Names
The name "Campion" may have its origin in the Old French word for "champion". Another source says the name was suggested by Allingham's husband Philip Youngman Carter, and may allude to the Jesuit martyr St. Edmund Campion. Carter and St. Edmund Campion were both graduates of Christ's Hospital school. Campion's fictional college, St. Ignatius, supports the Edmund Campion connection, since St. Ignatius of Loyola was the founder of the Jesuits.
'Albert Campion' is revealed early on to be a pseudonym. In Mystery Mile, his true first name is said to be Rudolph, while his surname begins with a K. In The Fashion in Shrouds he also mentions his first name being Rudolph but confides he changed it asking people to call him Albert as he didn't like the name Rudolph.
Campion has used many other names in the course of his career. "Mornington Dove" (although in the 1988 Avon edition (page 72) of "The Black Dudley Murder" he is called "Mornington Dodd") and "the Honourable Tootles Ash" are mentioned in The Crime at Black Dudley; "Christopher Twelvetrees" and "Orlando" are mentioned in Look to the Lady.
Read more about this topic: Albert Campion
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“In a time of confusion and rapid change like the present, when terms are continually turning inside out and the names of things hardly keep their meaning from day to day, it’s not possible to write two honest paragraphs without stopping to take crossbearings on every one of the abstractions that were so well ranged in ornate marble niches in the minds of our fathers.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words.... The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“A knowledge that people live close by is,
I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged
The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)