When I wrote in passing a while ago about that most prolific of authors, Anonymous, it never occurred to me to look up the files and see if we had a picture of him.
But shortly afterwards, a kind reader called Monica Ann Dunne sent me in one anyway. It was a picture of his statue, to be more exact, which she had come across during a visit to Budapest.
At first it seemed to me a little cheeky of the Hungarians to be claiming the great man, whose output transcends national borders. On closer inspection, however, they were not so presumptuous. The Budapest Anonymous apparently depicts an unnamed chronicler to one of the country's King Belas. It does not purport to be the definitive version.
In any case, having faded from the history books during the 19th century, Anonymous made a big comeback under the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th, Hungary's included. So maybe Budapest has more right than most cities to commemorate him.
Any official international monument to Anonymous would be a challenge. It would have to reflect not just his literary and pamphleteering output, which is enormous, but also his considerable body of folk-song and nursery rhyme.
His extreme philanthropy, expressed through countless charitable donations, would also need to be recognised. And in the interests of accuracy, the statue would have to make reference to his less likeable traits, such as a tendency to write abusive letters to newspaper columnists, often using green ink.
In our celebrity-obsessed era, it is sobering to reflect that the primary means by which we identify ourselves are a fairly recent invention. There was a time in Europe, not long ago, when everyone was anonymous. Names as we know them evolved only as people required them for legal reasons, or more to the point, as bureaucrats required them to keep tabs.
The Romans led the way, devising a system whereby men had three names: a personal one usually chosen from a list of 12 (Quintus, Rufus, Sextus, etc) followed by the clan (eg Julii) and family (eg Caesar) titles. Not being important, Roman women needed only one name, derived from their fathers and shared with any sisters. Both of Mark Antony's daughters, for example, were called "Antonia".
Many English surnames date only from the middle ages and the rise of the craft guilds, which are responsible for the plethora of Smiths, Millers, Bakers, and Harry Potters still around today. The Irish survived without surnames even longer, until the practice of using fathers' first names or nicknames became regularised. In some countries, the process was even more arbitrary. Like the Gaels, the Jews were among the last Europeans to succumb to official nomenclature, having long survived on patronymics and other informal identifiers.
But red tape caught up with them in the end. Between 1795 and 1806, for example, the Jewish people of Warsaw found themselves allotted German surnames at random by the city's administrator. As historian Norman Davies writes: "The lucky ones came away with Apfelbaum, Himmelfarb, or Vogelsang; the less fortunate with Fischbein, Hosenduft, or Katzenellenbogen." Anonymous's literary and musical output had peaked by then. But he - and yes of course, she - had already compiled a vast and varied body of work, ranging from prayers ("Hail Mary, full of grace"), to political slogans ("Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!"), to famous last words ("We who are about to die salute you"). In my Bloomsbury Dictionary of Quotations, Anonymous merits only 109 entries, including the three just listed, whereas Shakespeare gets 373. But then again, there are theories that Anonymous was responsible for some of Shakespeare too. In any case, the 109 quotations officially attributed to the former seem a reasonably representative sample.
Like all artists, Anonymous poses more questions (eg. "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?") than answers. One notable answer, however, was that written by a modern-day civil servant - yet another of Anonymous's manifestations - for a minister addressing Britain's House of Lords. Unfortunately, his comment in the margins was also read out by mistake: "This is a rotten argument, but it should be good enough for their lordships on a hot summer afternoon."
Naturally, Ireland is well represented in the list. Here, putting on a brogue, Anonymous addresses Napper Tandy about the state of the nation: "She's the most disthressful country that iver yet was seen/ For they're hangin' men and women there for the wearin' o' the green." The bereaved (yet strangely cheerful) admirer of Molly Malone also merits inclusion.
Some of Anonymous's pithiest work occurs in the now neglected art of epitaph-writing. Devon in England seems to be particular rich in the genre, according to Bloomsbury, which gives this grimly amusing example from a grave in Torrington: "Here lies a man who was killed by lightning./ He died when his prospects seemed to be brightening./ He might have cut a flash in this world of trouble,/ But the flash cut him and he lies in the stubble."
Death is the most extreme form of anonymity. Another, more cheerful, example from a Devon grave sums up the limited value of earthly fame: "Here lie I by the chancel door./ They put me here because I was poor./ The farther in the more you pay,/But here lie I as snug as they."
Woody Allen, a next-door neighbour of Anonymous in the dictionary, put it even more succinctly. "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work," he said. "I want to achieve it through not dying."