In Sense and Sensibility, the man who jilts Marianne Dashwood is called John Willoughby. Yet she and her more careful elder sister and their mother consistently refer to him as ‘Willoughby’. This strikes me as strange. One would have expected ‘Mr Willoughby’, and, on a much closer acquaintance, ‘John’. Was it common in the early 19th Centuries for genteel ladies to address male acquaintances by their surname?
September 27, 2012
Early 19th Century English social mores
Posted by thomascordatus under Literature | Tags: early 19th Century England, Jane Austen, nomenclature, Sense and Sensibility, social mores |[3] Comments
Laodicea 
September 29, 2012 at 10:07 pm
I think the answer is yes. Certainly until the late 20th C is was normal for men to know each other purely by surname. At my school boys were referee to by teachers and each other purely by surname (or nickname), and this is still the case today in the British armed forces, eg Prince William is simply “Wales” in the RAF.
September 30, 2012 at 9:42 am
Between men or boys, certainly. My question was about ladies addressing a gentleman.
October 4, 2012 at 11:46 pm
When I lived in Welling, Kent in the 1940s, our next door neighbour, Mrs Baugh, hardly of the social class Jane Austen wrote about, always addressed, and referred to, her husband as “Baugh”.