Mary Ann Evans revealed her true identify in ways that may have been conscious or subconscious. She chose Eliot as her pseudo surname, keeping the initial letter and sound of Evans, and she put herself inside the books as well as on the covers. She did not create literary casts of thousands. But a review of character names in her best-known and best-received novels revealed a strong preference for starting the names of significant well-developed characters with the M of Mary Ann (or Marian, as she was sometimes called). The somewhat autobiographical female protagonist of Mill on the Floss is Maggie, and the sympathetic main character in Middlemarch has Evans’s given name, Mary. The title and main character of Silas Marner also features the M, and Marner’s ward and eventual savior, Eppie, has the short E from Evans. In Daniel Deronda, the characters with strong values and high standards have names that begin with M—Mirah (Daniel’s eventual bride), Ezra Mordecai (her brother, with two of Evans’s initials), and Sir Hugo Mallinger (Daniel’s kind foster father).

Mary Ann Evans’s pattern was not unique. Other writers during the period of Joseph Smith’s life, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allen Poe, similarly wove sounds from their names into their major characters. British authors, including Dickens, did this as well. Some linguists today are studying a phenomenon not identified during Joseph Smith’s lifetime called the name letter effect, which explains that people have a particular fondness for sounds (and thus letters) in their own names, and that they consciously or subconsciously tend to favor those sounds in many decisions they make in their lives—including selection by authors of names for fictional characters.

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Plagiarism suspicion has been raised for two minor authors of Joseph Smith’s time period who were not Latter-day Saints. Ethan Smith, a minister, wrote View of the Hebrews, a religious work suggesting that the American Indians were descended from Hebrews who had migrated to the Americas in pre-Columbian times. This was a position advocated by many who lived during this time; Ethan Smith used scriptural references and philosophic reasoning, but his work did not include characters or specific happenings. Thus name letter effects are not involved in his book. When Ethan Smith’s name letters were compared to the unique names in the Book of Mormon, a 45 percent correspondence was found with consonants and 25.6 percent with vowels. Thus neither his name letters nor the style of his manuscript give support for his authorship.

Questions have been more commonly raised concerning the influence of Solomon Spalding, a former minister turned author, on aspects of the Book of Mormon. His narrative, titled Manuscript Story (sometimes called Manuscript Found), which the author freely admitted was his own fiction, involves a group of Romans who become lost at sea and end up in the Americas.

Spalding’s name sounds reveal no significant presence of the name letter effect in Book of Mormon characters. His consonant sounds correspond 45.2 percent with the Book of Mormon (more than Joseph Smith, about the same as Ethan Smith, and significantly less than Sidney Rigdon). His vowel sounds correspond only 18.7 percent (lower than both Joseph Smith and Ethan Smith).

In contrast, when Solomon Spalding’s name letter sounds were compared to the names of the characters in Manuscript Found, his consonant sounds were represented in 65 percent of the total consonant sounds, and his vowel sounds made up 57.9 percent of the total vowel sounds. Spalding’s sounds are represented prominently in the characters of his own manuscript, but not in the characters of the Book of Mormon.

Thus neither Joseph Smith’s contemporary LDS writers nor his contemporary outside clergymen/authors seem to have left their name letter imprint on Book of Mormon names. The striking number and variety of Book of Mormon names appear to us to be considerably beyond the experience or the possible “unconscious egotism” that might be attributed to Joseph Smith. If Joseph Smith was a fiction writer, he was certainly an atypical one, whose lexicon of names cannot be explained in terms of the name letter effect.