PICKWICK

PICKWICK. This name is no fabrication of our great Novelist; and indeed very few of his names, however happy, however ludicrous, are so. I have noticed a large 2)roportion of them on actual signboards in his own native county of Kent. At Folkeston there is, or at least, there recently was, a veritable Mark Tapley — one too who had been to America ! Although Pickwick does not occur in our Gazetteer, it appears that a locality in "Wiltshire formerly gave name to a familj' called De Pikewike. In the reign of Edward I., saith my record, one "William de Pikewike, like his immortal namesake, found himself within the walls of a prison — I am sorry to say, for felony ; \)\\t as the ofi'euce was compromised for eight shillings, we may presume that it was not a very enormous one. — Rotuli Hundredorum, vol. ii., page 273.

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.