The Surprising Origins of Some Very Famous Pen Names

Or, why Lewis Carroll was almost called Edgar Cuthwellis.

A brief programming note: As I’m more or less back in the swing of things, I’ve unpaused paid subscriptions (a special thank you to paid subscribers for your support!). This won’t affect you if you’re not a paying subscriber, but thank you for reading!

My earliest experiences of the unique British torture device known as the Cryptic Crossword Puzzle were when my grandparents would retire to their armchairs and solemnly solve The Times daily cryptic together after lunch, with a brandy probably. My grandfather would take charge of the paper itself and carefully read out each clue followed by the number of blanks and any already filled-in letters, and my grandmother would listen attentively, brow furrowed and pen and notepad at the ready to expertly disassemble any sneaky anagrams that were foolish enough to emerge from their foxholes. For anyone unfamiliar with the cryptic format (such as 8-year-old me), the scene would play out like a dream sequence, with all the appearance but none of the underpinnings of a logical conversation. “Make poor spelling naughty in a down clue …” my grandfather would read out (for instance)  “... ‘I,’ six blanks, ‘I,’ blank, blank.” And then they’d both sit in contemplative silence for 30 seconds before one of them would, improbably, shout, “Impoverish!” and move on to the next.¹  

I witnessed this loving and rather beautiful ritual countless times, but there are two specific answers that have remained lodged in my memory all these years, although I’ve sadly forgotten important parts of the clues that led to them. The first is SCARAB, a fairly common crossword beetle that also happened to be the first cryptic solution I ever shouted out myself. And the second, oddly enough, is LEADSMAN, a word that, even at the time, struck me as a frankly insane piece of vocabulary for anyone to know in the first place,² let alone to summon up (as my grandfather confidently did) based on a deliberately misleading nonsense fragment about the American author Mark Twain (that’s the only part of the clue that I do remember).

All of this is, of course, a preposterously roundabout way of introducing my topic today, which is the interesting and in some cases surprising origins of various literary pen names. Now that we’re three paragraphs deep and have scared off most casual readers, we can begin. 

Mark Twain

The origin of  Samuel Clemens’s pen name is a leadsman’s cry. The “lead” (as in the metal) that the leadsman wielded was a sounding line.³ And the purpose of the sounding line was to determine the depth of the water so nobody runs aground, which is a bad thing to do, especially when you’re in a boat. The marks on the lead-weighted sounding line indicated fathoms of depth, and the leadsmen would call out to indicate how many marks on the line they were from the bottom. Mark twain (as in the archaic word for “two”) was the second such mark — a depth of two fathoms, or 12 feet, which is, FWIW, pretty dangerous shallows for a riverboat! Get out of there! Mark Twain describes the sounding process in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi:

The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.

'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three!... Quarter-less three!... Half twain!... Quarter twain!... M-a-r-k twain!... Quarter-less—'

A final gloss on this is that mark twain isn’t the only sounding call with an afterlife: It’s from a leadsman’s cry that we get the term deep six, which is six fathoms deep, or, if you’re feeling whimsical, three marks twain.  

Lewis Carroll 

The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, which should be blindingly obvious to anyone who’s in the habit of translating people’s names into Latin, reversing them, and then translating them back into English again. Charles Lutwidge, Latinized, becomes Carolus Ludovic; and Ludovic Carolus, anglicized, becomes Lewis Carroll. 

More accurately (and much less tidily), Ludovic (meaning “devotee of the Lord”) was the Latin form used in Medieval documents to represent the Germanic Ludwig (with a completely different origin meaning “famed warrior”), which becomes Louis in French and Lewis in English. The surname Lutwidge is actually a place name, from lot, meaning share, and wic, meaning village and familiar from various wichs like Sandwich, Ipswich, and West Bromwich. The Charles/Carolus connection is more straightforward. 

Dodgson gives his pen-name origin story in diary entries from 1856, where we also learn that he was considering an anagram of Charles Lutwidge—Edgar Cuthwellis.

Feb 6: Sent a copy of my verses on 'Solitude' to Mr. Yates for The Train.

Feb 8: Heard from Mr. Yates—he is going to use the verses on 'Solitude', and the 'Carpette Knyghte'. He wishes me to alter the signature ‘B.B.’ and proposed that I should adopt some 'Nom de plume': Accordingly I sent ‘Dares’ [from Daresbury in Cheshire, where he was born].

Feb 10: Heard again from Mr. Yates—he wants me to choose another name, as Dares is too much like a newspaper signature.

Feb. 11: Wrote to Mr. Yates sending him a choice of names: 1. Edgar Cuthwellis (made by transposition out of 'Charles Lutwidge'). 2. Edgar U.C. Westhill (ditto). 3. Louis Carroll, (derived from Lutwidge = Ludovic = Louis, and Charles [Carolus]. 4. Lewis Carroll.

George Orwell

“How important names are. If I have the choice of going through two streets, other things being equal I always go by the one with the nicer name.”

—George Orwell, to a friend

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, who disliked the stuffiness of his first name (“It took me nearly thirty years to work off the effects of being called Eric,” he told a friend in 1940⁴) and (allegedly) the Scottishness of his surname. According to his biographer Bernard Crick, he chose the pen name “partly to avoid embarrassing his parents, partly as a hedge against failure, and partly because he disliked the name Eric, which reminded him of a prig in a Victorian boys’ story.”

This feels like a particularly unfair hit on Erics, who are generally a decent sort in my personal experience, but in Orwell’s case it’s actually literally true. The name Eric (from the Old Norse Eiríkr meaning “ever ruler,” which absolutely owns) wasn’t popular in England until the publication in 1858 of Eric, or Little by Little, a morality tale about a fatuous little prude who goes to boarding school and strays from the righteous path but not in a fun way.  As the preface to the novel (by Dean Frederic W. Farrar) describes it: 

The story of 'Eric' was written with but one single object—the vivid inculcation of inward purity and moral purpose, by the history of a boy who, in spite of the inherent nobility of his disposition, falls into all folly and wickedness, until he has learnt to seek help from above.

Farrar’s contemporary, the (truly wonderful) children’s author E. Nesbit, does a much better job of summing it up in her 1913 novel Wet Magic: 

The children also had been provided with books—Eric, or Little by Little; Elsie, or Like a Little Candle; Brave Bessie and Ingenious Isabel had been dealt out as though they were cards for a game, before leaving home. They had been a great bother to carry, and they were impossible to read. 

At any rate, “Eric” was a nonstarter. After briefly considering and (mercifully) discarding the idea of going by “X” for the publication of his first book (“I suppose the thing is to have an easily memorable [pseudonym], which I could stick to if this book had any success,” he told his agent), the author produced a list of four names: P. S. Burton, Kenneth Miles, H. Lewis Allways, and George Orwell. I can’t find anything definitive about the significance of the discarded names, except that P. S. Burton was “an alias he had used on tramping expeditions” (does everyone have a cool tramping alias and I just missed out somehow?⁵), but George was likely chosen for its quintessential Englishness (Saint George being the patron saint of England) and Orwell was (and indeed still is) a river in Suffolk.  

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Lol, I had like 10 more of these origin stories, but I absolutely cannot be allowed to go past 1,500 words, so I’m going to save them for a future newsletter. I hope you enjoyed the three questionably necessary paragraphs dancing on poor old Dean Frederic Farrar’s grave more than you want to know where the name John Le Carré comes from! There’s actually some real mystery around it, but my preliminary research indicates that it isn’t a tramping alias, so it’s probably not that important after all.

1. In case anyone’s interested, the solution is a synonym for “Make poor,” and it is also how you would spell “Impish” (i.e., naughty) in a down clue. IMP over ISH. This was actually a clue by Philistine in The Guardian earlier this year. 

2. Just to put a button on how absurd this piece of vocab is (in my view), The New York Times has clued SCARAB 85 times in its crossword, including twice last year, but it has only clued LEADSMAN three times ever, with the last instance in 1961 (“One of the ship’s crew”).

3. The lead of the sounding line is also referenced in the phrase “plumb the depths,” from the Latin plumbum,  meaning lead, which is also why “Pb” is the symbol for lead on the Periodic Table.

4. A lot of this information is from Orwell: The Authorized Biography, by Michael Shelden.

5. I wonder (with absolutely no evidence, I should be clear) whether P. S. Burton is an allusion to the great British explorer Captain Sir Francis Richard Burton. Again, I don’t have any documentary evidence to support this — just really keen to figure out how one gets one’s tramping alias.