Book chapter
Dickens and language
The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, pp.136-151
Cambridge University Press
2001
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521660165.011
Abstract
Dickens and language: one of the great love-matches of literary history, with a bottomless dowry to boot. It often seems as if the untapped reserves of the English vernacular were simply lying waiting for Dickens to inherit them - by marrying their riches to his story-teller's instinct. No one ever wrote prose that way before. And at the same time few writers have ever sprung their manner from such outright imitation. The style of Dickens's novelistic career begins in pure derivation, a sustained send-up not only of the Johnsonian high style of journalistic and parliamentary claptrap in the eighteenth-century Age of Rhetoric but of Sir Walter Scott's editorial aliases and their prefatory paraphernalia - and then finds its true quasi-oratorical tone amid the cleared debris of tradition. Here is the launching sentence of his debut novel:
The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Dickens and language
- Creators
- John O Jordan - University of California, Santa CruzGarrett Stewart
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, pp.136-151
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press; Cambridge
- DOI
- 10.1017/CCOL0521660165.011
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2001
- Academic Unit
- Cinematic Arts; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398843602771
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