Abstract
Part of the extreme diversity of the fictional world created by Dickens is reflected in the large number of highly individualised languages with which, to a greater or lesser degree of success, he endowed his fictional characters. In Dickens criticism, these special languages have been referred to as ‘private languages’,1 or, in linguistic terminology, as idiolects, an idiolect being ‘the totality of speech habits of a single person at a given time’.2 An examination of some of the idiolects created by Dickens, of their origins, development, linguistic, rhetorical and rhythmic features, and their structural significance (if any) is the purpose of this book.
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Notes
Cf. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New You 1953) p. 125. Further references in this vein are to be found in V. Pritchett’s The Living Novel (London, 1946) esp. pp. xi, 77, 78, and Edwards Muir’s The Structure of the Novel (London, 1928; 2nd edn 1946) esp. pp. 14 146.
Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958) p. 32 In the OED, Supplement, vol. II, H–N (1976) the earliest written usage the word is pinpointed as 1948 with B. Bloch, in Language, xxiv, 7, writing ‘The totality of the possible utterances of one speaker at one time in using language to interact with one other speaker is an idiolect’, and R. A. Hall in Studies in Linguistics, VI, ii, p. 31, ‘Language exists in individuals, as a set habits which each individual possesses (idiolect)’. Similar definitions, thought from writers referring chiefly to the artificial idiolects of fiction, are to found in, among others, G. L. Brook’s The Language of Dickens (London 1970) p. 138, and Norman Page’s Speech in the English Novel (London, 197 pp. 90–1.
Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics, p. 322. Interesting, in this respect, the following much more recent observation: ‘the term “dialect” as it presently employed is inadequate in that it fails to account for the extensive patterned variations which occur both within the speech of an individual and within that of a language community. Dialect as a concept must 1 expanded to include the patterned variations a speaker produces and tl even wider range of such variations which he accepts as part of the san dialect.’ (Lyn Kypriotaki, ‘A Study in Dialect: Individual Variation are Dialect Rules’, in New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, ed. Charle James N. Bailey and Roger W. Shuy (Georgetown University, 197: pp. 208–9.)
Norman Page, ‘Eccentric Speech in Dickens’, Critical Survey, 4, II (1969 p. 96. Further references to this point have been made by Ian Gordon in T
Movement of English Prose (London, 1966) pp. 9, 162, and G. L. Brook in The Language of Dickens, p. 138.
Peregrine Pickle (OUP, 1964) pp. 36–7, 140, 359–60 ff.
Humphry Clinker (OUP, 1949) pp. 434–5, for example.
Walter Allen, The English Novel (London, 1954) p. 75.
John Forster, TheLife ofCharlesDickens (London, 1874) p. 41.
Mamie Dickens, My Father as I Recall Him (London, 1897) pp. 47–8.
It was during his activity here that he began his reading at the British Museum, applied for — and withdrew from — an audition as a performer along Mathews’ lines, and fell hopelessly in love with Maria Beadnell, all significant milestones in his early life.
Illustrative of the acuteness of his aural sensitivity, as well as of the sarcasm aroused by the extent to which the exaggeration of the frequently heard artificial intonation grated on his nerves, is an attempt in an article appearing later in Household Words to make a rather rough and ready use of a musical stave to notate the excruciating modulation of such insincere voices (MP, 336–7).
F. R. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London, 1970) pp. 206–7. It is important to remember in this case that Dr Leavis took these words, unaltered, from his book The Great Tradition written nearly a generation previously (London, 1948) and in which he was otherwise far more limited in his praise of Dickens.
Cf. K. J. Fielding, ‘David Copperfield and Dialect’, TLS, 30 April 1949.
Cf. Louise Pound, ‘The American Dialect of Charles Dickens’, American Speech, XXII (1947) pp. 124–30.
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© 1985 Robert Golding
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Golding, R. (1985). Introduction. In: Idiolects in Dickens. Macmillan Studies in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18021-9_1
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