Place-names as a reflection of cultural interaction

Abstract

In a series of sketches by Elizabeth Gaskell, which appeared in Charles Dickens's weekly periodical Household Words between 1851 and 1853, the small Cheshire town of Knutsford was immortalized under the name Cranford. Mrs Gaskell, who had spent most of her childhood in Knutsford, knew the town and its inhabitants intimately and she returned to it as the setting for some of her later works, in which she called it ‘Eccleston’, ‘Dunscombe’ and ‘Hollingford’. Each of these four fictional names is convincing enough as the name of a small provincial town. Three of the names, indeed, are borne by settlements elsewhere in England, and the fourth, ‘Hollingford’, is close enough in form to the genuine names Hollington and Hollingworth to be acceptable. On her marriage, Elizabeth Gaskell had moved from Knutsford to Manchester and she exploited this commercial city, too, as the setting for some of her works. Her first published novel, Mary Barton (1848), actually bore the subtitle ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, but in later works the city appears under the fictional names ‘Drumble’ and ‘Milton’. Milton is a name which occurs quite frequently in England, although never as the name of a large city. Drumble is an artificial name – presumably a portmanteau word containing the words drear and rumble, which antedates Lewis Carroll's first exploitation of this device in a handwritten version of the poem Jabberwocky from 1855. Elizabeth Gaskell is not the only author to have coined a fictional name for Manchester in the course of time. Charles Dickens referred to it as ‘Coketown’ in Hard Times (1854), for example, and Louis Golding as ‘Doomington’ in Magnolia Street (1931).