The real life Jack Worthings

The Importance of Being Earnest character took his surname from a train ticket. Such randomness was rather common

In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack Worthing (known as “Earnest” when he is living a libertine life in the city) explains to Lady Bracknell that he was abandoned in a “somewhat large, black leather handbag” at Victoria Station. He reveals that his surname is something of an invention. The old gentleman who found him happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing, a seaside resort, in his pocket.

Abandoned babies with made-up surnames were common in Victorian literature. Some fifty-seven years before Jack Worthing, Charles Dickens had fashioned a similar backstory for Oliver Twist. The child’s mother gave birth to him at a workhouse and died soon after. As there was no hope of discovering his true patronage, a name had to be found. Luckily Mr Bumble, the parish beadle (a church official), had a list of names ready for any child who happened to be born in such circumstances. Unluckily for young Oliver Mr Bumble arranged these names alphabetically, so he was bestowed with his somewhat unusual surname: “We name our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last was a S, – Swubble, I named him. This was a T, – Twist, I named him. The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.”

But this common literary trick also had a basis in fact, as I discovered recently. The other day I was sorting through my late grandfather’s photograph collection, when I came across a stash of old wedding photos. The only clues as to who the couple was were the names ‘Reeves’ and ‘Maud’ written on the back, and the date: June 17th 1939.

Intrigued I spent some time trying to identify them. It turned out they were Edward R. Reeves and Maud T. Southfield, who were married at Ealing Registry Office. I wanted to know how they were connected to my grandfather and did a bit more digging around. As it turned out, Edward Reeves had served in the Palestine Police with my grandfather. But on the way I stumbled into a mystery about Maud’s real identity. She had no birth record, so I turned to FindMyPast’s archives and found this:

Maud, presumably with her sister, had been discovered as a baby on Southfield Road in Acton in 1916 and had been named after the road on which they had been stranded.

This seems to have been a regular occurrence. At the Foundling Hospital, in London, mothers who were unmarried (or just too poor or sick) brought their babies to be raised. Here they would be given new names and, like in Oliver Twist, their mother’s would leave behind a small token, such as a coin or a scrap of fabric, that would later be used to identify them if the mother wanted to take the baby back. Often this would be the only real identifier of their parentage that a child would have. Similar scenes played out at workhouses and children’s homes across the country. The result being that genealogists often hoping to find a paper trail for ancestors they suspect of having been adopted or raised in workhouses struggle to move beyond that brick wall. It may be because those ancestors were abandoned and given new names at random. FindMyPast’s newspaper archives would be a good place to start. But, unlike Jack Worthing, you are rather unlikely to discover the handbag they were stranded in.