Charles Dickens Style

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Charles Dickens Style
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On Dickens Style

• Despite the great length of his major novels,
  Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with
  occasional pauses to reread a choice passage,
  because he is one of the most inventive and
  vigorous stylists in the whole range of English
  literature. Style, as we know, has many facets,
  and Dickens powerful rhythms, his supple
  patterns of

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• alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric
  insistence he often favors, are all worthy of
  attention. But he is above all the great master
  of figurative language in English after
  Shakespeare.
• Robert Alter, John
  Hopkins U.

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Dickens Rhythms

• A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a
  great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and
  with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round
  his head. A man who had been soaked in water,
  and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and
  cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
  briars who limped, and shivered, and glared and
  growled and whose teeth chattered in his head as
  he seized me by the chin. GE, chapter one

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Dickens Alliteration

• The sun, the bright sun, that brings back, not
  light alone, but new life, and hope, and
  freshness to man burst upon the crowded city in
  clear and radiant glory. OT, p. 366

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Dickens and anaphora

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of
  times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age
  of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
  was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season
  of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was
  the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
  we had everything before us, we had nothing
  before us, A Tale of Two Cities, chapter
  one

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Dickens and figurative language

• Personification
• Simile
• Metaphor
• Overstatement
• Irony
• Figurative language is not to be taken
  literally!

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• Oh, Man, look here! Look, look down here!
  exclaimed the ghost.
• Spirit, are they yours? Scrooge could say no
  more.
• They are MansAnd they cling to me, appealing
  from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This
  girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their
  degree, for on his brow

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• I see that written which is Doom, unless the
  writing be erased. A Christmas Carol, Stave
  the Third

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What do we have here?

• A gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was
  a fool. Which was a capital way of raising his
  spirits and putting him at ease. p. 10
• Oliver remained a close prisoner in the dark
  and solitary room to which he had been consigned
  by the wisdom and mercy of the board. p. 14

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Or?

• Mr. Gamfields villanous countenance was a
  regular stamped receipt for cruelty. p. 20
• Bill had him on his back, scudded like the
  wind. p. 184

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What do we have here?

• After a short altercation of less than
  three-quarters of an hours duration, the
  permission was most graciously conceded. p. 33

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Hear it!cried Monks Rolling and crashing on
as if it echoed through a thousand caverns
where the devils were from it. p. 283
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Try this one

• He Monks declined any renewal of the
  conversation with Fagin, however, for that
  night suddenly remembering that it was past one
  oclock. And so the amiable couple parted. p.
  196

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A general definition

• Satire is the literary art of diminishing a
  subject by making it ridiculous and evoking
  toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt,
  indignation, or scorn. The butt of satire may be
  a person, a class, an institution, a nation, or
  even the whole race of man.
• M.H. Abrams

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and satire

• Juvenalian satire -- direct, biting criticism in
  the authors own voice
• Horatian satire -- gentler, delivered indirectly
  by characters

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• The opening chapters may seem a little
  declamatory, even stridentsome of Dickens
  furious interjections might well have been cut.
  But remember, this is a young mans bookandit
  would be hard to imagine a more remarkable
  literary debut. Irving Howe, introduction, x-xi

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What are his targets?

• Oliver and the adults response to his request
  for more gruel
• Gamfield
• Bumbles comments on paupers ingratitude
• Commenting on Oliver eating scraps

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• I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat
  and drink turn to gall within him whose blood is
  ice, whose heart is iron could have seen Oliver
  Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog
  had neglected. I wish he could have witnessed
  the horrible avidity with which Oliver tore the
  bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine.
  pp. 28 - 29

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What about imagery?

• ickens wrote, It is difficult for a
  large-headed, small-eyed youth, of lumbering make
  and heavy countenance, to look dignified under
  any circumstances but

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Continued

• it is more especially so, when superadded to
  these personal attractions are a red nose and
  yellow smalls. p. 31

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Examine this, please

• The mans face was thin and very pale his hair
  and beard were grizzly his eyes were bloodshot.
  The old womans face was wrinkled her two
  remaining teeth protruded over her under lip and
  her eyes were bright and piercing. Oliver was
  afraid to look at either her or the man. They
  seemed so like the rats he had seen outside. p.
  36

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• The days were peaceful and serene the nights
  brought with them neither fear nor care no
  languishing in a wretched prison, or associating
  with wretched men nothing but pleasant and happy
  thoughts. p. 239

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• So three months glided away three months
  which, in the life of the most blessed and
  favored of mortals, might have been unmingled
  happiness, and which, in Olivers were true
  felicity. With the purest and most amiable
  generosity on one side and the truest, warmest,
  soul-felt

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• gratitude on the other it is no wonder that,
  by the end of that short time, Oliver Twist had
  become completely domesticated with the old lady
  and her niece, and that the fervent attachment of
  his young and sensitive heart, was repaid by
  their pride in, and attachment to, himself. p.
  241

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What else?

• Take that baby out, when the gravity of
  justice was disturbed by feeble cries,
  half-smothered in the mothers shawl, from some
  meagre infant. The room smelt close and
  unwholesome the walls were dirt-coloured and
  the ceiling blackened. There was an old smoky
  bust over the mantel-shelf, and a dusty clock
  above the dock the only thing present, that
  seemed to go on

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• as it ought for depravity, or poverty, or an
  habitual acquaintance with both, had left a taint
  on all the animate matter, hardly less unpleasant
  than the thick greasy scum on every inanimate
  object that frowned upon it. pp. 336 - 337

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What makes us laugh here?

• Brittles always was a slow boy, maam,
  replied the attendant. And seeing, by-the-by,
  that Brittles had been a slow boy for upwards of
  thirty years, there appeared no great probability
  of his ever being a fast one. p. 213

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• When we read Dickenswe are reading all sorts
  of other things at the same timeplot, character,
  moral dilemma, historical predicament, and so
  forthbut we can see all these in their full
  complexity only if we attend to the illuminating
  play of style. Robert Alter

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