Eponymous Characters in Literature

It's Wordy Wednesday again. Last week one of the words I mentioned was Panglossian, which comes from Pangloss, a character in Voltaire's Candide, and defined, in the words of Pangloss himself: "marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds." (source)

I was trying to think of more words from memorable characters in literature -- so memorable that their name became a word and they became eponymous. I digress to call out that wonderful word eponymous, meaning a person that gave his or her name to a word or a concept or even to a physical thing, like (shudder) Trump Tower. Or the derived concept.

You probably know quite a few such words yourself. I thought of these:

• The term Uncle Tom often appears in discussions of current events. You probably know that its origin is a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The dictionary offers two meanings:
  -- "a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals), and also
  -- "a member of a low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority."
  
  
• Uncle Tom's Cabin also includes the character Simon Legree, a name that has become synonymous with a cruel slave driver.
  
  
• Nabokov's book Lolita is the source of the word lolita -- "a precociously seductive girl."
  
  
• From Shakespeare: a Romeo is, of course, a handsome lover.
  
  

• 

  Caliban by Rackham

  Also from Shakespeare: a caliban, from the character in the Tempest, is a degraded or bestial man.
  
  
• Yet another Shakespearean word -- sometimes the name Dogberry, a self-satisfied policeman in Much Ado About Nothing, is applied to similar officers of the law outside of the play. This one is a bit obscure, I think.
  
  
• Many other Shakespeare characters' names are also used to indicate similar individuals of the same type -- Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Macduff, Othello, Iago, Hamlet, Portia.

To return to panglossian -- it's one of several words that Merriam-Webster online includes in "A Who's Who of Literary Allusions: Words that Come from Characters in Books." Examples from this list:

• 

  W.C.Fields as Mr. Macawber.
  (All images from Wikipedia.)

  From David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: micawber -- "an improvident person who lives in expectation of an upturn in his fortunes."
  
  
• From The Three Princes of Serendip by Horace Walpole: serendipity -- "an assumed gift for finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for."
  
  
• From Gulliver's Travels by Swift: three words -- yahoo, lilliputian, and brobdingnagian -- which apply to three types of characters: boorish, very tiny, and gigantic.
  
  
• My biggest surprise was finding that the name of the disease, syphilis, originated as the name of a character in a literary work!  "Syphilis was the name of the ostensible first sufferer of the disease, a shepherd and hero (if such a word can be used here) of the 1530 poem written by the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus."

Other eponymous literary words on the dictionary list: pollyanna, pander, malapropism, milquetoast, gargantuan, pooh-bah, and quixotic. There must be many more such words, based on the enormous number of memorable characters in literature throughout the ages!