Victorian Surnames in England and Wales

The idea of surnames, or last names, is not a common nor universal practice. Victorian surnames in England and Wales supposedly evolved from a medieval naming practice known as “byname,” where a person’s occupation, locality, or nickname would be added to distinguish two people with the same Christian name. The fifty most common Victorian surnames in England and Wales for 1853 are listed in alphabetical order below. “More than half of the surnames are derived from the Christian or fore-name of the father,”[1] and based on a total of 3,253,800 people, nearly 18 in every 100 persons was known by one of these fifty surnames.

Some people you might recognize with these surnames from the list above include the female husband James Allen, the thief boy Jones, the sailor John Paul Jones, the anti-mason William Morgan, the Buttermere beauty Mary Robinson, the murderess Madeleine Smith, and the astrologist and fortune-teller Mrs. Williams.

In the next chart, the fifty surnames are further identified with the first column displaying the popularity rating between 1838 and 1853, and the second column showing the three most common Victorian surnames are Smith, Jones, and Williams, respectively. Apparently, on “average one person in every 28 would answer to one … of these three [sur]names.”[2] The third column lists the number of persons using the surname in 1853, the fourth column shows the commonality of the surname based on the entire population, and the last column shows how the surname was derived with “more than half derived from the Christian or fore-name of the father.”[3]

John Henry Brady, an English author, argued against surnames altogether. He noted:

“The head of a family seems to be the only person properly signified by them … [as] they serve as a sort of artificial memory by which, when we only hear … [the surname], we immediately recollect who was his great-grandfather.”[4]

It was also claimed that might be all well and good if the man was an upstanding person, but if a man retained the name of his family and the ancestor was deemed a “dishonorable man,” all the following ancestors would never forget the disgrace. Or if a child was born out of wedlock, Brady maintained:

“Supposing a child to be born in such a manner that there might be some doubt of the identity of its father, and the mother to have been plainly no intent that he should have come into the world at all, what could be prettier name for the little poppet than Chancy? But this would become very improper and injurious, when continued to a man whom we well know to have been born in wedlock, and begotten according to law. Instances of these and the like absurdities … are innumerable, all of them arising from the custom of continuing [sur]names from father to son.”[5]

References:

• [1] Patronymica Britannica, 1860, p. xxvi.
• [2] Ibid.
• [3] Ibid.
• [4] Brady, John Henry, A Critical and Analytical Dissertation on the Names of Persons, 1822, p. 34.
• [5] Ibid, p. 35-36.