succeeded, that'd be pretty awesome.
ugh. on the one hand tumblr introducing age verification for people in countries where thats come into law recently was probably inevitable and outside of their control. on the other hand the fact tumblr is so bad at identifying mature posts IS within their control and it really adds insult to injury. like idc if its a faulty algorithm or malicious user reports or shitty admins, at least when bluesky asks for my ID its because i clicked on a post with sex in it. the last mature marked post i saw on tumblr was a photo of megan thee stallion in cosplay. dont piss me off.
A Guide to Historically Accurate Regency-Era Names
I recently received a message from a historical romance writer asking if I knew any good resources for finding historically accurate Regency-era names for their characters.
Not knowing any off the top of my head, I dug around online a bit and found there really isn’t much out there. The vast majority of search results were Buzzfeed-style listicles which range from accurate-adjacent to really, really, really bad.
I did find a few blog posts with fairly decent name lists, but noticed that even these have very little indication as to each name’s relative popularity as those statistical breakdowns really don't exist.
I began writing up a response with this information, but then I (being a research addict who was currently snowed in after a blizzard) thought hey - if there aren’t any good resources out there why not make one myself?
As I lacked any compiled data to work from, I had to do my own data wrangling on this project. Due to this fact, I limited the scope to what I thought would be the most useful for writers who focus on this era, namely - people of a marriageable age living in the wealthiest areas of London.
So with this in mind - I went through period records and compiled the names of 25,000 couples who were married in the City of Westminster (which includes Mayfair, St. James and Hyde Park) between 1804 to 1821.
So let’s see what all that data tells us…
To begin - I think it’s hard for us in the modern world with our wide and varied abundance of first names to conceive of just how POPULAR popular names of the past were.
If you were to take a modern sample of 25-year-old (born in 1998) American women, the most common name would be Emily with 1.35% of the total population. If you were to add the next four most popular names (Hannah, Samantha, Sarah and Ashley) these top five names would bring you to 5.5% of the total population. (source: Social Security Administration)
If you were to do the same survey in Regency London - the most common name would be Mary with 19.2% of the population. Add the next four most popular names (Elizabeth, Ann, Sarah and Jane) and with just 5 names you would have covered 62% of all women.
To hit 62% of the population in the modern survey it would take the top 400 names.
The top five Regency men’s names (John, William, Thomas, James and George) have nearly identical statistics as the women’s names.
I struggled for the better part of a week with how to present my findings, as a big list in alphabetical order really fails to get across the popularity factor and also isn’t the most tumblr-compatible format. And then my YouTube homepage recommended a random video of someone ranking all the books they’d read last year - and so I present…
The Regency Name Popularity Tier List
The Tiers
S+ - 10% of the population or greater. There is no modern equivalent to this level of popularity. 52% of the population had one of these 7 names.
S - 2-10%. There is still no modern equivalent to this level of popularity. Names in this percentage range in the past have included Mary and William in the 1880s and Jennifer in the late 1970s (topped out at 4%).
A - 1-2%. The top five modern names usually fall in this range. Kids with these names would probably include their last initial in class to avoid confusion. (1998 examples: Emily, Sarah, Ashley, Michael, Christopher, Brandon.)
B - .3-1%. Very common names. Would fall in the top 50 modern names. You would most likely know at least 1 person with these names. (1998 examples: Jessica, Megan, Allison, Justin, Ryan, Eric)
C - .17-.3%. Common names. Would fall in the modern top 100. You would probably know someone with these names, or at least know of them. (1998 examples: Chloe, Grace, Vanessa, Sean, Spencer, Seth)
D - .06-.17%. Less common names. In the modern top 250. You may not personally know someone with these names, but you’re aware of them. (1998 examples: Faith, Cassidy, Summer, Griffin, Dustin, Colby)
E - .02-.06%. Uncommon names. You’re aware these are names, but they are not common. Unusual enough they may be remarked upon. (1998 examples: Calista, Skye, Precious, Fabian, Justice, Lorenzo)
F - .01-.02%. Rare names. You may have heard of these names, but you probably don’t know anyone with one. Extremely unusual, and would likely be remarked upon. (1998 examples: Emerald, Lourdes, Serenity, Dario, Tavian, Adonis)
G - Very rare names. There are only a handful of people with these names in the entire country. You’ve never met anyone with this name.
H - Virtually non-existent. Names that theoretically could have existed in the Regency period (their original source pre-dates the early 19th century) but I found fewer than five (and often no) period examples of them being used in Regency England. (Example names taken from romance novels and online Regency name lists.)
Just to once again reinforce how POPULAR popular names were before we get to the tier lists - statistically, in a ballroom of 100 people in Regency London: 80 would have names from tiers S+/S. An additional 15 people would have names from tiers A/B and C. 4 of the remaining 5 would have names from D/E. Only one would have a name from below tier E.
Women's Names
S+ Mary, Elizabeth, Ann, Sarah
S - Jane, Mary Ann+, Hannah, Susannah, Margaret, Catherine, Martha, Charlotte, Maria
A - Frances, Harriet, Sophia, Eleanor, Rebecca
B - Alice, Amelia, Bridget~, Caroline, Eliza, Esther, Isabella, Louisa, Lucy, Lydia, Phoebe, Rachel, Susan
C - Ellen, Fanny*, Grace, Henrietta, Hester, Jemima, Matilda, Priscilla
# Men were sometimes given a family surname (most often their mother's or grandmother's maiden name) as their first name - the most famous example of this being Fitzwilliam Darcy. If you were to combine all surname-based first names as a single 'name' this is where the practice would rank.
*Rank as a given name, not a nickname
+If you count Mary Ann as a separate name from Mary - Mary would remain in S+ even without the Mary Anns included
~Primarily used by people of Irish descent
^Primarily used by people of Scottish descent
>Primarily used by people of Welsh descent
I was going to continue on and write about why Regency-era first names were so uniform, discuss historically accurate surnames, nicknames, and include a little guide to finding 'unique' names that are still historically accurate - but this post is already very, very long, so that will have to wait for a later date.
If anyone has any questions/comments/clarifications in the meantime feel free to message me.
Methodology notes: All data is from marriage records covering six parishes in the City of Westminster between 1804 and 1821. The total sample size was 50,950 individuals.
I chose marriage records rather than births/baptisms as I wanted to focus on individuals who were adults during the Regency era rather than newborns. I think many people make the mistake when researching historical names by using baby name data for the year their story takes place rather than 20 to 30 years prior, and I wanted to avoid that. If you are writing a story that takes place in 1930 you don’t want to research the top names for 1930, you need to be looking at 1910 or earlier if you are naming adult characters.
I combined (for my own sanity) names that are pronounced identically but have minor spelling differences: i.e. the data for Catherine also includes Catharines and Katherines, Susannah includes Susannas, Phoebe includes Phebes, etc.
The compound 'Mother's/Grandmother's maiden name used as first name' designation is an educated guesstimate based on what I recognized as known surnames, as I do not hate myself enough to go through 25,000+ individuals and confirm their mother's maiden names. So if the tally includes any individuals who just happened to be named Fitzroy/Hastings/Townsend/etc. because their parents liked the sound of it and not due to any familial relations - my bad.
I did a small comparative survey of 5,000 individuals in several rural communities in Rutland and Staffordshire (chosen because they had the cleanest data I could find and I was lazy) to see if there were any significant differences between urban and rural naming practices and found the results to be very similar. The most noticeable difference I observed was that the S+ tier names were even MORE popular in rural areas than in London. In Rutland between 1810 and 1820 Elizabeths comprised 21.4% of all brides vs. 15.3% in the London survey. All other S+ names also saw increases of between 1% and 6%. I also observed that the rural communities I surveyed saw a small, but noticeable and fairly consistent, increase in the use of names with Biblical origins.
Sources of the records I used for my survey:
Ancestry.com. England & Wales Marriages, 1538-1988 [database on-line].
Ancestry.com. Westminster, London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1935 [database on-line].
I was just reminded of this amazing post, which (in the event you TL;DR'd) ranks real Regency names in tiers of popularity from S+ (your Marys and Anns) to H ("Technically possible but virtually non-existent"), and decided to look up the names from Stephanie Laurens' Four in Hand, the 1993 regency romance novel that Julia Quinn liberally cadged from for the first Bridgerton book* and compare them against some Bridgerton names.
Y'all, it's not even close. ALL of the girls in the Bridgerton family have H-tier names, whereas the main four girls in Four in Hand includes two S+-tier (Sarah and Elizabeth), one B-tier (Caroline), and one E-tier (Arabella). That's E-tier at the lowest, mind you, whereas The Duke and I never gets higher than E-tier (and only if you count the Featheringtons, Penelope and Prudence). If you extend to the love interests in later books, you do get an S-tier (Katharine) but also Sophie, which didn't rank at all ("Sophia" is A-tier, at least).
Where the men are concerned, it's a little more even. Laurens' duke is named Max and never says what it is short for, but he has a maternal aunt named Maxwell and yeoldenews considered the entire practice of "mom's maiden name as first name" in the A-tier. Quinn's duke is firmly B-tier (Simon), so I'd say that's a draw. The other male love interests in Four in Hand are Martin (D-tier), Hugo (E-tier), and Darcy (arguably A-tier if it's supposed to be a family name but let's be fair, it's just an Austen reference), and the Bridgerton boys are a C, an E, and two Fs, so it's fairly comparable (a little worse than the girls in Laurens' case, much better for Quinn's)**.
I feel so justified in being a one-woman "give Stephanie Laurens a writing credit on Bridgerton" soapbox***.
*Seriously though, there's just way too many similarities for it to just be genre overlap. Read the book if you don't believe me.
**I'm not looking ul who Eloise and Francesca marry and you can't make me
*** jk, as the kids used to say
Religious italian child: the Lord was above the Angel of Death upon the butcher that slaughtered the bull that drank the water that put off the fire that burnt the stick that hit the dog that bit the cat that ate the mouse that my father bought at the market.
Atheist italian child: death is an inescapable and irreversible process so no one could possibly be above the Angel of Death upon the butcher that slaughtered the bull that drank the water that put off the fire that burnt the stick that hit the dog that bit the cat that ate the mouse that my father bought at the market.
Agnostic italian child: no one knows if someone or something was above the Angel of Death upon the butcher that slaughtered the bull that drank the water that put off the fire that burnt the stick that hit the dog that bit the cat that ate the mouse that my father bought at the market.
Saint Thomas Aquinas: the perfect chain of dependency on each other of animals and elements, exemplified by the Angel of Death upon the butcher that slaughtered the bull that drank the water that put off the fire that burnt the stick that hit the dog that bit the cat that ate the mouse that my father bought at the market, is an example of an efficient cause that regulates the world and could be understood as an a posteriori proof of the existence of God.
Edward Said: the idea of the eastern fair at which my father bought a mouse was orientalist in nature.
Today I learned that there's an Italian version of Chad Gadya. And it's about a mouse I guess? Is buying mice at markets an Italian thing, or was this guy more concerned with cats eating reasonable animals for their size than fathers buying reasonable animals at markets? I have questions.
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