Naming in the Courts

Abstract

This chapter focuses on naming practices, and especially the use of gutted names, such as ‘J— S—’ for John Smith, in eighteenth-century satire. In 1713 the courts ruled that such ruses provided no defence for libel, yet satirists and their booksellers continued to employ such practices. Some satirists simply misunderstood the law—an important reminder that even misinterpretation should be a part of our understanding of how the law shapes social and literary practices. However, gutted names also served important commercial, aesthetic, and pseudo-ethical functions, if not legal ones, in eighteenth-century satire. The chapter concludes with Alexander Pope. Having openly named his victims in the Dunciad Variorum, Pope was forced to grapple with what was, at its core, a socio-literary rather than legal issue. In a clever turn, however, he did so by adopting the prosecutorial language of the courts and libel law.