Brave New World Character Name Meanings

Background figures[edit]These are non-fictional and factual characters who lived before the events in this book, but are of note in the novel:

• Henry Ford, who has become a messianic figure to the World State. "Our Ford" is used in place of "Our Lord", as a credit to popularising the use of the assembly line. Huxley's description of Ford as a central figure in the emergence of the Brave New World might also be a reference to the utopian industrial city of Fordlândia commissioned by Ford in 1927.[speculation?]
• Sigmund Freud, "Our Freud" is sometimes said in place of "Our Ford" due to the link between Freud's psychoanalysis and the conditioning of humans, and Freud's popularisation of the idea that sexual activity is essential to human happiness and need not be limited to procreation. It is also strongly implied that citizens of the World State believe Freud and Ford to be the same person.[22]
• H. G. Wells, "Dr Wells", British writer and utopian socialist, whose book Men Like Gods was an incentive for Brave New World. "All's well that ends Wells", wrote Huxley in his letters, criticising Wells for anthropological assumptions Huxley found unrealistic.
• Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose conditioning techniques are used to train infants.
• William Shakespeare, whose banned works are quoted throughout the novel by John, "the Savage". The plays quoted include Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Othello. Mustapha Mond also knows them because he, as a World Controller, has access to a selection of books from throughout history, including the Bible.
• Thomas Robert Malthus, whose name is used to describe the contraceptive techniques (Malthusian belt) practised by women of the World State.
• Reuben Rabinovitch, the character in whom the effects of sleep-learning, hypnopædia, are first noted.
• John Henry Newman, whom Mustapha Mond discussed with the Savage after reading a quotation from his book.

Sources of names and references[edit]The limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens can be traced to political and cultural figures who contributed to the bureaucratic, economic, and technological systems of Huxley's age, and presumably those systems in Brave New World:[23]

• Bernard Marx, from George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Bernard of Clairvaux or possibly Claude Bernard) and Karl Marx.
• Henry Foster, from Henry Ford, American industrialist, see above.
• Lenina Crowne, from Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader during the Russian Revolution.
• Fanny Crowne, from Fanny Kaplan, famous for an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Lenin. Ironically, in the novel, Lenina and Fanny are friends.
• George Edzel, from Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford.
• Polly Trotsky, from Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader.
• Benito Hoover, from Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy; and Herbert Hoover, then-President of the United States.
• Helmholtz Watson, from the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the American behaviorist John B. Watson.
• Darwin Bonaparte, from Napoleon I, the leader of the First French Empire, and Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species.
• Herbert Bakunin, from Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher and Classical liberal,[24] and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian philosopher and anarchist.
• Mustapha Mond, from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of Turkey after World War I, who pulled his country into modernisation and official secularism; and Sir Alfred Mond, an industrialist and founder of the Imperial Chemical Industries conglomerate.
• Primo Mellon, from Miguel Primo de Rivera, prime minister and dictator of Spain (1923–1930), and Andrew Mellon, an American banker and Secretary of the Treasury (1921–1932).
• Sarojini Engels, from Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto along with Karl Marx: and Sarojini Naidu, an Indian politician.
• Morgana Rothschild, from J. P. Morgan, US banking tycoon, and the Rothschild family, famous for its European banking operations.
• Fifi Bradlaugh, from the British political activist and atheist Charles Bradlaugh.
• Joanna Diesel, from Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who invented the diesel engine.
• Clara Deterding, from Henri Deterding, one of the founders of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, and Clara Ford, wife of Henry Ford.
• Tom Kawaguchi, from the Japanese Buddhist monk Ekai Kawaguchi, the first recorded Japanese traveller to Tibet and Nepal.
• Jean-Jacques Habibullah, from the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Habibullah Khan, who served as Emir of Afghanistan in the early 20th century.
• Miss Keate, the Eton headmistress, from nineteenth-century headmaster John Keate.
• Arch-Community Singster of Canterbury, a parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church's decision in August 1930 to approve limited use of contraception.
• Popé, from Popé, the Native American rebel who was one of the instigators of the conflict now known as the Pueblo Revolt.[25]
• John the Savage, after the term "noble savage" originally used in the verse drama The Conquest of Granada by John Dryden, and later erroneously associated with Rousseau. Furthermore, from the prophet John the Baptist.