Jody, are you saying that JA is equating Smith with being low class (i.e. artisan?) That's quite possible, although one of the greates literary wits of her time was a gentleman and a clergymen called Sydney Smith, whom some like to think was a model for Henry Tilney.

Then, in P&P, there is a Mrs Long and the Gardiners, both of whom are friends/relatives of the Bennets, whom she must represent significantly in the lower class in contrast to the Darcys and the de-Bourghs.

So you are saying that Long and Gardiner are inherently lower-class names than Darcy and de Bourgh.? That may be so, I don't know, but would JA have known them to be so, and what justification is there for this assumption?

Similar, Mrs Clay keeps in company with the Elliots, and her name gives the same lower connotations.

Do you use the same argument here- that Clay is a low-class name, or merely that it sounds more lower-class?

Fairfax is also an "attribute" surname (fair-hair). There is also Mrs Hill, the maid in P&P.

Which means........????

] Bennett means "good speaker" . In both Mr Bennet and Mrs Bennet's cases, these are correct! *grin*

I'll take your word for it. Would Jane Austen have known this, do you think?

] Darcy can be derived from "dark" - perhaps, from the dark "bad" light he was shown in at the start.

Are you saying that JA could speak old irish, or just that it sounds like "dark", therefore JA was intending it to mean dark.

] Ferrars, I think, might come from "farrier", which might suggest that they were also of the new rich - they were not as "upper class" as they would like to think.

Ferrars is, amongst other things, the name of a place- a common place-name ending in Hampshire. It's also the name of one of JA's neighbours- a clergyman called Edmund Ferrars.

] However, it had been observed in some other message, quite a while ago, that Fitzwilliam means "son of William", but the fitz-prefix generally tends towards a meaning of illegitimacy - suggesting a blemish to the "higher orders", that JA is wanting to relay.And it has been confirmed, repeatedly on this board and on P&P that there's absolutely no truth in that rumour whatsoever.

] Of course, all my conjectures could just be delving too much into a lovely story. But it is interesting.

I don't know whether you are delving too much or not. But I do know that all this is still purely guesswork!

The truth is that no-one knows how or why JA chose the names she did. I think we can prove that some snobs like Sir Walter considered "Smith " to be a low-class name. We can guess that "Miss Smith" is so called because her father's name is not to be besmirched by the fact that he's got an illegitimate daughter, and that many "Miss Smiths" were similarly illegitimate. But that's about it.