“Dickensian,” debased

Alessandra Stanley writes in the New York Times, regarding the protagonists of two recent economic and political scandals:

Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.

Madoff? Blagojevich? These don’t sound very Dickensian to me! I have to admit that I’ve only read a few of Dickens’s books, so maybe I’m missing something. But these names sound more “ethnic” (as we used to say) than Dickensian. I think the real question is, if Alessandra Stanley things Madoff and Blagojevich have a Dickensian ring, are there any names that wouldn’t sound Dickensian to her?

P.S. By comparison, here’s a list of names that really do sound like they belong in a Dickens novel.

5 thoughts on ““Dickensian,” debased

  1. Maybe she was following Times-columnist Paul Krugman who posted on his blog (12/19):

    "Madoff/Merdle

    "I’m ashamed to admit that I've never read Little Dorritt, by Charles Dickens. But I guess I'll download it to my Kindle. A reader points out that the BBC is currently doing a dramatization, and that the character of Mr. Merdle, the fraudulent financier, bears a strong resemblance to Bernard Madoff."

  2. Ahh!

    I think it is because madoff sounds like made-off (with) and to blag something is to acquire dishonestly, as in 'while I was in Reading I blagged a statistics MSc'

    DaveG

  3. I recently read that the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik, when well into middle age, married a 20-year-old English girl named Winsome Ward.

    That's either Dickensian or Wodehousian, I can't decide which.

  4. Dickens often gave his characters names that reflected their personalities, like "Mr Bumble" in Oliver Twist, who was a bumbling person, or "Dotheboys hall" in Nicholas Nickleby, where boys were 'done'. I imagine Skimpole and Pardiggle have appropriate connotations too, though i don't remember these characters from my childhood reading days.

    Incidentally, i hate it when a writer uses '…ian' rather than actually saying what they are talking about.

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