Addressing the poor

[watervole]

 It's dead easy to find online resources as to how to address ever titled person who ever existed, and it's pretty easy to find out how Victorians addressed their servants (even servants had different forms of address depending on their status in the servant hierarchy), but the poor?

Invisible.

My best guess, from a quick browse of Dickens (whom I hate) is that lower class women (xcluding servants) were addressed by their first names by  the well to do, and that the men were addressed by their second names.  This is partly surmise as Dickens's characters don't seem to do many introductions, but the way he uses names in text follows this pattern. 

Upper class men are always 'Mr Jones', lower class men are 'Jones'.

I shall go with this format for the time being.

I seems odd to never let the audience know the first name of the main protagonists, but I accept it happily in Shakespeare...

Comments

[katherine]

Interesting! I peeked at a chapter or three in my rather tattered copy of What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. I found no clue in there.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

This comment is only loosely connected with this entry but I remembered something about another neighbour, a little older than my Grandmother, who always referred to her husband as Mr X even when addressing him. I can't say if this was common amongst her generation, neither of my Grandmothers did it, but I have read it in books of the Victorian period and earlier.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I believe it was quite common usage. Seems strange to us now, but customs do change.