Literary Characters in Everyday English Language
The Impact of Shakespeare and Cervantes
When we use the word Romeo to describe a romantic young man, we hardly think of the character from William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. A sure sign of an author having created a successful character is that the character’s name enters the language and becomes a word. Despite only writing in Spanish, Shakespeare’s contemporary Cervantes achieved the feat of creating a new word in a different language – English: the adjective quixotic. This word comes from the title character of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It describes a person who has great imagination and makes incredible plans, but whose plans are unfortunately impossible to achieve.
Charles Dickens’ Lasting Influence
One author who was particularly successful in seeing his characters enter the language was the novelist Charles Dickens. In modern English, a Scrooge is used to describe someone who is mean and tries to avoid spending money at all. The word comes from the protagonist of Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge, who treats the employees who work in his office poorly and makes them work in terrible conditions. As well as Scrooge, Dickens also had success with Fagin, the villain of Oliver Twist. In the novel, Fagin controlled a group of child criminals. His name is often used in the press to describe real-life adult leaders of youthful gangs.
The Victorian Era and Beyond
The Victorian era (1837-1901), in which Dickens wrote, was a major period for the English novel. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson achieved enormous success with the masterpiece Treasure Island. Stevenson also brought two of his characters into everyday speech. A Jekyll and Hyde character is a person whose personality can quickly change from being kind to being angry, impolite, or aggressive. The name comes from the scientist protagonist of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, whose strange experiments turn him from man to murderous monster, and back again.
Gothic Horror’s Contribution
Stevenson was not alone in seeing success from the field of Gothic Horror. At the age of twenty-one, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and the name of her mad scientist is now used as an adjective to describe any kind of science that seems to be out of control. Frankenstein foods, for example, is a term that people can understand to describe genetically modified ingredients.
Villains and the Power of Language
It does seem strange that villains enter the language more often than heroes. Sometimes, in fact, these characters need hardly appear in the original work at all. The television series Big Brother is named after the all-powerful dictator who rules the London of the future in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother himself is never encountered during the story: we only ever see his face on posters along with the ominous message “Big Brother is Watching You”. This is why the presence of more and more cameras watching the streets, and greater government control over the everyday lives of people, has led to the suggestion that we live in a “Big Brother society”.
George Orwell’s Enduring Legacy
Interestingly, Orwell achieved the double feat of creating a character that has entered the language as well as entering the language himself. The word Orwellian is used to describe a society that tries to control every aspect of people’s lives, as happened in the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like the novel, it’s a word that seems to be getting more and more popular all the time.