Learning to Name Characters from Dickens

“How do you choose their names?” a young writer recently asked me, referring to the host of characters populating my historical novel "Murder in Old Bombay," to be published shortly by Macmillan Publishers. That got me thinking about names.

Names are powerful! They contain the seed of the character’s personality, the time and place, their ancestry, and even how they see themselves.

Recall Dickens’ infamous character Uriah Heep? “Humble we are, and humble we shall always be!” he’d say, rubbing his hands. What a vivid impression of falsehood! We know he’s pretending to modesty because both his body language and his very name elicit suspicion. Names are subtle signposts.

In my current manuscript I had named a character Blake Baldwin. He’s an operative, a detective who is killed when he uncovered an anarchist plot. But something about his presence just didn’t work, until I realized the anachronism! Blake is a rather modern name—and my book is set in 1893! Renaming him Arnold Baldwin allowed him to fit into the scenes much better.

Names also direct us to a character’s ancestry and ethnicity. In "Murder in Old Bombay," a young rascal called Birju (a Hindu name) was a pivotal minor character from a mountain village near Pathankot in northern India. Readers may not know that in 1947, when British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, border villages with predominantly Hindu populations remained with India and those which had mostly Muslim populations were given over to Pakistan. Pathankot stayed in India.

I wanted a racial balance in the book—representing positive characters in all religions, all races, all cultures. To paint one group as villainous exacerbates preexisting prejudices, and that should be contrary to a writer’s role.

Now here’s the problem. In the 1890s, the period in which my book is set, Hindus and Muslims co-existed amicably in villages, so while I wanted to show Birju’s family was Hindu, much of the village life reflects a rural Muslim culture. However, when we sent out electronic copies of my book, an early reviewer complained that it was...

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