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GIRL’S NAMES
What They Mean-Famous People That Bore the Name-The Name in History, Literature, Etc.
By Henry W. Fischer
[Welland Telegraph, 5 January 1912]
MOLLY
“Molly” is the only colloquial substitute for the more dignified Mary that good taste will tolerate. Others, like Mamie and Mame, are seldom heard outside the most intimate circles, and good literature scorns them.
“Molly” on the other hand figures prominently in the domain of crime as in that of letters. At the same time it is frequently applied in a derisive sense.
Two of the world’s famous lyric poets owe some of the happiest hours of their lives to girls named Molly: Shelley and Burger.
The latter, whose famous ballad, “Leonore” offered Walter Scott his first opportunity as a literary artist, conceived a passion for “Molly,” when he led to the altar her sister, his first wife. The infatuation yielded both man and woman untold miseries that the literary world might gain some jewels of poetry, whose every word meant a heart-ache.
When, after years of unhappiness, Burger finally married his “Molly;” death robbed him of his treasure in a few months’ time.
Like Burger’s, so Shelley’s love for “Molly,” Mary Goodwin, broke his wife’s heart, but they had at least the happiness of living in peace for eight years, when in the end their love culminated in the long-wished for marriage.
Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders is no work of imagination, but the biography of a real person.
Molly was a contemporary of the second Charles and did time in Virginia, then a penal colony. An outcast and a thief for more than two decades, married five times, she ultimately grew rich and died full of years and honors. She was, perhaps, the handsomest woman of a period famous for beauties, such as Neil Gwynn, Lucy Waters, Mrs. Middleton and La Belle Stuart, and so were most of the other famous Mollys noted for fair looks and sprightliness.
Molly Carlson, known as “the German princess,” was hanged at Tyburn. Molly Firth, alias Molly Cutpurse, was a bold thief in the reign of Charles I. She escaped the other Moll’s fate by bribing the Newgate jailer.
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