Wilde & Tame

I'm not sure why I was invited to LIBERTY 2005: The Annual London Conference of the Libertarian Alliance and the Libertarian International. The mailing went to my BlackCrayon.com address so they're either mailing libertarian webmasters in general (let me know) or it might have something to do with a pleasant email exchange I once had with Perry de Havilland, who you can find quoted in my BlackCrayon dictionary definitions a few times.

Anyway, the email came from the director of the Libertarian Alliance, Dr. Chris R. Tame.

His name reminded me of something I've failed to mention in this blog before:

The hero of my favorite anarchist science fiction novel, The Stone Canal, is named Jonathan Wilde. I wondered if his name was supposed to be meaningful to me so I looked it up in Wikipedia. I found Jonathan Wild (no ultimate E on this spelling) :

Jonathan Wild (1683-May 24, 1725) was perhaps the most famous criminal of London -- and possibly Great Britain -- during the 18th century, both because of his own actions and the uses novelists, playwrights, and political satirists made of them.

I wasn't sure what the connection was supposed to be. Jonathan Wilde of Stone Canal is clearly the hero (isn't he?) -- an anarchist in the peaceful market-anarchist sense of the A-word, not a villain. But maybe his name is a comment on how he is perceived. Or maybe it was the historical Jonathan Wild's role as "Thief Taker General" -- could it be a reference to private security? Polycentric law?

Well, I didn't worry about it too much.

Then when I was reading David Liss's historical mystery/literary thriller, Conspiracy of Paper, the question came up for me again, because the historical Jonathan Wild is a major character (and major villain) in Liss's novel. I've had brief correspondence with Stone Canal's author, Ken MacLeod, but never thought to ask. When my father was reading Conspiracy of Paper, however, he did think to ask.

This is what MacLeod replied:

The real Jonathan Wild (not Wilde) was an eighteenth-century (I think) entrepreneur who supplied protection services. Unfortunately he also supplied quite a few of the crimes his agency protected against, and he ended up on the gallows.

This ironic side-light on anarcho-capitalism wasn't, I'm afraid, at all in my mind when I invented the guy's name. Though I must have read about Jonathan Wild in the children's magazine Look and Learn when I was very young, I had forgotten all about him.

Jonathan Wilde first appears in The Star Fraction as a minor character, the eminence grise of the space movement, and I consciously gave him that name to distinguish him from (and thus, of course, to obliquely allude to) the famous real-life English libertarian activist, Chris Tame - a point duly noted in the first notice of the book in the Libertarian Alliance journal Free Life, which in a later issue carried a review of the book, by Chris Tame.

So it all just came from the not very brilliant pun on the two names, Wilde and Tame. I wish I'd been clever enough to notice the historical echo, but I wasn't.

All the best
--
Ken MacLeod