Dickens, Charles

Charles Dickens (1812–1870), famous as the last great popular novelist in English, was also an important journalist and social reformer, arousing the Victorian social conscience through his treatment of a range of social problems and systemic abuses. At the age of twenty he became the Parliamentary reporter, thus acquiring the knowledge of the street life and the underworld that underlies his fiction. Dickens learned shorthand and clearly had a good ear for the idiosyncrasies of actual speech, which he replicated and developed as an aspect of characterization. He greatly developed the notion of the idiolect , the technical term for the language unique to an individual or a personal dialect.

However, his attitude toward the lower registers and especially slang showed ambiguity. In the persona of Vox Populi , Dickens denounced “the sewerage and verbiage of slang” ( Household Words , no. 183, September 24, 1853). Yet his creative use of slang is almost unrivaled in English literature. He familiarized the reading public with such Cockney rhyming slang forms as artful dodger for “lodger” and barnaby rudge for “judge,” and much of the argot of lower-class and criminal slang, such as beak (magistrate), crack (break open, burgle), do (swindle), fence (receiver of stolen property), gonoph (thief, from Yiddish), lifer (one sentenced to transportation for life), nab (arrest), peach (to turn informer), put-up job (inside job), quod (prison), shop (send to prison), split upon (to inform against), stone jug (prison), and trap (a policeman).

Swearing and foul language do not figure largely in Dickens’s work, since he was sensi- tive to accusations of “coarseness” in his novels, preferring the various Victorian euphemisms. Dickens insisted, for example, in the Introduction to Pickwick Papers (1838) that “throughout this book no incident or expression occurs which could call a blush into the most delicate cheek or wound the feeling of the most sensitive person.” Since the taboo against damn and its related forms was still strong, jiggered and drat are much used in its place. The following exchange from Nicholas Nickleby is fairly risqué for 1838:

“What’s the dem’d total?” was the first question [Mr. Mantalini] asked.
         “Fifteen hundred and twenty-seven pound, four and ninepence ha’penny,” replied
Mr. Scaley, without moving limb.
         “The ha’penny be dem’d,” said Mr. Mantalini, impatiently.
(chapter 21)

In Pickwick Papers (1836), Sam Weller resorts to this comic circumlocution to avoid damned: “[H]e says if he can’t see you afore tomorrow night’s over, he vishes he may be somethin’—unpleasanted if he don’t drown hisself” (chapter 39). Similarly, Hell is clearly intended in the following comment: “[he] demanded in a surly tone what the—something beginning with a capital H—he wanted.” In giving the clue to the obvious answer, Dickens interposes his authorial voice like a ventriloquist, thus avoiding the offensive word. In this respect he is similar but less sophisticated than Laurence Sterne.

Stranger to modern readers is the Victorian taboo against the direct mention of trousers . In Sketches by Boz (1836), comic negative formations like inexpressibles, indescribables , and inexplicables are pointedly used. Farmer and Henley commented in their magnum opus, Slang and Its Analogues (1890–1904), that many of these precious forms were “invented by Dickens.” The taboo is exploited in this farcical passage from Oliver Twist (1837) as the butler Giles recounts his reaction to a nocturnal disturbance:

“I tossed off the [bed] clothes,” said Giles … looking very hard at the cook and the house-maid, “got softly out of bed; drew on a pair of—”
         “Ladies present, Mr Giles,” murmured the tinker.
         “—of shoes sir,” said Giles, turning on him and laying great emphasis on the word.
(chapter 28)

Yet Dickens could be extremely direct, especially in the sections of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) dealing with America. As the conservative Colonel Driver is expatiating on “the ennobling institutions of our happy country as—,” “As nigger slavery itself,” comes the shocking suggestion from his associate, Mr. Brick (chapter 16). When another acquaintance uses the phrase “a man of color,” Martin responds tartly: “Do you take me for a blind man … when his face is the blackest that ever was seen?” (chapter 17). Dickens’s interest in and sympathy with the underclass, as well as his gifts for drama and comedy, serve to illuminate many of the taboos and double standards of Victorian society.