Below, Thomas De Quincey writes to his daughter Emily, who had just given birth to her own daughter Eva. Throughout, De Quincey is preoccupied with names (specifically, that of “Eva”): with what names mean; the (speculative) history of the act of naming; and the effect a name may have upon a person’s development. He writes: “[I]t is a most rational justification of a name to my thinking—not that it expresses a quality as emphatically existing at a time when powers are latent, but forecasts the possible growth and fructification of the tendencies and faculties which it signifies.”
October, 1854.
My Dear Emily, — To you, as being (I think) my latest adviser from Tipperary, I address my answer. Bear with me if I am abrupt or incoherent: perhaps that is better than being tedious. Strange it is that I, who have three fair daughters gifted with a marked talent (two in promise, and M. in full development) for letter-writing, can yet pretend myself to so little power in that direction. And that little grows less when, from profound sedentariness, I grow preternaturally nervous.
First of all, concerning what is just now first in importance, viz., dear little Eva. Glad I am that she has gotten herself a name, for really it is an awkward case, when giving the health at a dinner-party of a little lady, as one’s own sole representative in the next generation but one, the advanced vedette on the frontier of posterity, plainly to confess that she is anonymous, and also a Pagan, or at least that the Pagan question is for her still an open question. Any name therefore was beginning to be an advantage. As to the particular name chosen, it is to my feeling a very pretty one. Two novels at the least have been written by men of high pretensions bearing this name for their sole title ; one by Sir Edward Lytton, which perhaps I have not read, but certainly do not remember,— the other by a man whom I think of with even more respect, viz., Maturin. It was not, however, by any means amongst Maturin’s better works. Still, being Maturin’s, it could not be otherwise than interesting. Maturin’s Eva, if I remember the story at all, is the subject of an odious persecution from some hyperbolical feather-bed of a soi-disant lover, who does not improve his position, or at all win upon the sulky reader, by being also a dissenting parson. His reasons for dissenting I do not know, but the reader’s reasons are undeniable—‘first chop’—for dissenting from the Rev. Featherbed; and, unfortunately for him, Eva’s dissenting principles are equally strong; but then, unfortunately for her, the odious and reverend lover draws some iniquitous support from a dissenting aunt. The issue, I fear, is tragical. The true lover, he whom Eva and the reader countenance, is non-suited. Such, at least, is my fear. And it is a proof of Maturin’s power that now, at this moment, though left behind me by thirty years, the tale and the very name of Eva are nevertheless set and steeped in some indistinct haze of sorrowful impressions, whilst my separate remembrances of the fable are no more than what I have related. Simply through the power of Maturin, who was verily and indeed a man of genius, the name of Eva has shaped itself to my symbolising fancy in the image of a white rose—overcharged (I do not say surcharged, as suggesting odious thoughts of income-tax) with rain or heavy dews—dimly descried in a solitary garden through the very dimmest twilight of earliest dawn upon a morning of June. Is this too much for a conscientious man to pack up into that one little tri-literal name of Eva.
This name naturally throws back one’s thoughts upon the original person who bore it—that unhappy lady, the fairest of her own daughters, but also, one must suppose, the most woe-begone, if she knew the extent of her own trespass. “For this we may thank Adam!” is the dreadful cry of reproach ascending from billions of generations which the Miltonic Adam figures to himself in sad anticipation. But, begging his pardon, he had himself, like a veritable sneak, forestalled that reproach. He had, in the language of London villains, “split ” upon his partner—the very last baseness even amongst our domestic rogues, that final and crowning step which, being foreborne, leaves even to the thief a conscious arrearage of nobility and possible redemption. A man that should have stolen a pocket handkerchief might (I conceive), by some memorable act of public service, redeem himself, but—…. This whole matter of naming, however, if we cast a backward glance at its earliest beginnings, though an inscrutable, would—were it not so— be an interesting theme for investigation. It is not only a prehistoric, but a premythical, not only a premythical, but even a prefabulous and a pretraditional thesis. My thesis ends by indicating in Eve one feature of intellectual delicacy which places her in advance of her species by perhaps a myriad of generations, and to this recent baptismal epoch in the first year of dear little Eva’s experience it is a most appropriate feature—renewing and reverberating from a modern case echoes of the very same solicitude in the proper choice of a name as naturally displayed itself in the very earliest cases. Eve, like the council of Pegsboro’, [sic] put forth an earnest anxiety (for earnest it must have been to secure any commemoration at all in a record necessarily so austerely condensed as the Mosaic) in order to construct a significant name for her sons. On a hasty consideration it might seem as though Pegsboro’ and Mesopotamia [which, or else Kurdistan, or else Armenia, I will assume to be the region inhabited by the primitive house- hold of man] had pursued a separate and peculiar object in this study. But perhaps not. Eve sought for a name that should, by a sort of shorthand, express significantly any pathetic circumstantialities connected with the birth (or with the immediate antecedences to the birth) of the particular son concerned in the nomination. Events or changes externally attached to the biography of the child were naturally contemplated as the keynotes for the several names; so that the bare names of Eve’s sons composed a solemn register—cryptical and shadowy, as being abstracts so severely condensed, but to herself fearfully significant, as secret mementoes of sad or joyous revolutions. For the Pegsboro’ council, on the other hand, the names were sought—not at all with any view to incidents or household changes, but as expressing qualities of intellect, of temper, or of temperament which might reasonably be anticipated in a spirit of hope, since, even when naturally defective, by artificial culture any qualities may be indefinitely promoted. And therefore it is a most rational justification of a name to my thinking—not that it expresses a quality as emphatically existing at a time when powers are latent, but forecasts the possible growth and fructification of the tendencies and faculties which it signifies.