Cyber Georgianas and Brontë villains

'Ere, what's all this then? When googling Georgiana to see if I could find a picture of her for my profile (well, that was the main reason), I discovered to my dismay that some other chick - it CAN'T be a guy - has registered "Georgiana Podsnap" as a user on Facebook. Is dismay an overreaction? Should I not be glad that somewhere out there, little Georgiana has another fan? Yes, probably. But honestly I can't be. If the other Georgiana should find this blog (not very likely at present because it seems to be in a Google blind spot) she will think I stole her alias and be not a little cheesed off. I can only say it's a feeling I wholeheartedly share.

I was not aware that Facebook was a playground for fictional characters as well as flesh-and-blood people but I suppose it was only to be expected: we book nerds are like that. At work, I try to use names of fictional and historical characters whenever I can as test users and in manuals. I once invented a test user called Edward Casaubon whose function it was to make all kinds of mistakes on a website where I was the webmaster, in order to check the error messages. I thought of using the name Nicholas Bulstrode, but decided he would not have made any errors even in a futuristic web environment. The company where I have my present assignment has, according to one of my manuals, contracts with Dombey and Son, Wickfield and Heep and the Captain Flint Corporation. In such circumstances, outsourcing may not seem such a brilliant idea after all.

Speaking of book nerdishness, I'm really enjoying "The Taste of Sorrow" now. The Brontë sisters are struggling on with their various teaching jobs and not liking it much, but it's still not a depressing read: the warm family feeling and the siblings' shared imaginary worlds lighten things up. I wish poor Charlotte would be less hard on herself and show more signs of the sense of humour you can see in her books, but I can't claim Jude Morgan doesn't have sympathy for her. According to him, Wilson of Cowan Bridge a.k.a. Brocklehurst deserved his bad press, and he certainly convinced me. It's one of the sneaky things about historical fiction: you're apt to believe that everything the author describes more or less happened just like that. It's hard to remember that Carus Wilson in "The Taste of Sorrow" is just as much a fictional character as Brocklehurst. But if the real Wilson really did publish a journal called "The Children's Friend" full of horrifying cautionary tales, well, there's not much you can say for him.

It would be ironic if one of the fictional Victorian villains who actually did exist in the real world would be Brocklehurst, who, as I've said earlier, is a dead loss villain-wise. The only cool thing about him is the name. I must say generally that Brontë villains aren't much to my taste. With Charlotte this doesn't matter because she has such intelligent, humourous and interestingly flawed heroes. Mr Rochester, of course; Paul Emmanuel - an acquired taste, I've been given to understand, but I like him; Robert Gerard Moore: with such men about, you don't really feel short-changed. I've not felt myself able to revisit Anne's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" or Emily's "Wuthering Heights" since my teens, though, largely because I find their main villains - Heathcliff and Arthur Huntingdon - so appalling. What makes it worse is you're meant to see their dangerous fascination and accordingly feel for the women who fall for them, but I cannot and do not. They represent two types of baddie I have little time for: The Dissipated Cad and The Savage Brute. You can say this much for Heathcliff, however, that everyone else in "Wuthering Heights" is almost equally loathsome: Catherine even manages to be even worse than he is, up to the point where you actually start to feel sorry for the poor caveman sap for being so crazy about her. As for the "Tenant", I should probably give it another chance, because I do like the hero Gilbert Markham, and it's a ripping yarn full of warring couples which makes for great drama. Plus there's a villain on the sidelines who was rather interesting as I remember, though why he should waste his time trying to seduce Helen, the novel's heroine, is a mystery to me. But then those who know the book better than I do claim I'm too hard on Helen, which is another reason to re-read the book. I did tend to be a bit too censorious as a teenager.