Abstract
In the passage introducing Littimer, Steerforth’s unpleasantly enigmatic manservant, it will be observed that Dickens deliberately underlines this slimy personage’s superficial respectability — his chief characteristic — by applying the words ‘respectable’ and ‘respectability’ no less than fifteen times on the two pages (DC, 299–300). This, as far as could be established, appears to be Dickens reader’s introduction to a technique also found in patches in the subsequent novel, Bleak House, but not put into practice on an extensive scale until Hard Times, the novel after that. Its chief moment here lies in its being the first clear illustration of a move in Dickens’ works towards a direct fusing of the fictional speech and the three authorial modalities. It was a move that culminated in the stylistic amalgam often called the author’s ‘oral style’.1
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Notes
This technique can be made to cover a great deal more, of course; as Professor Ullmann has underlined, ‘Most inquiries concerned with keywords are statistically orientated, but the concept can also be defined in qualitative terms. [G. Matore] has described them as “lexicilogical units expressing a society … denoting person, a feeling, an idea which are alive in so far as society recognizes in them its ideal.” This approach can also be applied to individual authors.’ (Stephan Ullmann, ‘Style and Personality’, REL, 6 (1965) p. 27.)
David Lodge, Language of Fiction (London, 1966) p. 152.
The literature on the subject makes it clear that it has proved difficult to agree on an all-embracing, generally acceptable phrase for such a fictional technique. In English criticism, the term ‘free indirect speech’ seems to have ousted that of ‘erlebte Rede’; besides these two, five others at least are also occasionally in use: Bally’s ‘le style indirect libre’ (cf. ‘Le style indirect libre en français moderne’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, vol. IV (1972) pp. 549–56, 597–606); Otto Jesperson’s ‘represented speech’ or ‘vorgestellte Rede’ (The Philosophy of Grammar (London, 1924) pp. 291–2); Curme’s ‘independent form of direct discourse’ (ibid.); Kalepsky’s ‘verschleierte Rede’ or ‘veiled speech’ (ibid.); and Tobler’s ‘mingling of direct and indirect discourse’ (ibid.) — however, the last three can, for all practical purposes, be ignored). A related form of speech representation, free direct speech, has also been categorised (cf. Harmer, The French Language Today (London, 1954) pp. 300 ff.), it being one in which the direct speech is not introduced by a verb of saying or indicated in any way by conventional graphological signs. Occasional examples of this technique are also to be found in Dickens.
Randolph Quirk, The Use of English (London, 1962), p. 247. The technique of free indirect speech is one which has cropped up in the literature of many languages, Flaubert’s artistic application in Madame Bovary (1856) being particularly well-known (cf. Stephan Ullmann, Style in the French Novel (Cambridge, 1957) esp. ch. II). In English literature, Jane Austen was the first writer — and probably still remains the most successful — to turn the technique to extensive and effective use, the impression made being both extraordinarily subtle and gently (though on occasion bitingly) ironic (cf. Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1972) pp. 123–36, and K. C. Phillipps, Jane Austen’s English (London, 1970) pp. 204–6). Since her time, many other writers of English fiction — notably Thackeray — have also made use, sometimes considerable, of the technique under discussion (cf. Lisa Glauser, ‘Die erlebte Rede im englischen Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten (Bern, 1948); Günter Steinberg, ‘Erlebte Rede’. Ihre Eigenart und ihre Formen in neuer deutscher, franzo’sischer und englischer Erzahlliteratur (GOppingen, 1971); Willi Buhler, ‘Die “Erlebte Rede” im englischen Roman’, Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten (Bern, 1937); George L. Dillon and Red Kirchoff, ‘On the Form and Function of Free Indirect Style’, Poetics & Theory of Literature 1, 3(1976) pp. 431–40; and Fritz Karpf, ‘Die Erlebte Rede im Englischen’, Anglia, 57 (1933) ).
Cf. Michael Gregory, ‘Old Bailey Speech in A Tale of Two Cities’, REL, vi, 2 (April, 1965) pp. 42–55, for a thorough and illuminating analysis of all the categories of fictional speech used in this court scene.
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© 1985 Robert Golding
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Golding, R. (1985). Rhetorical Extension. In: Idiolects in Dickens. Macmillan Studies in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18021-9_6
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