Last name, little

   Not a standard mode of address, but made well-known in a literary context by Charles Dickens, in Little Dorrit. Amy Dorrit is about twenty-two years old when she meets Arthur Clennam and falls in love with him, but she looks much younger. She tells him that she should like to be called Little Dorrit ‘better than any name’. Soon afterwards occurs: ‘“Little Dorrit”, said Clennam; and the phrase had already begun, between these two, to stand for a hundred gentle phrases, according to the varying tone and connexion in which it was used.’ Another character in the novel, Flora, nevertheless thinks that ‘Little Dorrit’ is the ‘strangest of denominations’. To Maggy, Amy is ‘little mother’; to the turnkey’s son, John Chivery, who is also in love with her, she is Miss Amy. In Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson, the central character Gerald Middleton is at one stage addressed as ‘little Middleton’: ‘“What does it matter to you, little Middleton?” he said. Gerald, hearing the schoolboy form of address, thought, “He’s drunker than I realized.”’