| Fanny by Gaslight
The large number of ‘Fanny’ names in Potty, Fartwell & Knob is as much a reflection of its popularity as of its double entendre potential. ‘Fanny’ gradually replaced Frances as baptismal name, rather than a nickname, from the second half of the eighteenth century, John Cleland’s popular novel, Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, dating from 1748, perhaps contributing to its popularity. It peaked in the 1870s, when more than 5,000 girls were given the name every year, but then began a steady decline which perhaps reflected the rise in the use of fanny as a slang word. Its earliest recorded use in print in this context appeared in the September 1879 issue of the salacious magazine The Pearl. Thereafter, it became progressively less common, so that by the time it featured in songs and ribald jokes in the trenches of the First World War, it had all but fallen out of use. By the Second World War, scarcely anyone was given the name ‘Fanny’. The 1944 British film Fanny by Gaslight, based on the novel of that name by Michael Sadleir, received such an outraged reaction that in the USA it was retitled Man of Evil – even though American fannies are not the same as British ones.
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