Chapter III of Silas Marner contains this puzzling phrase:
Betty Jay scented the boiling of Squire Cass's hams, but her longing was arrested by the unctuous liquor in which they were boiled; and when the seasons brought round the great merry-makings, they were regarded on all hands as a fine thing for the poor.
Who or what is “Betty Jay”?
Betty Jay is the name of someone close enough to smell the hams, and perhaps witness the other goings-on in town, but not anyone of concern to the reader. She is a nonce character— part of the scenery, as opposed to an actor within it.
Why give her a name? To help evoke an air of familiarity. Such a casual mention of Betty suggests the reader should be familiar with her, even though Betty makes no appearance before or after, and her mention is utterly incidental to the plot. Why Betty? Why not. The OED doesn't indicate any special uses of this name in the era where the novel was set or written.
I suppose Eliot could easily have anonymized the ham smeller and personalized the poor instead, with equally unimportant names:
A townswoman scented the boiling of Squire Cass's hams, but her longing was arrested by the unctuous liquor in which they were boiled; and when the seasons brought round the great merry-makings, they were regarded on all hands as a fine thing for the Widow Bailey down in the river bottom, and for the Sedgely orphans.
But we're already getting outside the scope of this site. I found at least one literature textbook that supports this interpretation, see e.g. George Eliot: The Novels by Mike Edwards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003):
Betty Jay appears nowhere else in the novel, and her name makes an appearance here to develop the note of homeliness— of the familiar, ordinary and unthreatening— that characterises one aspect of the extract.
