Every author fields the same question sooner or later, usually from someone leaning in slightly as if requesting classified information: “Are your characters based on real people?” The honest reply comes out as yes, no, and it’s complicated, often in the same breath. We borrow a laugh here, a walk there, an aunt’s talent for narrating her own indigestion. Most characters end up a patchwork of a dozen people who’d never spot themselves in the stitching.
Now and then, though, a real person walks into a book almost whole and stays there for a century. They rarely volunteer. Here are a few who ended up immortal by accident, and what the arrangement actually cost them.
The doctor who diagnosed you before you sat down
In 1877, a young medical student called Arthur Conan Doyle took a job as an outpatient clerk to a surgeon at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The surgeon, Dr Joseph Bell, had a rather unique party trick. He could glance at a patient shuffling through the door and tell them their trade, their recent travels, and roughly where they’d bought their boots, all before a word left their mouth. A sailor’s tattoos told him which ports the man had worked; an accent and a set of calluses did the rest.
Doyle never forgot it. Years later, hunting for a detective who cracked crimes by noticing what everyone else walked straight past, he reached back to his old teacher and lifted him nearly intact. In 1892 he wrote to Bell and owned up: “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.” Bell, to his credit, seemed thoroughly delighted, which puts him one up on most of the people on this list.
The one-legged poet who turned pirate
Robert Louis Stevenson had a friend called William Ernest Henley, a poet and editor who’d lost a leg to tuberculosis of the bone as a young man and moved through the world on a crutch with genuinely alarming energy. Stevenson’s stepson remembered him as a great, glowing, massive-shouldered fellow with a red beard and a laugh that rolled like music.
When Stevenson sat down to write Treasure Island, that image refused to leave him. He later confessed the whole thing in a letter to Henley: “It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver.” A lovely thing to tell a friend, right up until the friend remembers Long John Silver happens to be a murderous, double-crossing sea-cook who’d garrotte a cabin boy for a bigger slice of the loot. Compliments arrive in all shapes.
The boy who never asked for any of it
A.A. Milne had a son, born in 1920, called Christopher Robin. The boy owned a teddy bear, a stuffed piglet, and a permanently gloomy donkey, and his father simply wrote them all down. Winnie the Pooh took his name partly from a real black bear at London Zoo. Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger came off the nursery shelf more or less as they stood.
It turned the boy into the most famous child in England, which sounds marvellous until you’re nine and every lad at boarding school knows the poems off by heart. Christopher Robin Milne spent much of his adult life clawing his way out from under the character who shared his name, and refused to touch the royalties his likeness brought in. Being adored by millions of strangers, it turns out, feels nothing like being loved by the one or two people who actually know you.
The birdwatcher who lent 007 his name
Ian Fleming, settling in at his Jamaican house to write a spy novel, wanted a name for his hero so plain it vanished. No romance, no flourish, nothing that sounded invented. He looked down at the book on his desk. Fleming happened to be a keen birdwatcher, and the definitive field guide to Caribbean birds, Birds of the West Indies, sat within arm’s reach. Its author, an American ornithologist, went by the name James Bond.
Fleming borrowed it wholesale. He later told the real Bond’s wife that the brief, unromantic, very masculine name suited his purposes perfectly. The ornithologist, a quiet man who spent his days cataloguing warblers, then spent the rest of his life explaining that no, he did not hold a licence to kill; he held a licence to identify the lesser Antillean pewee. The film-makers eventually had their fun with it. In Die Another Day, Bond thumbs through a copy of Birds of the West Indies and introduces himself as an ornithologist, a quiet nod to the man whose name went off to save the world without him.
The father forever about to strike it rich
Charles Dickens handed David Copperfield a gloriously hopeless character called Wilkins Micawber, a man permanently one lucky break short of solvency, forever assuring everyone that something will turn up. Readers adored him. Dickens knew him a good deal better than they did, because he’d grown up alongside him.
When Charles turned twelve, his father, John Dickens, landed in a debtors’ prison over money he couldn’t repay, and young Charles left school to paste labels onto pots of shoe blacking for six shillings a week. He later described his father as a jovial opportunist with no money sense, which reads like Micawber in eight words. Dickens took the most painful stretch of his childhood and spun it into one of the best-loved comic characters in the language. Turning your worst memories into something people treasure covers roughly the entire job description.
The catch nobody mentions
There’s a temptation to assume being written into a famous book counts as the highest tribute going. Sometimes it genuinely does. Joseph Bell rather enjoyed his cameo; Henley wore his link to Treasure Island with a certain swagger. But Christopher Robin Milne would have handed the whole thing back in a heartbeat, and the ornithologist James Bond mostly wanted people to stop ringing his doorbell. The character escapes into the world and does precisely as it likes. The person left behind has to live with the version of themselves that a few million strangers now take for gospel.
That gap between the real person and the printed one happens to be exactly where I like to work. Nearly every character I’ve invented carries a fingerprint of someone I’ve met: a phrase I half-overheard at the gym, a face attached to a Facebook message out of the blue from somebody I haven’t clapped eyes on since school. None of them turns up whole. They arrive in pieces, and the pieces shift around until even I lose the thread of where they started.
If you fancy a couple of ordinary blokes who feel like someone you’d actually recognise, The ’86 Fix follows Craig Pelling, a middle-aged man marooned in a life he can’t remember choosing, handed one weekend back in 1986 to put it right. And Waiting in The Sky, the most personal thing I’ve written, gives you Simon Armstrong, a man who has spent nearly thirty years quietly certain he’s an alien waiting for his lift home. Neither of them traces back to any one person. Both of them, I suspect, trace back to all of us. If the question of where any of this comes from nags at you, I dug into it properly over in where do authors get their ideas.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which fictional character is most famously based on a real person?
Sherlock Holmes is the classic case. Arthur Conan Doyle modelled him on Dr Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon who taught him and could deduce a stranger’s trade and history at a glance. Doyle admitted the debt to Bell directly in a letter in 1892, writing that he owed the detective entirely to him.
Did Ian Fleming name James Bond after a real person?
Yes, though only the name. Fleming, a keen birdwatcher, lifted it from the American ornithologist James Bond, author of the field guide Birds of the West Indies. He wanted the plainest, least romantic name he could find, and the book happened to be sitting on his desk in Jamaica.
Did the real Christopher Robin like being in Winnie the Pooh?
Not for long. Christopher Robin Milne, A.A. Milne’s son, enjoyed the early attention but came to resent the fame as he grew up, particularly at boarding school, and refused the royalties his likeness brought in. He spent much of his life trying to separate himself from the character.
Who inspired Long John Silver in Treasure Island?
Robert Louis Stevenson based the one-legged pirate on his friend William Ernest Henley, a poet who had lost a leg to illness and carried himself with enormous force of personality. Stevenson confessed the inspiration in a letter, telling Henley that “the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness” gave rise to the character.
Do modern authors base their characters on real people?
Most do, at least in part, but rarely in one clean lift. Characters tend to be composites, assembled from scraps of many different people until no single real person stays recognisable. It keeps the writing honest and the lawyers calm.