'Twas Ever Thus...

The Victorians really did love their commemorative names. And while it may be intriguing for us, it seems to have bemused many of their contemporaries. This excerp is taken from the Gleanings of Berrow's Worcester Journal in 1885. 

 

EVENT NAMES FOR CHILDREN    In the quarter following the battle of Alma, five hundred and nineteen children, males as well as females, received Alma as a Christian name. Balaklava, Inkerman, and Sebastopol also speedily gave their names to English infants, and one Seige Sebastopol was registered. The acquisition of the island in the Mediterranean during the year 1878 was the means of introducing Cyprus into English personal nomenclature; and to pass a later date still, a labourer's boy, born at Sawston, Cambridgeshire, in September 1882, was named Tel-el-Kebir. Political events, as well as military, find their reflection in names. Charter is a recorded appellation recalling the popular movement of 1848, and Reform is also an existing denomination.  In a birth-register of 1882, appears as the personal designation of a certain Mrs. Thorpe, who became mother at that time, the startling name Leviathon. The good lady, it is stated, was born or named at the time of the launching of Brunel's monster steam-ship, which was at first so called, though it has since been known as the Great Eastern. A little girl, daughter of a hoop-maker, born early in the last-named year at Rye, in Sussex, received the name Jumbo, presumably in commemoration of the regretted departure of the zoological favourite from Regent's Park to America.  -- EDWARD WHITAKER, in Good Words.                      Berrow's Worcester Journal                (Worcester, England), June 13, 1885