Abstract
Quite a few Dickens characters speak straightforward, standard, one could say written, English with next to no colouring, the resulting style giving rise to a stiff ‘literary’ impression rather than one of actual speech. Such a character is almost invariably a leading personage in the novel concerned, and, moreover, one normally representing moral good — the ‘goodies’ one might say. One thinks of Esther Summerson (BH), Agnes Wickfield (DC), Emma Haredale (BR) and Rose Maylie (OT) among others, and the expression ‘goody-goody’ often seems the only appropriate word when confronted with the sickly ‘I-am-here-to-do-my-duty-come-what-may’ attitude inherent in the artificial rhythms and lexical pretentiousness of: ‘It is very bold in me … who have lived in such seclusion, and can know so little of the world, to give you my advice so confidently, or even to have this strong opinion’ (Agnes: DC, 367). Or even worse, Esther Summerson’s answer to Allan Woodcourt’s declaration oflove (BH, 834). We are, indeed, a long way from what can be assumed was the normal colloquial idiom of even educated people, and, notwithstanding Dickens’ stylised world, such a technique does not convince.
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Notes
Norman Page, ‘A Language Fit for Heroes: Speech in Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend’, Dickensian, 65 (1969) p. 100.
Ibid. p. 100. Typical examples are the speech idioms of such as Oliver Twist, Fagin (to a degree), Smike (NN), Amy Dorrit (LD) and Pip as a boy (GE).
Steven Marcus, Dickens: from Pickwick to Dombey (London, 1965) p. 359.
John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens atWork (London, 1957) pp. 230–1.
A further point illustrated in detail by Professor Page in ‘A Language Fit for Heroes’, p. 100.
G. L. Brook, The Language of Dickens, ch. 6 (heading), pp. 168–207.
Cf. Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (London, 1963) for a thorough and revealing study of Dickens’ attitude to education.
Humphry House has made some interesting observations on this point (cf. The Dickens World (London, 1941) p. 106).
It is difficult at this distance of time to judge its true effect and value on the stage, but Macready obviously possessed a quality peculiar to only the greatest of actors, the ability to rivet the attention of an audience through the sheer power of his personality, regardless of the methods being used.
Ernest Weekley, ‘Mrs. Gamp and the King’s English’, in Adjectives and Other Words (London, 1930) p. 140.
Although it is true that such characters, as P. J. Keating points out, ‘may be classified under the general heading “lower class” [they] often possess vague, undifferentiated social backgrounds’. (P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London, 1971) p. 15.)
Professor Brook, in his book The Language of Dickens, devotes one chapter to ‘Class Dialects’, another to ‘Regional Dialects’, and between them is one entitled ‘Substandard Speech’, this being in effect the speech of the London Cockney! In this respect, it is interesting to compare Dickens’ Sam Weller (PP) with Thackeray’s Charles Yellowplush (The Yellowplush Papers, in The Oxford Thackeray, London, 1908), both of whom appear in books written more or less around the same time (1836–8).
For general treatments of this or that linguistic feature of the Cockney dialect, the reader is referred in particular to the following: Stanley Gerson, Sound and Symbol in the Dialogue of the Works of Charles Dickens (Stockholm, 1967), plus the same writer’s ‘Dickens’ Use of Malapropisms’, Dickensian (January 1965) pp. 40–5, and ‘I spells it with a “V”’, Dickensian (September 1965) pp. 138–46; the discussion in the OED (vol. xtt, s.W.) on the V/W confusion; Tadao Yamamoto, Growth and System of the Language of Dickens (Osaka, 1950); Robert Bruce Glenn, Linguistic Class-indicators in the Speech of Dickens’ Characters, PhD thesis (University of Michigan, 1960); William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present (London, 1938); Julian Franklyn, The Cockney (London, 1955); G. L. Brook, The Language of Dickens (London, 1976); Norman Page, ‘Convention and Consistency in Dickens’s Cockney Dialect’, English Studies, 51 (1970) pp. 339–44 and ‘Eccentric Speech in Dickens’, pp. 96–100; Ernest Weekley, ‘Mrs. Gamp and the King’s English’, pp. 138–61. Tadao Yamamoto’s book is basically a collection of ‘idioms’ and nothing more; Professor Brook goes over Dickens’ use of language from the philologist’s standpoint and Stanley Gerson from that of the phonetician. Both Brook and Gerson make here and there a telling remark, but then stop short where significant critical insights seem called for.
George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London, 1898) pp. 74–5. However, in his own novels, Gissing clearly drew the line at a direct transcription of what he called ‘that vituperative vernacular of the nether world’ (The Nether World (London, 1899; 2nd edn 1937) p. 158). Also of interest in this respect is an observation contained in an article written in 1876 about the underworld characters in OT: ‘That he should have portrayed such characters in their hideous reality, and still have denied to them their favourite outlets of expression in ribaldry and blasphemy, proves both his skill in characterization, and his instinctive perception of the verbal proprieties demanded by modern taste.’ (Cf. Stanley Gerson, Sound and Symbol, p. 370, footnote 2.) Dickens himself interpolates an authorial comment on why Sikes’ use of cant is kept down (OT, 87).
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© 1985 Robert Golding
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Golding, R. (1985). Root Dialects and Registers1 . In: Idiolects in Dickens. Macmillan Studies in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18021-9_3
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