Last month, Barlo & Shaw’s A to Z featured Shirley Street, which some readers will have been surprised to learn was named after Sir Titus’ grandson. Shirley Salt must thank Charlotte Bronte for changing the sex of his name from male to female. It originally meant lea or clearing. Then in 1849 Charlotte Bronte wrote the novel Shirley. “Shirley Keelder (she had no Christian name but Shirley; her parents who had wished to have a son, finding that, after eight years of marriage, Providence had granted then only a daughter, bestowed on her the same masculine family cognomen they would have bestowed on a boy, if with a boy they had been blessed…."
Poor Shirley Salt, put not your trust in novelists!
Clive Woods |
