Representational Speech

Abstract

From about the middle of the 1840s onwards, and with an ever-growing intensity which became particularly apparent in the later phase of his career, Dickens strove persistently to make the speech idioms of his characters serve more than simply the needs of individualisation and typification, no matter how brilliant and popular the results of these needs turned out to be, aiming at merging them in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes into the general structure of the novels concerned. This move towards attaching structural significance to the idiolects had already become partially apparent as early as Barnaby Rudge (1841) and, to a fair extent, in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4), the subsequent novel. In the novels from Dombey & Son up to and including Little Dorrit, Dickens gradually learnt to weave the speech of his characters into the general structure until it became, when fully realised, a vital and artistically convincing factor, above all in those greatly more complicated though in the main unified novels of the last two decades of his life.