Where Principles Come From: Why I Named My Business Rules After Dickens Characters

I have a principle called Joe Gargery.

If you haven’t read Great Expectations, Joe is the blacksmith. Pip’s brother-in-law. The man who raises him, loves him without condition, and asks for nothing back. When Pip comes home broke and ashamed after years of chasing the life of a gentleman, Joe nurses him back to health and then quietly disappears — because he knows his presence embarrasses the boy he loves, and he won’t make the boy bear that. He does the work. He never once announces it.

The principle named after him: do the work, don’t announce the work. No status updates. No “I’ve been working on.” Commit it or it didn’t happen.

I could have written that as a rule. “Don’t announce work in progress.” Clear, precise, forgettable. Instead I named it after a man who has two hundred pages of Dickens behind him. Every time the principle fires, it brings Joe with it — the blacksmith’s hands, the quiet exit, the love that doesn’t need acknowledgment. The rule tells you what to do. Joe shows you what it looks like to be the kind of person who does it.

That’s the oldest knowledge-preservation technology we have.

Before the Book

Homer didn’t write the Iliad. He sang it.

For centuries before anyone committed it to papyrus, the story of Achilles and Hector and the walls of Troy was carried in the mouths of poets. It was performed, memorised, and handed to the next generation as living material — not as doctrine, not as a list of rules about courage and honour and grief, but as a story about specific people in specific situations making specific choices.

The principles were embedded in the characters. You didn’t learn about honour in the abstract. You learned it by watching Achilles choose between a long, obscure life and a short, glorious one. You didn’t learn about dignity in defeat. You watched Hector know he was going to die and go out to meet Priam’s son anyway.

Twenty-six centuries later, the principles are still legible — because the characters are still alive. The story is the carrier. The character is the mnemonic.

This is what oral tradition understood that we keep forgetting: a rule without a face is a rule you can argue with. A person with a story is something you carry with you.

The Precise Word

Gene Wolfe was the author of The Book of the New Sun — a four-volume science fiction epic set so far in Earth’s future that the sun is dying and civilisation has fallen so many times the layers are geological.

I nearly gave up after two chapters. The opening is set inside a guild of torturers, and the scenes are — the word that kept arriving was tortuous.

I stuck with it, and when Severian finally leaves the Citadel and the story opens out, the book came alive in a way I hadn’t expected. Most of the classics work this way — the first three chapters are building a world, and you have to trust that the world is worth building before you can see why. I think Wolfe just asks more of you than most.

What I noticed, once I was inside the world, was the words. He didn’t reach for the comfortable word. He reached for the right word — which is sometimes an old word, a precise word, a word that carries moral weight the modern equivalent has shed.

In his work, a woman of low standing isn’t described with a modern approximation. She’s a jade — the archaic English term for a woman considered used, beneath regard, disposable. Not because Wolfe wanted to sound archaic. Because “jade” carries something no modern word carries — a specific social contempt, compressed. The word makes you stop. It tells you something about the world Severian inhabits and the way that world categorises people. A comfortable word would let you slide past what’s being described. The precise word makes you feel the weight of it. Precision isn’t about clarity. It’s about density.

Wolfe also understood something specific about how readers and writers work together. He loaded his world with context — the deep time of Urth, the layers of civilisation compressed into sediment, the Citadel built on ruins nobody remembered — and then trusted minimal surface to activate it. Severian doesn’t explain things. He lives in them. The reader does the archaeology.

This is the same physics as a well-built AI system. Sparse prompts inside rich substrate produce deeper output than verbose instruction. Load the world. Trust the word. Wolfe’s entire method, applied to prose. It’s not an analogy — it’s the same mechanism operating in a different medium.

The same logic applies to principles. Joe Gargery is the precise word. “Don’t announce work in progress” is the comfortable approximation. Anti-Maxwell is the precise word. “Be transparent” is the comfortable approximation. The character is chosen because it’s exact, not because it’s nearest. And the reason the right character is available at all is because the reading life loaded the material.

If you don’t read, you don’t have the words. And if you don’t have the words, you’re left with rules. Rules without faces. Rules people can argue with.

The Pattern in the Substrate

I didn’t design my principles to reflect any particular set of values. They arrived. And I found Gene Wolfe because I asked AI which books I should read to better understand worldbuilding. It gave me a list. Wolfe was on it.

The books I’ve returned to most in my life are The Count of Monte Cristo, The Phantom of the Opera, and Nicholas Nickleby. I didn’t choose them for what they argue. I chose them because something in them kept pulling me back — the way you return to a song without being able to say exactly why.

Then AI pointed out what they share. All three are about injustice done to someone who doesn’t deserve it, and the long consequence of that. Dantès imprisoned for something he didn’t do. Erik rejected by the world for how he looks. Nicholas watching cruelty inflicted on the vulnerable and refusing to stomach it. In each case, someone responds to a world that’s fundamentally unfair — not with resignation, but with action, even when the action costs them everything.

I looked at the principles that had arrived in my system and the same pattern was sitting there. Anti-Maxwell: don’t be the man who makes everything look fine until it isn’t. Joe Gargery: do the work, don’t need the world to notice. The Parting Glass: know when the moment has passed and leave without making anyone bear the weight of your staying.

The substrate isn’t neutral. It carries the taste of the person who built it, and the principles that emerge are flavoured by what that person has read, felt, and returned to over twenty-six years.

Marco Pierre White once made Gordon Ramsay cry in his kitchen at Harveys. When asked about it later, Marco said: he didn’t make Gordon cry. Gordon chose to cry.

I didn’t choose the pattern. The pattern chose itself, and the reading life supplied the vocabulary.

Bourdain was a different kind of discovery. Reading Kitchen Confidential I began to understand something about voice — why his prose is so instantly recognisable, why you can feel the register from a single paragraph, why AI can reference him so readily. His signal is that strong and that consistent.

But that same quality — the vivid, reproducible surface — means it can be approximated by something that has never actually cooked anything or eaten anywhere. Dickens and Dumas load characters you can’t reach without having read them. Bourdain loads a voice so vivid it’s become part of the culture.

Both are worth understanding. They’re not the same thing.

The Density Problem

There’s a reason Anti-Maxwell works better than “don’t be dishonest.”

Robert Maxwell stole the pension funds of his own employees. He bluffed, bullied, and fabricated for decades.

He fell off his yacht in 1991 under circumstances nobody has ever fully explained. The yacht was named Lady Ghislaine, after his daughter, who is currently serving twenty years in a Texas prison for sex trafficking. Unbelievably, the yacht was eventually purchased by Anna Murdoch, ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, Maxwell’s great rival in the British press. He would have found that intolerable. The man was the deception — it wasn’t a strategy, it was a character.

When I named the principle after him, I didn’t have to explain what it meant. Anti-Maxwell activated everything the public record holds about Robert Maxwell — the theft, the bluster, the eventual accounting, the employees who lost their retirements. The principle: could we show anyone the books? Could we stand behind everything in the light? Not as an aspiration. As a daily test.

The density is the point. The character carries weight that an invented rule can’t have. An invented rule is a claim. A named character is a history.

The Boxes

I want to be honest about how this piece was made, because it’s directly relevant to what this piece is arguing.

The ideas in it are mine — the observations about Wolfe, the Gill thought, the reading list, the Kubrick connection. The system helped construct the narrative. The preparation that makes that collaboration produce something worth reading — the voice document, the correction history, the reading life that loaded the characters — is what ingeniculture looks like in practice.

The Kubrick connection arrived during this session. I remembered watching Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes — Jon Ronson’s 2008 documentary. After Kubrick’s death, Ronson was given access to his estate at Childwickbury Manor.

What he found was over a thousand boxes, stacked floor to ceiling in the stable block, filling portable cabins in the fields where racehorses once grazed. Every ghost book ever written for The Shining. Photographs of the exterior of every mountain hotel in the world for Eyes Wide Shut. Years of Napoleon research that never became a film.

Thousands of details accumulated with the obsessive precision of a man who was constitutionally incapable of entering a room without knowing more about that room than anyone else alive.

None of it visible in the finished films.

That’s the principle I named The Boxes: the preparation is invisible in the output. The depth of the substrate doesn’t show in a published insight — it shows through it. The wiki, the voice document, the correction loop, the reading life — those are the boxes. The reader sees the film. If they can see the boxes, the craft hasn’t done its job.

It also answers a question about this kind of work honestly. AA Gill could have built a better version of this system than I have. His literary depth was extraordinary — the breadth of reading, the precision of vocabulary, the capacity to find the exact word rather than the nearest one. He would have had no interest in doing so. But the point stands: someone with a richer reading life has more boxes to draw from. The system works with what’s in the room. The room is stocked by the reading.

The Test

Not every principle earns a name. Some things are rules — clear, technical, operational. “Don’t put metrics in the wiki” is a rule. It has no character behind it because it doesn’t need one. You understand it immediately and the understanding is enough.

The character closes the loopholes the rule leaves open. The principle shapes character, not just behaviour. Joe Gargery has been in the system for 7 months. I haven’t needed to remind anyone what he means.

The Reading Life Is Infrastructure

The principles that last come from characters that already exist. Which means the reading life isn’t a hobby that sits alongside the work. It’s the library the work draws from. The boxes that make the film possible.

Ask what the reading list suggests, not what you want to impose. The best principles aren’t invented — they’re recognised. They were already there in a story, waiting for the work to catch up to them.

Homer understood this. Every principle he wanted to preserve, he put in a person. Two and a half thousand years later, we’re still arguing about what Achilles should have done.

That’s not a bad shelf life for a rule about pride.

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