Alphonse the Page

The annotations to A Damsel in Distress offer two possible explanations for this short exchange between George Bevan and Maud's page Albert:

"'Ullo!" said the youth.
"Hullo, Alphonso!" said George.
"My name's not Alphonso."
"Well, you be very careful or it soon may be."

The initial suggestion was that this was a reference to W. S. Gilbert's poem "The Modest Couple," first published in Fun on August 8, 1868, which Wodehouse knew well and quoted elsewhere. However, there doesn't seem to be too much common ground for connecting Gilbert's character with Albert: his Alphonso is not a stereotypical page, but a young suitor full of self-confidence.

As an alternative I brought up a scene in Dickens' Nicholas Nickelby, where a boy who "carried plain Bill in his face and figure" and is in the service of a lady of quality is re-christened "Alphonse" and dressed in the many-buttoned uniform of a page. This is exactly the situation Albert is in in Wodehouse's novel, justifying George's warning. At the time I thought this was conclusive.

There is more to it though, because lately I've found out that Dickens' passage is not alone. In summary, just as "Jane" was a generic name for housemaids, there appears to have been a tradition of renaming pages as "Alphonse/Alphonso." This may be first documented in Nicholas Nickleby but extends even into the twentieth century. In what follows I will put together the traces of evidence I have found so far.

First, concerning Maud's model for her ideal page: she "wanted him to be as like as he could to a medieval page, one of those silk-and-satined little treasures she had read about in the Ingoldsby Legends." None of the (foot-)pages or errand boys found in the Legends (published in 1837) is called Alphonse, but they are characterized by a uniform with plenty of unnecessary buttons, especially when attending on the nobility: see for example "a careless young rascal he'd hired as a Page, / All buttons and brass" ("The Blasphemer's Warning") or "Master José was a youth well-favoured, and comely to look upon. His office was that of page to the dame ... clad, for the most part, in garments fitted tightly to the shape, the lower moiety adorned with a broad strip of crimson or silver lace, and the upper with what the first Wit of our times has described as 'a favourable eruption of buttons'" ("The Leech of Folkestone").

Then comes Dickens' novel in 1838-1839:

Upon this doubtful ground, lived Mrs. Wititterly, and at Mrs. Wititterly's door Kate Nickleby knocked with trembling hand. The door was opened by a big footman with his head floured, or chalked, or painted in some way (it didn't look genuine powder), and the big footman, receiving the card of introduction, gave it to a little page; so little, indeed, that his body would not hold, in ordinary array, the number of small buttons which are indispensable to a page's costume, and they were consequently obliged to be stuck on four abreast. [...]
"Place chairs."
The page placed them.
"Leave the room, Alphonse."
The page left it; but if ever an Alphonse carried plain Bill in his face and figure, that page was the boy.

J. Leech in The Church-Goer (1845) p. 18 wrote:

a lofty perked-up looking dowager approached, followed by one of those non-descripts, made of buttons and braid, called 'a page.' Like all of his class it was impossible to tell his age; a long dark fur on his upper lip, and a certain hardness of feature told one he had arrived at that mysterious epoch where man and boy meet; while the childishness attempted to be imparted to his figure in other respects, showed that an effort had been made by his aspiring mistress to convert him into something between a Cupid and a Ganymede. He was so packed and squeezed into his jacket and trousers, and all the protuberances of his body were so pressed in and imprisoned, you felt in contemplating him a most uncomfortable misgiving lest, like most things too cruelly imposed upon, they would one day or another revolt, and laughing to scorn all the ingenuity of tailoring and the power of stitches, burst forth in native fulness and form to the world. This poor boy had certainly parted not only with his liberty, but with his second prerogative, for he was like nothing in nature but—a page: save for the rows of buttons and the hat, which he held up with his ears, the creature would have looked like a crocodile, and even that would have been preferable, for better be like a crocodile than nothing. He carried a small gilt edged prayer book, about the size of a set of ivory tablets, for his mistress, and to bear this and himself upright seemed his principal business. She had romantically, too, re-baptized him "Alphonse." Alphonse walked up to the pew, and placing the prayer book there, turning on his heel, took up his position in the gallery by a full-blown footman.

Next we have a humorous poem, "The Little Foot-Page," in Chambers's Journal (October 6, 1855, p. 224), signed "A. W."; it was later reprinted in Bentley's Miscellany for 1856 as "A Page of the Times" with the author's full name Alfred A. Watts. The re-christening of servants, the buttons, and duties such as accompanying his mistress to church make an appearance. Since this page's name is Bill, the author may have had Dickens in mind:

No jewel in his cap he wore, no plume in pagelike pride;
No lute upon his back, he bore no dagger by his side:
He never had long silken hose, or wore a satin blouse;
Nor did he ever bear a rose on either of his shoes.
In ladies' bowers he ne'er was seen; he ne'er sang ballads anyhow;
His name was not Alphonse, Eugene, Lucentio, or Ascanio.

But the names which to Pages were given of yore,
And the name of the Page I am speaking of, bore
As much likeness as Sukey to Eleanore,
Or Betty to Phyllis and Lalage;
From such Pages he was just as different as
A page out of Butler's Hudibras
From a page out of Butler's Analogy.

He was clad in a totally different way,
In the exquisite taste of the present day,
In a light little jacket of rifle-green,
Whereupon three bright rows of gilt buttons were seen—
Every button most sadly suggestive to me
Of amphibious fashion and finery.
And, to make the difference greater still,
This little Foot-Page's name was Bill.

His duties, so far as I'm able to tell,
Were to open the door and to answer the bell;
To fetch the books from Hookham's; to look
At his master's letters, and tease the cook;
To walk after his mistress to church, and wait
At table; and meet, I may likewise state,
The collateral claims of the knives and plate;
And to fill, to the family's pride and joy,
The place of a man at the price of a boy.

I knew not whether to smile or sigh
At my friend's Procrustean philosophy,
But I know that I very much longed to say:
'Pitch the Page to Old Harry, dear madam, I pray;
He's a sham and pretence: if you can't keep a man,
Get some "neat-handed Phyllis" instead, till you can;
And boldly abandoning "Buttons," employ
An "Anne Page" instead of a "lubberly boy."'

Next, several plays of the period have page characters called Alphonse (although none of them suggests that this is not their real name):

• [A Squib for] The Fifth of November by A. Mayhew and H. S Edwards (1851).
• Hotel Charges; or, How to Cook a Biffin! by Charles Selby (1853) includes the character "ALPHONSE (a page in buttons);" his costume is again described as "Page's suit, with buttons." He doesn't have any speaking lines in the play, but he does have a lot of comical "business," and at one point is seen presenting toasted bread, as in Payn's quote below.
• The Man of Many Friends by J. Sterling Coyne (1855).

An article "Devil's Dust" in Chambers's Journal for February 16, 1861 (unsigned, but the Curran Index identifies the author as George Dodd) includes this passage, with stereotypical names for different types of servants:

Shoddy is a mass of woolly particles, obtained by tearing or 'deviling' up old worsted stockings, blankets, rugs, and carpets; while mungo is a similar but somewhat better material, obtained by tearing up old woollen garments and tailors' cuttings. The coat of Lord Peerless, the Livery of James the footman, the buttoned jacket of Alphonse the page, the carpet of his lady's drawing-room, the worsted stockings of John the Gardener—all, when fitted for nothing else, are consigned to the Batley district, where they acquire a new lease of existence, and claim a place among the useful things available to us.

Then James Payn in his column "Our Note-Book" (ILN, June 2, 1888; the quotes clearly show that "Alphonse" was not his true name):

The "Lady and the Page" is a very pretty poem, but the relations between these personages are not always of a poetic character. I have even heard ladies, who are not given to denounce servants as the "greatest plague of life," express themselves with exceptional vigour against pages. "Alphonse," in his bright buttons, handing bread-and-butter on a silver salver and looking as if the butter would not melt in his mouth, is said to be a very different being outside the drawing-room door.

[I haven't found a poem titled the "Lady and the Page," but I think Payn means an episode in Alexander Smith's dialogue in verse "A Life-Drama" (Poems, 1853, pp. 57-77). The episode is narrated by the protagonist, Walter, to the lady he is wooing. It doesn't have a title, but it is sometimes referred to as "The Page and the Lady," particularly by G. Gilfillan in "A New Poet in Glasgow" published in The Critic, December 1, 1851. ("The following article, the second on Smith by Gilfillian, introduced Smith to about six thousand readers before he had even published a book of poetry, and caused Smith's first volume to be eagerly anticipated."—M. L. Onorato and D. Kanisec, Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 59, p. 254.) Walter's story is a romantic dialogue between a blasé lady and her page Leopard, and justifies the contrast between the poetic nature of the relationship between lady and page in such stories and the more prosaic character of real-life ladies and pages (like Dickens' or Wodehouse's).]

Finally, toward the end of the century we find examples of pages called "Alphonso" instead of the French form "Alphonse": Kipling in 1888 (Letters, p. 208) mentions "Alphonso the Page" as a nickname, and in a 1907 pantomime Babes in the Wood a character is "Alphonso, the Page." It is possible that the popularity of Gilbert's poem contributed to this shift between the high-class-sounding French form and the one more commonly used in English.

———

Such are the traces of this tradition that I have been able to collect so far. It may be wondered whether it is a real-life custom that is being satirized rather than a literary cliché, initiated perhaps by Dickens' successful novel. The practice of renaming servants ("Jane" for housemaids, "James" for footmen, "Thomas" for coachmen and so on—rather depersonalizing if you ask me) is so well documented that I tend to believe the former is the case, but I'd like to see more conclusive evidence culled the ocean of Victorian literature. In any case, I'm convinced that Wodehouse's Albert is a very late representative of this long lineage of Alphonses/Alphonsos, whether fictional or historical.