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Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex

What happens now to people and businesses named after Atticus Finch?

This article is more than 8 years old

The heroic lawyer from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is synonymous with fairness, but in the sequel, Go Set a Watchman, he is exposed as a racist

Atticus topped the 2011 list of baby names inspired by characters in novels – ahead of Darcy, Holden and Gatsby – but its star is waning. The reviews of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman are out, and the response has been one of dismay. Literature’s great moral conscience has been corrupted. The character once voted the greatest hero of American film may in fact be a villain.

In Go Set a Watchman – written before To Kill a Mockingbird, but published 50 years after it – Atticus Finch is a racist, a bigot and a segregationist, a man who says things like “the negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people”. Would you name your child after this man?

Many have already done so. According to nameberry.com, Atticus is up 21% this week and has risen 150 places in the past two years. “With its trendy Roman feel combined with the upstanding, noble image of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, [Atticus] is a real winner,” the website states.

In the New York Times review of Go Set a Watchman, Michiko Kakutani describes Finch as “the perfect man … In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus”. Indeed, Shami Chakrabarti wrote in the Guardian only last Saturday about how Atticus Finch inspired her to become a lawyer.

Pauline Lewis is another Finch devotee – a Chancery Lane barrister who named her firm Atticus Lawyers because of her lifelong love of To Kill a Mockingbird. “It’s my favourite book,” she tells me. “Somewhere in my mind it made me want to become a lawyer.” It also influenced the kind of law she practises. “I try to represent disadvantaged people who find it difficult to get good legal representation,” she explains. “I do pro bono work, and as a person of Jamaican heritage I offer a quality service to businesspeople from my own community. It’s an Atticus Finch philosophy, a way of rebalancing history.”

An internet search for Atticuses (Attici?) throws up all sorts: a Shoreditch production company called Atticus Finch (whose sister company is Scout Films); a vintage emporium in Buckinghamshire called Jack & Atticus (named after the owners’ dogs); and countless individuals, including the offspring of both Casey Affleck and Jennifer Love Hewitt. All are named in honour of the man who described real courage as “when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what”. None of them want to speak to me; as someone points out on Twitter, maybe Atticuses are lying low.

Eventually I track down Atticus Ingram Rowe from Cape Cod. “I never knew another Atticus growing up,” he tells me. “In 1974, there were less than five people born in the US with the name. Eventually, I grew into it, and I’m proud of my Texan parents for having the courage to name me Atticus.” He adds that he won’t be reading Go Set a Watchman any time soon: “I will keep the Atticus we know from To Kill a Mockingbird as my Atticus.”

And how does Lewis feel about her hero now? “All great characters have areas of weakness and imperfection,” she says magnanimously. “Atticus Finch is just like everyone else. It would be wrong to allow his other beliefs to undermine the message of To Kill a Mockingbird.” So, she’s not considering telling people her company is actually named after Titus Pomponius Atticus, the ancient Roman philosopher and correspondent with Cicero? “No!” she laughs. “Even if Atticus Finch is not the guy we thought he was, the message still stands.”

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