first name, Master

   Until recently this was a way of addressing politely a boy who was too young to be called ‘Mister’. In his autobiographical Goodbar to All That Robert Graves comments:

   The servants were trained to call us children, even when we were tiny, ‘Master Robert’, ‘Miss Rosaleen’, and ‘Miss Clarissa’, but I had not recognized these as titles of respect. I had thought of ‘Master’ and ‘Miss merely as vocative prefixes used for addressing other people’s children; but now I found that the servants were the lower classes, and that we were ourselves. It is noticeable that when Bumble the Beadle, in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, learns of the hero’s good fortune, which makes him a young gentleman, he switches to ‘Master Oliver’ as a term of address. It was certainly the boys from middle and upper-class families who were normally addressed in this way by their social inferiors, but even boys from working-class backgrounds might in modern times be addressed with mock solemnity as ‘Master’ + first name by, e.g., a doctor. ‘Master’ + last name was also sometimes used. The use of ‘Master’ as a prefixed title to a boy has now almost died out, though some adults may still use this form jokingly. It is not always appreciated by those to whom it is addressed. A God and His Gifts, by Ivy Compton-Burnett, has: ‘The Nurse appeared. “May Master Henry come now, ma’am?” “Not Master,” said Henry, with a wail. “Come then, Nurses’s little boy.”’