Sources of names and references

The limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens can be traced to political and cultural figures who contributed to the bureaucratic, economic, and technological systems of Huxley's age, and presumably those systems in Brave New World:

Bernard Marx, from George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Bernard of Clairvaux or possibly Claude Bernard) and Karl Marx.

Henry Foster, from Henry Ford American industrialist, see above.

Lenina Crowne, from Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader during the Russian Revolution.

Fanny Crowne, from Fanny Kaplan, famous for an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Lenin. Ironically, in the novel, Lenina and Fanny are friends.

George Edzel, from Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford.

Polly Trotsky, from Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader.

Benito Hoover, from Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy; and Herbert Hoover, then-President of the United States.

Helmholtz Watson, from the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the American behaviorist John B. Watson.

Darwin Bonaparte, from Napoleon I, the leader of the First French Empire, and Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species.

Herbert Bakunin, from Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher and Social Darwinist, and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian philosopher and anarchist.

Mustapha Mond, from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of Turkey after World War I, who pulled his country into modernization and official secularism; and Sir Alfred Mond, an industrialist and founder of the Imperial Chemical Industries conglomerate.

Primo Mellon, from Miguel Primo de Rivera, prime minister and dictator of Spain (1923-1930), and Andrew Mellon, an American banker and Secretary of the Treasury (1921-1932).

Sarojini Engels, from Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto along with Karl Marx: and Sarojini Naidu, an Indian politician.

Morgana Rothschild, from J. P. Morgan, US banking tycoon, and the Rothschild family, famous for its European banking operations.

Fifi Bradlaugh, from the British political activist and atheist Charles Bradlaugh.

Joanna Diesel, from Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who invented the diesel engine.

Clara Deterding, from Henri Deterding, one of the founders of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company.

Tom Kawaguchi, from the Japanese Buddhist monk Ekai Kawaguchi, the first recorded Japanese traveler to Tibet and Nepal.

Jean-Jacques Habibullah, from the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Habibullah Khan, who served as Emir of Afghanistan in the early 20th century.

Miss Keate, the Eton headmistress, from nineteenth-century headmaster John Keate.

Arch-Community Songster of Canterbury, a parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church's decision in August 1930 to approve limited use of contraception.

Popé, from Popé, the Native American rebel who was one of the instigators of the conflict now known as the Pueblo Revolt.

John the Savage, after the term "noble savage" originally used in the verse drama The Conquest of Granada by John Dryden, and later erroneously associated with Rousseau.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 751