“Introduction” in “Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination”
Introduction
Victorian Idiom and the Dickensian “Toe in the Water”
There is a very deep material bond between language and the body, which communication theories that concentrate on the passing of messages typically miss: many poems, many kinds of writing, indeed a lot of everyday speech communicate what is in effect a life rhythm and the interaction of these life rhythms is probably a very important part of the material process of writing and reading.
—Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (1979)
This book argues that Charles Dickens develops a unique idiomatic style, deeply rooted in bodily expression, which eventually emerges as a fundamental dimension to the way he imagines his most mature and iconic fictional worlds. I did not originally set out to write a book about Dickens’s use of idiomatic language, however. I began instead with an interest in researching how, when, and what it could mean that figurative expressions related to the body start to show up in Victorian novels. This broader interest took on more focus during a two-year grant in Digital Textual Studies from the National Humanities Center, where I assembled corpuses of nineteenth-century British novels and mined them for idiomatic body expressions. Surprisingly, Victorian authors, as it turns out, do not use idiomatic body expressions all that much and, when they do, the expressions are often literal or only partially idiomatic. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), for example, Jane’s early experience of being “browbeaten” in her aunt’s household is quite literally connected to the physical blows that John Reed delivers to her forehead in the novel’s opening chapters (14). Her bullying cousin does not make “tongue-in-cheek” disparagements of Jane; he does so directly, “thrust[ing] his tongue into his cheek whenever he [sees]” her (26). If Brontë did not use many body idioms figuratively, however, I was almost certain that William Thackeray would. I expected to witness a myriad of “cold shoulders” turned by the prodigiously class-conscious characters in Thackeray’s expansive and highly choreographed social satires. But instead, throughout his entire oeuvre, we get only a single (literal) description of “how the knife boy was caught stealing a cold shoulder of mutton” from the kitchen in Vanity Fair (1847–48) (49). This is not to imply that most Victorian novelists used idiomatic expressions only literally. What I encountered in the majority of cases in terms of idiomatic body expressions, though, was largely uninteresting and, worse yet, fairly predictable. Take the case of the body idioms that appear in George Eliot’s major novels. It is hardly controversial to think of Eliot as a deeply cerebral and philosophical prose writer. It is not very remarkable, then, to discover that idioms involving the “mindsets” of her characters (“state of mind,” “the same mind,” “peace of mind,” “on her/his mind,” etc.) make up almost half (44%) of all the body idioms Eliot uses in her major fiction.1
On the other hand, given what we know about Charles Dickens—his limited education, his time spent at Warren’s Blacking Factory and Marshalsea debtor’s prison, the intensely physical outlets he required for his astonishing energy (as an obsessive walker, passionate amateur actor, and exuberant public speaker), his attraction to “everyday” language (Household Words)—one might reasonably predict that Dickens would be a heavy user of body idioms in his work of all kinds. As impressive as it is, we may not be surprised to learn that the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms (2009) lists Dickens among its most cited sources, alongside the Bible and Shakespeare. What is astonishing, however, is the extent to which Dickens is truly “inimitable” in comparison to his peers when it comes to his use of idiomatic language involving the body.
And it is not simply a matter of Dickens using a lot of body idioms either; it is that he uses, by far, the greatest variety of them as well. The tables below demonstrate how, when considering the unique body idioms used per novel, 12 of Dickens’s novels hold the top 15 positions in my corpus of 124 novels by 11 different Victorian authors (Table A). Dickens generally writes long novels, but so do many of the authors in this corpus, including Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, and Thomas Hardy. Nonetheless, to be sure that I was coming as close as I could to comparing apples to apples in my idiom measures, I tallied the total number of words in each novel so that the relative frequencies of each idiom (i.e., occurrences per 100,000 words) would be accurately recorded. What we see when adjusting for book length, therefore, is that Dickens’s novels hold nine of the top ten positions and eleven of the top fifteen (Table B). I should also note that, for fear of unduly privileging Dickens, I do not include in these calculations the principal body idioms around which my main chapters take as their foci (“right-hand man,” “shoulder to the wheel,” “brought up by hand,” “by the sweat of the brow,” and “nose to the grindstone”). Had I included them, Dickens’s novels would be even more prevalent in each table.
I begin by presenting the numerical comparisons above not because they “prove” anything definitive about Dickens but so that readers will have some context for my decision to write a book that sets out to analyze what such a seemingly minute lexical unit like body-derived idioms can tell us about the “Inimitable’s” fictional imagination.
Digital Methodologies
For good reason, literary scholars continue to wrestle with the place (even if it is to have one at all) of computer-assisted research in the humanities. “Traditional” critics justifiably object to the ways in which quantitative data often masquerade as a version of unquestioned and, ultimately, false objectivity.2 As Lisa Gitleman makes explicit in the title of a book she edits, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, numbers always come to the researcher “cooked” in one way or another simply because designing and implementing a text-analysis program is itself a necessarily interpretive act, not just a digital one.3 This means I must acknowledge that the 124 novels by 11 different authors I use in my calculations constitutes my attempt to construct a representative sample—albeit a canonical one—of nineteenth-century British fiction against which to measure Dickens’s idiom usage.4 In later chapters, I draw on the Chadwyck-Healy database of 250 nineteenth-century English novels, another corpus of over 3,700 novels, as well as millions of pages of newspapers, journals, essays, and other periodical print material in an attempt to reach a point of what Andrew Piper (2022, 6) has called “evidentiary sufficiency” that far exceeds what we encounter in most traditional literary analyses. With this in mind, even bona fide skeptics of data mining and so-called distant reading practices like Johanna Drucker (2017, 631, 633) acknowledge that digital tools “can be helpful as departure points for research” because they “permi[t] the investigation of social and cultural issues in texts at a scale no representative single exegesis can produce.”5 Similarly, although Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (2009, 17) correctly refer to computers as “weak interpreters but potent describers,” they concede that machine reading “can help us to find features that texts have in common in ways that our brains alone cannot.” Like me, Best and Marcus do not envision a world in which computers replace literary critics, but they are “curious about one in which we work with them to expand what we do” (17).6
Such is the spirit in which this project began. Dickens’s extraordinarily high use of body idioms in comparison with his peers became an opportunity for provocation rather than simply proof; it was exploratory for me rather than strictly evidentiary. My interests lie in discovering what is distinctive but not necessarily definitive about Dickens’s imagination as I analyze his imaginative processes through the alembic of his unique idiomatic propensities. Therefore, my predominant approach, even as it draws on numerical data, is not “truth” driven nor is it meant to be confirmational. I am far less interested in reaching interpretive closure, with proving or confirming anything about Dickens than I am with asking new questions about when, how, and why he came to rely so heavily on what I call his “idiomatic imagination.”7 Moreover, as my first footnote suggests, my ideas about Dickens’s idiomatic imagination are not predicated on any elaborate or abstruse digital programming. The simple looping algorithm by which I identify bodily idioms in my corpora adheres in this sense to what Roopika Risam and others have begun to refer to as “minimal computing.”8 My practice aligns with a new generation of digital humanities practitioners whose relatively uncomplicated searches manage to provide the opportunity to ask complex and nuanced questions regarding what we thought we already knew about particular aspects of literary history. Daniel Shore advocates for Cyberformalism—a method of using simple search tools to radically expand as well as contextualize our understanding of what his colonic title calls Histories of Linguistic Forms (2018). Likewise, in Reductive Reading, Sarah Allison (2018, 30) contends that the major methodological contribution of computational analysis is the freedom it confers on us to read reductively, “through an aggressively simplistic lens” that paradoxically generates ways to open up new discussion by reducing literary problems to simpler terms. For me, ultimately, the power of minimal computing lies in its ability to show us how digital methods usually associated with distance and data crunching can direct us to a new kind of close reading often occluded because of our ordinary or traditional reading practices.
By identifying, comparing, and contextualizing the occurrences of certain uniquely Dickensian idioms, my book joins important conversations about the “scales” of reading—both digital and analogic. The search for body idioms at the center of this project actually makes the incorporation of several typically antithetical modes of reading—from Katherine Hayles’s “hyper-reading” (2010) and Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s “surface reading” (2009) to Alison Booth’s “mid-range” reading (2017) and Jonathan Culler’s “close reading” (2010)9—not only possible, but it also presents a rare opportunity to survey the benefits and limitations of purportedly “rival” interpretive practices. For example, many Victorian scholars in all likelihood have hyper- or surface read all 124 novels in my original corpus. Dickens specialists may and probably have performed traditional, “close,” analogue readings (if not several directed but analogical rereadings) of every single one of Dickens’s (seventeen)10 novels at one time or another over the course of their careers. Thus, simply having read all of Dickens’s fiction is a good example of what Booth has recently advocated in terms of a categorical “mid-range” reading. Having read a single author’s entire oeuvre is not only possible but probable among specialists. Without digital tools (and unsophisticated ones at that), however, even the most earnest, perspicacious, and intellectually gifted Dickensian scholar will not notice, never mind consider, the importance of the fact that Dickens uses the idiom “right-hand man” only four times in his career but only in Dombey and Son (1846–48); “shoulder to the wheel” nineteen times but only in Bleak House (1852–53); “brought up by hand” more than thirty times but only in Great Expectations (1860–61); “by the sweat of the brow” and “nose to the grindstone” a combined forty-three times but only in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65).11 From the departure point of this book, as Ted Underwood (2013, 9) has framed the case for digital methods in the humanities more generally, “we are probably overlooking important patterns because they happen to be invisible on the scale of reading we normally inhabit.” But not all patterns are important, of course. The remainder of this introduction and, indeed, each detailed chapter that follows it will make the case for why bodily derived idiomatic expressions matter in Dickens’s fiction as a vital but yet unremarked upon dimension of his imagination.12
Why Dickens? And Why Body Idioms?
I began by demonstrating the numerical extent to which Dickens surpassed his peers in his usage of idiomatic body language, and each of my upcoming chapters will incorporate digital search methods that consider his use of body idioms within his own fictional oeuvre, within his culture’s broader lexical backdrop, and within nearly four thousand other nineteenth-century novels. But at its core, this book develops a literary-historical and at times even a philological argument—not a statistical one. By triangulating Dickens’s idiomatic distinctiveness in relation to the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain more broadly and in relation to thousands of other novelists, I adopt a set of Bakhtinian methodologies where “the real task of stylistic analysis consists in uncovering all the available orchestrating languages in the composition of the novel … determining the heteroglot background outside the work that dialogizes it” (Bakhtin 1981, 416). I take seriously Bakhtin’s belief that “historico-linguistic research into the language systems and styles available to a given era (social, professional, generic, tendentious) will aid powerfully in re-creating a third dimension for the language of the novel” (417). In Dickens’s novels, this third dimension is often characterized by the “common” use bodily idioms in uncommon ways. It is for this reason that Dickens’s unique penchant for body idioms forms a significant part of what the nineteenth-century critic David Masson (1859, 252) summed up as the “recoil” that often came early on from “cultivated and fastidious” circles. Contemporary criticisms of Dickens’s idiomatic and generally more colloquial language had far deeper roots, of course. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a passage from Joseph Addison’s The Spectator as the first published usage of the word idiom, wherein the following stylistic warning appears: “Since … Phrases … used in ordinary Conversation … contract a kind of Meanness by passing through the Mouths of the Vulgar, a [writer] should take particular care to guard himself against Idiomatick ways of speaking” (1712, 9). A few decades later, Samuel Johnson enshrined similar interdictions to idiomatic phrasing while completing his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), acknowledging his “labou[r] to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations.”13
The impact of Johnson’s labor on this front was indeed long lasting. Even in the nineteenth century, the proscriptive Johnsonian style was still the benchmark for many early reviewers of Dickens. The Quarterly Review, for instance, objected to Oliver Twist (1837–39) by focusing on how “these Dodgers and Sikes break into our Johnsons, [and] rob the queen’s lawful current English.”14 It goes on to say that Dickens is the “regius professor of slang, that expression of the mother wit, the low humour of the lower classes, their Sanscrit, their hitherto unknown tongue, which … seems likely to become the idiom of England” (92). In 1845, the North British Review specifically listed Dickens’s use of idioms among the “gross offences against the English language.”15 It was not just the critics who singled Dickens out; his peers also lodged similar complaints. George Eliot’s (1883, 145) appraisal of his characters’ shallow psychological development was largely a matter of Dickens’s supposedly outsized attention to their “idiom and manners.” Anthony Trollope (1962, 200) claimed that Dickens’s idiomatic voice—“created by himself in defiance of rules”—led to an “ungrammatical” style that was “impossible to praise.” Others were quick to yoke this generally “lower” style to his relatively low educational attainment. Margaret Oliphant (1897, 305–6), commenting on the lack of allusions to classical literature, music, or painting in Dickens’s writing, suggested that a want of literary education was to blame. George Henry Lewes (1872a, 152), even while attempting to praise Dickens for his instinctive talent, ended up patronizing him as an uneducated writer (“he never was and never would have been a student”), whose interests “remained completely outside philosophy, science, and the higher literature.”
If early critics and higher-brow peers found Dickens’s idiomatic leanings objectionable, however, the vast majority of his readers most certainly did not. Robert Patten (1978, 343) and others have shown how his soaring popularity, enabled in part by his enterprising publication schemes, essentially allowed Dickens to “democratiz[e] fiction.”16 Some lower-class readers could afford his novels in monthly numbers, and the literate among them often read aloud to larger groups of listeners with each new instalment.17 Robert Forster (1892) describes a common occurrence where a landlord of a rooming house would, on the first Monday of every month, hold a communal tea. Those who could afford it purchased tea and cakes, but all lodgers were welcome to hear the landlord read the latest installment of Dickens’s novel. Leslie Stephen (1988, 30) remarked on this phenomenon with typical combination of condescension and class snobbery in his entry on Dickens for the Dictionary of National Biography: “If literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists.” Even so, George Ford (1955, 113) pointed out in the middle of the twentieth century that because of Dickens’s popularity and what we know about the adoration that generations of readers (of all classes) have conferred on him, “we have lost a sense of how shockingly revolutionary Dickens’s prose seemed to his contemporaries.”18 The Quarterly Review (1837, 507), for example, claimed it had never witnessed a novelist with Dickens’s “felicity in working up the genuine mother-wit and unadulterated vernacular idioms of the lower classes of London.”
Dickens’s unique upbringing is one of the reasons that his prose style in general, and his heavy use of body idioms in particular, was revolutionary. Although his traditional education at Wellington House had been cut short, his early life experiences gave him direct access to a range of colloquial language that his peers simply did not possess. Working as a young boy at Warren’s Blacking Factory, regularly visiting his father at Marshalsea debtor’s prison, and later, spending time as a law clerk, a parliamentary stenographer, and a newspaper editor gave Dickens a broad spectrum of linguistic resources from which to build his fictional idiolect. Put simply and in conjunction with the topic of my study, Dickens had what Malcolm Andrews (2013, 29, 74) calls a “mind’s ear” for the wide range of linguistic ingenuity he lived among, including as it related to the body.19 Better put, perhaps, by one of the finest career-long observers of Dickensian “mycrostylistics,” Garrett Stewart (2001a, 136), “it often seems as if the untapped reserves of the English vernacular were simply lying in wait for Dickens to inherit them.”
I take as my starting point Dickens’s (numerically) unparalleled use of one very specific untapped reserve of the English vernacular: his usage of idiomatic body phrases, or what an early theorizer of idiomatic language, Logan Pearsall Smith (1925, 250), called “somatic idioms.” Essentially, the story comes down to this: where Addison and Johnson warned, Dickens wallowed—as his semi-autobiographical character David says in David Copperfield (2004, 632): “I wallow in words.” This wallowing was heavily imbricated with how he relished using common colloquialisms, idioms, and experimental combinations of both in uncommon ways; how he delighted in the malleability of vernacular phrasing and the possibilities such language opened up for imaginative development in his novels. Instead of “guard[ing] himself against Idiomatick ways of speaking” because such language passed so easily through “the Mouths of the Vulgar,” Dickens reveled in its use. I argue that his “bodily idiomatic style” is fundamental to the way in which Dickens approaches the world in language. Body idioms appear hundreds and sometimes thousands of times in each of his novels. Bleak House (1852–53), for example, contains nearly 1,100 usages of body-derived idioms.
It is important to note, though, that my central argument does not depend on the largeness of these numbers. Quite the opposite, in fact. I stake my biggest claims on analyzing how, and at times why, a conspicuous deficit of unique idiomatic expressions appears in Dickens’s oeuvre. As we will see, the vast majority of his body idioms surface again and again in each one of his novels, cycling through in ebbs and flows of repetition. We will also see how and try to make sense of why, as Dickens matures as a writer, certain idioms appear uniquely and almost exclusively in specific novels. My argument rests not just on the surfeit of body idioms in Dickens’s oeuvre, then, but also very much on the unique usage of only a small number of certain ones that subtend his more generally widespread employment of the idiomatic. Thus, one of my central contentions is that Dickens structures his most mature and iconic fiction—sometimes consciously, oftentimes not—by way of a distinctly idiomatic imaginative process that merges with, contributes to, and helps form the central themes of each successive novel.
My consideration of this process also offers an original analysis of a central paradox that helps explain the Inimitable’s democratizing popularity with all classes of readers. That is, how Dickens’s increasingly focused use of “low” and slangular (his neologism) idiomatic body language paradoxically allows him to construct some of the primary imaginative coordinates of his mature novels’ most elevated and most sophisticated conceptual ideas—those enjoyed by the lowest scullery worker all the way up to the queen. Before Dickens, this unlikely alliance between weighty subject matter and low idiomatic tone had a long history of literary incompatibility. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary sought to “refine [the English] language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms [and] licentious idioms” (Johnson 2018, 413) precisely because he saw “the laborious and mercantile part of the people[’s]” diction as incapable of expressing elevated ideas and therefore deemed them “unworthy of preservation” (Johnson 1984b, 323) in his Dictionary: “Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rustics or mechanics, so the most heroic sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications” (Johnson 1984a, 695).
Johnson’s late eighteenth-century belief in the incommensurability between low idiomatic diction and elevated ideas was pervasive. Even one of the earliest and most comprehensive idiom theorists, L. P. Smith (1925, 258), could not help but equate “the popular origin” of idiomatic expression with its supposed inability to convey intellectual sophistication and abstraction: “Since our idioms … are … so largely of popular origin, we should hardly expect to find abstract thought embodied in them, or scientific observation, or aesthetic appreciation, or psychological analysis of any subtle kind;—and these indeed are almost completely lacking. The subject matter of idiom is human life in its simpler aspects.”
But Dickens had an unparalleled ability to connect the lowly with the lofty. One of my primary contentions is that readers really should expect to find abstract thought and sophisticated ideas constellating around Dickens’s idiomatic language. To fulfill this expectation, I will track important moments in his career to demonstrate how Dickens came to relish using common, body-based idiomatic expressions in uncommon ways; how he began to delight in the malleability of idiomatic phrasing and the possibilities it opened up for imaginative development. I will trace how the young author grew to experiment with the ways in which idioms could be altered to fresh purposes, pressed into unanticipated service, and imported into different contexts that would confer novel associations on them. I am interested in tracking the process of how, after playfully tinkering with body idioms more and more steadily in his early fiction, Dickens began to see in them creative opportunities for combinatorial invention by abstracting, reliteralizing, and even violating some or all of their components, ultimately fashioning them (consciously or not) into new agents for major thematic innovation in his mature works.
The (In)visibility of Body Idioms
Although critics generally agree that Dickens shaped many of his era’s most memorable characters by way of their fantastically embodied descriptions, and although there is certainly no shortage of scholarship dedicated to the analysis of uniquely Dickensian “styles” of writing,20 the extent to which his imaginative craft is connected to constellations of body-derived idiomatic locutions has so far entirely eluded scholarly attention. The affordances of digital of methodologies aside, there are good reasons for this blind spot, and some of the reasons this elision exists are deeply infused with the larger arguments of my study. For one, I think that all professionally trained literary critics are—at least to some degree—inheritors of the Addisonian and Johnsonian tradition that leads us to privilege interpretations of what we would like to think of as complex and sophisticated ideas at the outset of our research. We tend to want to start projects with nuanced and intricate ideas. We are unlikely, as Sarah Allison so convincingly suggests in Reductive Reading, to begin research projects with simplistic ideas precisely because of their apparent reductiveness. More specifically for the topic of my study, it is almost certain that our own twentieth- and twenty-first-century associations with idiomatic expressions such as “right-hand man,” “shoulder to the wheel,” “nose to the grindstone,” and so on, are purely figurative—always already evacuated of their literal, historical, and original contextual origins. Such idioms’ figurative currency in our contemporary lexicon has had the effect of rendering them unobtrusive as we read and, hence, critically unremarkable.
My chapters will demonstrate, however, that Dickens was often using (and popularizing) these expressions at unique historical-linguistic moments when their very meanings teetered on the cusp of divergence from the literal to the figurative. For example, the transition from a strictly literal (military) sense of a “right-hand man” to the figuratively surrogate commercial and domestic contexts was just beginning to occur when Dickens was writing Dombey and Son (1846–48). People still put (or paid someone else to put) their actual shoulders to the wheel to free sunken carriages in the time of Bleak House (1852–53). Almost everyone knew that an infant “brought up by hand” was bottle rather than breast fed when Great Expectations (1860–61) appeared in All the Year Round, just as they were still aware of how perilously close a nose could come to one who lay on a body-length sharpening grindstone when reading Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). I also suspect that there is something to be said for the sheer fact that we are bombarded with bodily-derived idioms when we read Dickens; they appear at an average of around one per every two pages of his fiction.21 This creates a situation where we fail to notice how Dickens isolates certain idioms for specialized treatment within a given fictionalized world where their use, combined with their figurative “ordinariness,” have worn away their significance for contemporary audiences.
Perhaps most importantly, even if more paradoxically, critics consistently read past Dickens’s seemingly ordinary idiomatic phrasings partly because of the way such phrasings become enmeshed in a novel’s deepest structural and thematic concerns. They tend to hide in plain sight as figures in the narrative’s lexical carpet because they fit in so well with many other thematic dimensions of a particular novel. Raymond Williams (1970, 81, 82) has noted, along these lines, how Dickensian social ideas may become “so deeply embodied that they are in effect … dissolved into a whole fictional world.” The proliferation of Dickens’s vernacular language has thus had the effect of camouflaging the important relationship between a given idiomatic expression and a novel’s larger imaginative periphery. A significant portion of my method (both digital and analogue) is dedicated to bringing these camouflaged relationships into analytical focus so that we may see how a concentration on particular idiomatic expressions in Dickens’s mature novels reveals an important dimension of idiom absorption—a process wherein the idiom, once articulated, begins, borrowing from Leo Spitzer’s (1948, 27) formulation, to “soa[k] through and through … the atmosphere of the work” with such prevalence that its literalization, abstraction, and even its explicit violation emerge as important new agents for imaginative innovation.
Philology and Intention
I am also guided by a broader philological concern for how Dickens came to construct some of his most mature and sophisticated novels beginning in the 1840s.22 That is, I am interested in the intersections of Dickensian “style” and its philological underpinnings. If style may be described as the relationship between what a text says and how it expresses that saying, a philologically inflected analysis of style pays particular attention to the historical and linguistic record of a text and the extratextual material that helps inform its lexical horizon. It is no coincidence that the Philological Society of London was formed at about the same time (in 1842) Dickens began to press idiomatic expressions into more concentrated service in his novels and that the society’s formation was driven by a growing interest in a democratic view of language where use and custom is decided by the majority—literate or not. Figures such as Benjamin Thorpe and John Mitchell Kemble had spent time in Germany studying with continental philologists, and they returned to England eager to chart a course where language could be studied as a product of usage by generation after generation of speakers rather than just its readers and writers.23 For these thinkers and many later English philologists, a primary concern for their study of language became the ways in which words and phrases behaved in shifting contexts over time. The culminating achievement of this new, historical, and social orientation to language was the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, originally titled the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles in its early iterations) whose first edition was eventually published in 1884 after legions of people from the English-speaking world sent in “slips” documenting “the life-history” of every word and phrase (Mugglestone 2005, 5). This distinctly English strand of what might aptly be termed “participatory philology” also began to appeal to a far more popular audience in large part because of the well-attended lectures in the 1840s by Richard Chenevix Trench, Kemble’s close friend and colleague at Cambridge. Newspapers and journals of the day steadily reported on the popularity of Trench’s lectures, and they were subsequently published in 1851 as On the Study of Words—a text that went through nineteen editions by the time the OED’s first edition appeared. In lectures and in print, Trench promised to uncover “riches … l[ying] hidden in the vulgar tongue of [the] poorest and most ignorant” principally by identifying the historical and social derivation of “daily words and phrases” (3).
Additionally, Friedrich Max Müller, a torchbearer of the German philological tradition, delivered a series of highly publicized lectures24 at the Royal Institution in April, May, and June 1861 which, like Trench’s, emphasized the benefits of a scientific, historical, and democratic orientation toward language study. Müller famously saw “the vulgar idiom of the peasant [as] no less than the refined dialect of the philosopher” (Cox 1862, 69). With the new philological orientation he espoused, Müller (1899, 79) predicted that “the popular, or, as they are called, the vulgar dialects, which had formed a kind of undercurrent, [would] rise beneath the crystal surface of literary language and sweep away, like the waters in spring, the cumbrous formations [of] … the more polite and cultivated speech.”
Such a boldly democratized focus on the excavation of popular language hardly went uncontested, though. As Linda Dowling (1982, 170) has noted, this new approach “diametrically opposed established Victorian ideas of literature and literary decorum.” The work of Trench and Müller, combined with the abolition of the paper tax and the subsequent flood of cheaper periodicals and newspapers, sparked a profound fear that the language of the uneducated would defile and overwhelm the purity of “correct” English usage. The publication of prescriptive books such as Henry Breen’s Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects (1857) and Henry Alford’s The Queen’s English (1863) reflects the intensity of the debate on both sides.
The Edinburgh Review announced in January 1862 that it would “watch with keen interest the various influences which seem to be at work, whether to purify [the English language] or corrupt it” (Cox 1962, 68). Predictably, however, the journal was far from an impartial observer. It argued that “the speech of clowns and ploughmen can never deserve the patient attention of the scholar; the jargon of savages can never be worthy of comparison with the language of poets, orators, and philosophers” (68). But for all of its prejudice in favor of elevated language “purity,” the journal hinted at the “living force” Müller and others identified as operating within the lower linguistic registers. “To us,” the Edinburgh Review wrote, dialects, idioms, and other common phrases “which come pouring in upon us may be simply ugly and repulsive, [but] our dislike may be quickened by a secret feeling that there is a strange vitality in the adversaries which we are striving to put down” (68; emphasis mine).
Dickens was not only aware of these philological developments; he made them his business—literally—both in what I contend is the idiomatic imagination of his novels and in the subject matter of the periodicals he owned and edited while he was composing them. It was Dickens, after all, who named his first weekly journal Household Words years before Trench (1852, 246; emphasis mine) urged “training and elevating an ever-increasing number of persons” to consider the history of word and phrasal meaning “till at length they have become truly a part of the nation’s common stock, ‘household words,’ used easily and intelligently by nearly all.” In terms of the subject matter of Dickens’s journals, Dorothy Deering (1977, 12) has demonstrated how Household Words and All the Year Round contain a significantly larger portion of articles on the development of the English language, its usage trends, and its focus on the derivation of everyday diction than Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, the Cornhill, Bentley’s Miscellany, and the Edinburgh Review. Although not the focus of Deering’s study, it is noteworthy that a significant portion of the articles in Dickens’s journals advocate for the depth of meaning that is socially and historically embedded in lower, colloquial, and idiomatic language. “Saxon-English,” for example, justifies a democratic approach to writing based on contemporary philological exploration of “the History of the Language” which privileges common speech patterns: “If a man wishes to write for all,” the Household Words piece avers, “he must know how to use the speech of all, and he will come nearest all hearts with words that are familiar in every home” (Morley and Rushton 1858, 89). Similarly, an article titled “Plain English” (1868, 205) attests that “all the words of everyday use, all the joints of the language, all that makes it an organism … are pure English.” What is also at least as interesting for my specific concern is how many of the articles’ titles in Household Words and All the Year Round are themselves body idioms: “If This Should Meet His Eye” (1852), “Foe under Foot” (1852), “The Gift of Tongues” (1857), “A Piece of Blood-Money” (1859), “A Stomach for Study” (1860), “At Your Fingers’ Ends” (1863), “Skin Deep” (1863), “Noses out of Joint” (1864), “Out at Elbows” (1865), “Spirits on Their Last Legs” (1865), “Small Arms” (1866), “Skeleton in the Closet” (1867), “Touched to the Heart” (1867), and so on. These ideas about language fit Michel Foucault’s (1973, 290) account of the philologic shift in the nineteenth century wherein “language [becomes] no longer linked to civilizations by the level of learning to which they have attained … but by the mind of the peoples who have given rise to it, animate it, and are recognizable in it.”
Following this philological impulse to explore how texts are made based on the histories of their linguistic forms, I pay special attention to the various material and ideological conditions involved in Dickens’s imaginative conception of his novels at the particular times of their composition. Here, it is helpful to draw on the sense of philological orientation Edward Said (2004) describes in the central chapter (“The Return to Philology”) of his posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism. In order to evaluate the ideas that constitute the process of aesthetic creation, Said believes the critic must “put oneself in the position of the author, for whom writing is a series of decisions and choices expressed in words”—all of which “locate the text in its time as part of a whole network of relationships whose outlines and influence play an informing role in the text” (62; emphasis original). Said’s aesthetic hypothesis also aligns with Bakhtin’s “sociological stylistics” where “the novelistic word … registers with extreme subtlety the tiniest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere” (300; emphasis original). Each chapter of my study therefore responds to a version of the deceptively simple question that Robert Patten (2012a, xvi) sets forth in Charles Dickens and “Boz”: “When faced with a blank piece of paper and an urgent deadline, what prompted his imagination?”
As a result, my overarching argument that Dickens possesses an idiomatically oriented imagination necessarily intersects with vexed and thorny issues of intentionality which cannot and should not be sidestepped. What place, if any, does authorial intent have in explaining Dickens’s usage of the phrase “right-hand man” in only a single novel (Dombey) which brings to life a character (Captain Cuttle) who has no right hand? The same question could be asked for the topics of my succeeding chapters: of the hundreds of body idioms that appear and reappear in almost all of his novels, did Dickens consciously intend to use the expression “shoulder to the wheel” only in Bleak House; “brought up by hand” only in Great Expectations; “sweat of the brow” and “nose to the grindstone” only in Our Mutual Friend?
These are important questions, and their “answers” contain the prospect of tipping the interpretational balance in multiple directions. Every major critic who sets as their task an assessment of the nature of Dickens’s imagination—beginning with J. Hillis Miller’s first book, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958), to Garrett Stewart’s first book, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (1974), to Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s Knowing Dickens (2007)—grapples with the varying levels of intentionality we might ascribe to his prose. On this score, I tend to agree with Bodenheimer (2007, 19) that “the conscious and unconscious artfulness of Dickens’s self-creation remains one of the most fascinating aspects of his writing.” I agree, too, with Bodenheimer’s sense that with Dickens, “conscious knowing sets off unconscious knowing” (20–21). Dickens undoubtedly knows something of his own isolated use of a particular idiom but how much? And how does the extent of that knowledge develop over the course of a novel’s serial composition?
To these ends, I consider what some of Dickens’s cross-outs and corrections in his handwritten manuscripts and planning documents can tell us about his imaginative process, his refinements in thinking, and how those refinements often become refinements of idiomatic expression. Amid all of these concerns, I maintain that the interplay between states of imaginative “knowing”—conscious or not—is important and relevant, though perhaps never conclusively determinate.25 What is more, a novel can certainly fulfill an intention that its author was unaware of having, and I hope to demonstrate how both the fulfilled intention and the level of unawareness vis-à-vis Dickensian body idioms are objects of legitimate critical interest. Put somewhat differently, Dickens’s furious imagination in all likelihood created elements that Dickens himself could never have fully known or articulated. A classic example of just such an instance comes from John Forster’s (1892, 2:78) recollection that Dickens was “much startled” when he (Forster) pointed out that the initials created for his semi-autobiographical character, David Copperfield, “were his own reversed.”26 Insofar as some of these creative elements were distinctly idiomatic and bodily oriented, however conscious, we can learn something new from them about how Dickens’s imagination worked at the height of his career.
The Body behind the Body Idioms
Dickens’s penchant for body idioms is definitively and physiologically constitutional as well. What I mean by this is that his fascination with body idioms is not only a question of artistic expression or philological circumstance, but it is also an entailment of a lifelong fascination with the physicality of the human body. Hillis Miller (1958, ix–x) persistently held to his phenomenological belief that the “imagining mind” is an “expression of the unique personality and vital spirit of its author” and, moreover, that an author’s “style is his own way of living in the world given verbal form.” Dickensian biographies have varied in their emphases over the years, but they all invariably agree that Dickens possessed an extraordinary and seemingly boundless physical energy.27 Dickens’s “way of living in the world” was, in a Husserlian sense,28 bodily, and this physiological orientation manifested itself in at least two principal ways: (1) his attraction to the theater and (2) his compulsive walking. In terms of the former, Dickens’s career-spanning love for acting and virtually anything having to do with the theater is well documented. The familiar story is that the world may have never known of Dickens the novelist had a terrible cold not prevented him from auditioning at Covent Garden in front of the stage manager George Barley and the actor Charles Kemble in 1832.29 Of course, he eventually became a famous novelist, but he also managed and performed in amateur theatricals—a category that includes his exhaustively theatricalized staged novel readings—for the rest of his life. Beginning with Robert Garis’s The Dickens Theatre (1965), a whole host of critical commentary has traced the ways that theatricality suffuses the worlds of his fiction.30 Dickens was no doubt drawn to the theater because of its emphasis on the physicality of the body: the embodiedness of acting, the physicality of movement across the stage, the value and importance of physical gesture, projection of voice, manipulations of facial expression, and so forth.
There is also significant evidence that Dickens thought of his writing as theatrical acting in private, and to such an extent that bodily performance was often inseparable from his actual creative process. His daughter Mamie recounts how she once observed him in the process of composing one of his novels: “My father wrote busily and rapidly at his desk, when he suddenly jumped up from his chair and rushed to a mirror that hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went back again to the mirror” (M. Dickens 1896, 49–50).
Similarly, the artist William Firth, who painted a portrait of Dickens in 1859, described “going to Dickens’s study, where he was [writing], watch[ing] him from a corner as he muttered, grimaced, and walked about the room, pulling his beard” (C. Tomalin 2011, 305). This thoroughly embodied method of composition apparently applied even early on, in the rare instances when Dickens wrote outside of his study. His brother-in-law Henry Burnett, for instance, recalled an evening spent at the Doughty Street residence when Dickens came into the drawing room carrying his work for the monthly installment of Oliver Twist (1837–39):
In a few minutes he returned, manuscript in hand, and while he was pleasantly discoursing he employed himself in carrying to a corner of the room a little table, at which he seated himself and re-commenced his writing. We, at his bidding, went on talking our little nothings,—he every now and then (the feather of his pen still moving rapidly from side to side), put in a cheerful interlude. It was interesting to watch, upon the sly, the mind and the muscles working (or, if you please, playing) in company as new thoughts were being dropped upon the paper. And to note the working brow, the set mouth, with the tongue slightly pressed against the closed lips, as was his habit. (Kitton 1890, 1:13; emphasis original)
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2011, 263) correctly surmises that this recollection provides us with a privileged glimpse into how Dickens “drew his characters out of himself and then channeled these physical tics and grimaces into the rhythmic movements of his hand traveling across the page.” Not only did Dickens think of writing as acting in private—or semiprivate in the case above—but he also believed that organizing his many amateur theatricals was “like writing a book in company” (Hartley 2016, 37). In fact, the embodied theatricality of Dickens’s writing has become so apodictic in twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical assessments that Nicholas Dames (2007, 13), in his pathbreaking study The Physiology of the Novel, chooses to pass on Dickens for “its literary evidence” specifically because of its obviousness.31
Physiologically speaking, perhaps only Dickens’s dedication to compulsive exercise rivaled his attraction to the theatrical: his ten- to fifteen-mile daily walks through London have become the stuff of legend for biographers. As Claire Tomalin (2011, 257) has noted, the sedentary, quiet concentration that other authors required to write was simply not a feature of Dickens’s working life. He once told John Forster that “if I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.”32 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) have made convincing arguments that our language is structured by the physicality of our bodily orientations and that, in particular, our imaginative capabilities are rooted in the bodily experiences of our physical environments.33 My association of these physiological theories of language with Dickens is threefold. First, it helps explain why the human body itself is so often the basis of the idiomatic expressions we all use so unwittingly. Second, if everyone—sedentary or not—experiences imagination and language in a bodily way as Mark Johnson (1987) in The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reasoning and Kathleen Wider (1997) in The Bodily Nature of Consciousness so convincingly argue,34 how much more is this the case for someone like Dickens whose experience with the world was so decidedly embodied? Third, the intensity and the regularity of Dickens’s walking was not just a matter of blowing off steam; it was a primary way by which he accumulated the broad array of idiomatic expressions that pervade his writing. The compulsive walking and the vernacular noticing was a ceaselessly converging activity—what Foucault (1973, 290) calls energeia—involving both body and language.
One of Dickens’s early pieces of nonfiction for Bentley’s Miscellany, “The Pantomime of Life” (1837), is representative of his tendency to experience the theatrical, the idiomatic, and walking as converging parts of a single enterprise. Not only does this article contain twenty-three body idioms in fewer than seven pages of text, but it begins with a distinctly bodily and theatrical set of idiomatic expressions. The first clause “plunge[s] [us] headlong” into “the scene [of] a street” where walking “in the open street” is essentially “the drawing up of a curtain for a grand comic pantomime” that “occurs in real life day after day” (291, 292, 296, 294).
It is no secret that Dickens’s experiences of walking provided him with a great deal of fodder for his fiction. Part of what Dickens loved about his walks through virtually every section of London was the variousness of the language employed by the people he encountered. An article titled “Slang,” which appeared early on in Household Words, encourages a prospective author to “take advantage of what he hears and sees in his own days and under his own eyes, and incorporate into his language those idiomatic words and expressions he gathers from the daily affairs of his life and the daily conversations of his fellow men” (Sala 1853b, 73; emphasis mine). Therefore, it is not just that Dickens’s truncated education or upbringing around the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and Warren’s Blacking Factory inclined him to colloquial language and idiomatic speech patterns. There is also every reason to believe that he sought out such language by immersing himself among the people who spoke with what Bakhtin (1981, 297) would later call “speech diversity.” To take only one example, Dickens claimed that he composed A Christmas Carol (1843)—a novel containing a high incidence of body idioms—in a series of walks through “the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, [on] many a night.”35 London’s streets are famous for their variety. In her essay “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf (1930, 165) describes her walks through the city as a kind of escape from the self where “one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.” Dickens was apparently so good at doing precisely this, and for many hours (not minutes), that Douglas-Fairhurst (2011, 153) has appositely described him as “less a human being than [London’s] conscience given legs and a voice.” This description is no doubt accurate as well as appropriate given my interest in bodily orientation and idiomatic phrasing, but it is missing a body part that was crucial for establishing Dickens’s authorial “voice”: his ear.36 Dickens’s fictional voice is so distinctive in large part because of his ear’s ability to take in and mimic what it heard on the London streets. Steven Marcus (1972,192) has attested to the unusual quality of Dickens’s “ear” probably most succinctly: “For a number of important formative years [Dickens] had worked as a kind of written recording device for the human voice, for speech, for the English language.” In this way, he becomes, as Dennis Walder (1995, xxi) has cleverly dubbed him, the ultimate “metropolitan wanderer, and wonderer.” Although there is nothing particularly theoretical about this part of my argument, it is worth noting that theorists of walking have lent a certain credence to my observations about the relationship between Dickens’s walking and his vernacular language. Michel de Certeau (1984, 100), for instance, discusses a “rhetoric of walking” wherein “a series of turns … can be compared to ‘turns of phrase.’ ” De Certeau goes on to say that “the art of ‘turning’ phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path” and that walking through an urban environment composed of differing lexical registers is akin to “the drifting of ‘figurative’ language” itself. I stress these ideas because of my belief that not only did the aleatory circumstances of Dickens’s life and upbringing make him more idiomatically inclined than his peers; his own bodily propensity for walking and listening made him so as well.
The Idiom Embryonic: Early Dickensian Body Language
As we have seen, it is widely accepted that the origins of idiomatic phrasing come to us from the illiterate and colorfully spoken worlds of the lower classes that Dickens would have encountered time and time again during his legendary walks.37 L. P. Smith (1925, 212) puts it this way: “Our figurative and idiomatic phrases are of popular origin, are drawn from the interests and occupations of humble life. The phrase-making, like the word-making, faculty belongs pre-eminently to the unlettered classes, and our best idioms, like our most vivid and living words, come to us, not from the library or the drawing-room or the ‘gay parterre,’ but from the workshop, the kitchen and the farm-yard.”
The everyday “familiar style”38 of lower-class language users had, of course, become part of a seismic poetic shift espoused by William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth well before Dickens began to write fiction. Wordsworth famously wrote in his 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads of his desire to keep the “reader in the company of flesh and blood”—what Paul Younquist calls his “physiological aesthetics” (1999, 152)—by using “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” (1991, 250, 241).39 Wordsworth (1991, 244) also sought “to render the plainest common sense interesting … by throw[ing] over them a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.” Indeed, even the work of England’s best early nineteenth-century essayists began to reflect how far grammatical strictures had gradually changed since the days of Addison and Johnson. William Hazlitt’s New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1810), for example, not only refrained from disparaging the use of idioms, but it went so far as to isolate them as a vital form of expression. “The idioms of every language,” writes Hazlitt, “are in general the most valuable parts of it, because they express ideas which cannot be expressed so well in any other way” (124; emphasis original).
It is thus also important to trace the ways in which Dickens’s own lexical and phrasal use of idiomatic expression derives from his early reporting and writing about the discourses of everyday life he encountered in and around London—what Catherine Robson (2006, 7) has described as his “rapturous immersion in the quotidian.” The full title of Dickens’s first fictional work could not be more indicative of the important relationship between familiar people and familiar idiom: Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People (1836).40 Overall, this set of stories contains more than three hundred body-derived idioms—many of which eventually get recycled throughout Dickens’s later career as a novelist. They include idioms such as “on first blush,” “by main force,” “open-mouthed,” “skin and bone,” “cold-blooded,” “a deaf ear,” “in everybody’s mouth,” “looking with a jaundiced eye on,” “purple in the face,” “a matter of neck or nothing,” and “on the tiptoe of expectation.” The opening story, “The Beadle—The Parish Engine—The Schoolmaster,” uses a body idiom (“from hand to mouth”) in just its second sentence41 and then goes on to incorporate seven more in its barely five pages of prose. Forster’s (1892, 30; emphasis mine) appraisal of Sketches by Boz thirty years after its appearance is therefore accurate both in general and in terms of the young author’s predilection for bodily language: “[Dickens] gave, in subsequent writings, so much more perfect form and fulness to everything [Sketches] contained.… But the first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here.” Once such instance occurs in a tightly controlled paragraph that Dickens ([1836] 1995, 106) wrote in “Hackney-Coach Stands.” Here, the narrator begins the paragraph with a humorously concise assertion that “our acquaintance with hackney coach stands is of long standing.” After describing the many other means of conveyance available to Londoners, the narrator concludes the paragraph with a playfully witty idiomatic expression of support for hackney coach travelers: “Leaving these fleeter means of getting over the ground, or of depositing oneself upon it, to those who like them, by hackney-coach stands we take our stand” (106).
So far as bodily idioms are concerned, Dickens’s early fiction shimmers with many of these brilliant but generally unrelated occurrences of what Daniel Tyler (2013, 22) has called the felicitous “twinning of literal and figurative signifiers.” There is therefore likely a connection between the picaresque dimension of Dickens’s first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836–37), and its smattering of foot-related idioms. The driving plot of the novel, if there is one, revolves around the group’s peregrinations and, more specifically, Mr. Pickwick’s repeated question to his circle: “Where shall we go next?” ([1836–37] 2003, 440). The Pickwickians’ “goings” involve a fair amount of walking. Hence, it should not be surprising that there are many foot-related idioms in the novel. Several that surface at times throughout the novel include “continuing closely upon each other’s heels,” “following at his heels,” “turned on his heel,” “set my heel,” “equal footing,” “to set foot in,” and so forth. But although Pickwick contains more body idioms than most novels written by other novelists at this time, within Dickens’s oeuvre, it has the lowest incidence of body idioms of per page (168 body idioms in 740 pages; 11.7 body idioms per 100,000 words). So rather than a more definitive coherence between the novel’s themes and its idioms, what we witness in Pickwick is a kind of fleeting inventiveness of active, spontaneous imaginative creativity where, as Steven Marcus (1972, 193) famously describes it, we see “the best parliamentary reporter of his time spitballing away in … free, wild, inventive doodling language.”42
Often, this inventive spitballing involves idiomatic experimentation. For example, Dickens plays with the idiomatic senses of “facing” an uncomfortable circumstance and “looking someone in the face” during a humorous interaction between the lawyers Dodson and Fogg, Mr. Perker, and Pickwick. The narrator comments on Pickwick’s belief that “Messrs. Dodson and Fogg ought to be ashamed to look him in the face, instead of his being ashamed to see them” (671; emphasis mine). Mr. Perker then assures Pickwick that the lawyers would never “exhibit any symptom of shame or confusion at having to look [him], or anybody else, in the face.” When the lawyers enter the room and come “face to face” with Pickwick for the first time in their long, drawn-out suit, however, Mr. Fogg is taken aback at discovering that Pickwick is the defendant: “Dear me … how do you do, Mr. Pickwick? I hope you are well, Sir. I thought I knew the face” (emphasis mine). In another instance, Pickwick’s genial gullibility is set against the experienced card playing of the dowager Lady Snuphanuph, Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, and Miss Bolo. Here, too, we can witness Dickens beginning to play with the variability of meanings embedded in idiomatic language. Recognizing him as an easy mark, the women “no sooner set eyes upon Mr. Pickwick … than they exchanged glances with each other, seeing that he was precisely the very person they wanted” to round out their table (452). No match for the ladies’ skills, Pickwick is carved up almost as quickly as he sits down to the table. What is much more notable than Pickwick’s poor gaming skills, though, is the masterful play with idiomatic language through which Dickens renders the scene: “Poor Mr. Pickwick! he had never played with three thorough-paced female card-players before. They were so desperately sharp that they quite frightened him. If he played a wrong card, Miss Bolo looked a small armoury of daggers” (452; emphasis mine). Although these instances do not yet begin to cohere with the themes or structures of the early novels, they nonetheless offer early glimpses of Dickens’s penchant for figurative expression and preoccupation with phrasing that will eventually lead to his more fully fledged idiomatic imagination.
Garrett Stewart (1974, 14) has long maintained that the Inimitable’s “borrowed figures and idioms” constitute “a sheer gymnastics of words on vacation from the chore of meaning.” This assessment fits my sense of how Dickens’s idiomatic imagination works early on where we encounter these verbal calisthenics and doubling (if not tripling) of language’s expected form in the bodily idioms employed throughout nearly all of the early novels. Examples of this in Oliver Twist (1837–39) include the narrator’s description of Oliver’s starvation during his journey to London: “If he begged at a farmer’s house, ten to one they threatened to set the dog on him; and when he showed his nose in a shop, they talked about the beadle, which brought Oliver’s heart up into his mouth,—very often the only thing he had there” ([1837–39] 2003, 59; emphasis mine). The narrator’s comical account of Barney, the waiter with the perpetually stuffed-up nose at the Three Cripples, offers another example when Fagin nervously inquires if there is anybody else at the establishment: “ ‘Dot a shoul,’ replied Barney, whose words, whether they came from the heart or not, made their way through the nose” (119; emphasis mine).
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) is interesting in that we start to witness Dickens extend some of the conceits of his idiomatic expressions beyond individual instances or immediately consecutive sentences. At the outset of the novel, for instance, the grandfather begins a paragraph by asking to speak privately with Master Humphrey (still the narrator at this point). “A word in your ear, sir,” the old man requests ([1840–41] 2000, 34). Humphrey then begins the next few paragraphs by referring to “the eagerness with which all this was poured into my ear” (34). It is in this sense that we see Dickens taking more delight in the ways idiomatic constructions allow him to press multiple senses into punning phrases with adjacently extended figurative and literal meanings. When Quilp is attempting to enlist Nell’s brother, Frederick, in his villainous plans to siphon money from their grandfather, he connivingly insists on a nonexistent friendship by saying, “Frederick … I have always stood your friend” (183; emphasis mine). The first sentence of the next paragraph farcically literalizes the idiom: “With his head sunk between his shoulders, and a hideous grin overspreading his face, the dwarf stood up and stretched his short arm across the table” (183; emphasis mine). The remainder of the scene alternates between Quilp’s sitting and rising from the table—as if to dramatize the absurdity of the selfish villain’s idea that to “stand by” someone means simply to “stand up” and shake hands while conducting nefarious business. A similar extension of idiomatic expression occurs in the comic section where Sampson Brass enlists Dick Swiveller to help gather information about the mysterious lodger who has come to let a floor in the lawyer’s building. Dick suggests setting up a ladder to gain access, but Brass objects, saying, “The neighborhood would be up in arms” (268; emphasis mine). A few paragraphs later, after they decide to make a racket at the lodger’s door, we learn that Dick has “armed himself with his stool and [a] large ruler” and that Brass comes “armed with a poker or other offensive weapon” (268–69; emphasis mine).
I have been tracing these various instances of Dickens’s affinity for idiomatic phrasing not because they are the only places where they exist in his early work but more so to consider the extent to which his budding experiments with such language help create a relational basis for assessing how some of the deepest pools of his mature imaginative genius took shape. My much closer analysis of individual novels begins with Dombey and Son (1846–48) in chapter 1 partly because critics widely agree that it represents the gateway to Dickens’s mature, “planned” fiction. This does not mean that Dickens all of a sudden—shazam—starts using body idioms in an iron-clad, fully fledged way even in Dombey, however. Instead, my first chapter seeks to evaluate the personal, social, historical, and philological conditions that contribute to the novel’s inception of what we may consider the beginnings of a definitively more sustained dimension of Dickens’s idiomatic imagination. My other chapters demonstrate how this dimension then becomes more and more embedded in the compositional processes of each successive novel—to such an extent that Dickens’s idiomatic imagination shifts from the realm of the experimental to one of formal necessity by the time of Our Mutual Friend. In my conclusion, we will see how the bodily-oriented idiomatic dimension to Dickens’s imagination eventually proves so generative and pervasive that it ends up affecting not only the prose of the modern novelists who come after him but also (uncannily) the criticism of those who continue to analyze his life and work today.
Idiomatic Shortcomings
For all of the dazzling dimensions of Dickens’s idiomatic imagination, I would be remiss not to acknowledge its limitations, too. One of the most serious, to my mind, is the assumption of male normativity that we see reflected in the explicit usage of the body idioms I discuss in Dickens’s work. Despite my belief that a powerful sense of “right-hand womanness” emerges alongside the “right-hand man” idiom in Dombey and Son, for instance, Dickens never actually uses the expression “right-hand woman” in the text. The same could be said with varying degrees of the mostly masculine subjectivity regarding other body idioms as well. Esther Summerson and Charley Neckett undeniably exhibit a “shoulder to the wheel” orientation toward labor in Bleak House, but it is never explicitly acknowledged as such.43 Similarly, the “sweat of the brow” idiom is associated—albeit sardonically—with Rogue Riderhood, Mortimer Lightwood, Eugene Wrayburn, and Silas Wegg rather than to the far more deserving female laboring characters like Lizzie Hexam, Betty Higden, and Jenny Wren. The reasons for the gendered nature of these idioms range from the fairly straightforward to the biographically complex. Dickens’s language may be seen as a product of the gendered conventions of the society in which he was writing. Victorians in the 1840s were just barely beginning to use the “right-hand man” idiom outside of military contexts, and so the idea of a “right-hand woman” may have been unthinkable this early on in the expression’s movement from the literal to the figurative. But there is also something more deeply concerning about the relationship between Dickens’s masculinized idiomaticity and his particular views of women. Put differently, I think Dickens’s well-known inability to understand women44 is part and parcel of his often disembodied idealizations of them. To borrow a term from Mary Ann O’Farrell (1997, 68, 84), so many of Dickens’s domestic heroines lack “somatic legibility” because of his real-life preference for virtuously etherealized45 rather than “real women” (C. Tomalin 2011, 194). Dickens’s reaction to the early and sudden death of his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, at seventeen, starkly manifests this tendency to, as Lillian Nayder (2012, xiv) and many others have shown, “idealize” women. He told a close friend that this sweet-natured but quite ordinary young woman was an angelic paragon: “So perfect a creature never breathed. I knew her inmost heart, and her real worth and values. She had not a fault” (quoted in C. Tomalin, 2011, 79). Dickens removed a ring from her finger on her deathbed and wore it perpetually on one of his own for the rest of his life in which he was periodically visited by Mary in “Madonna-like” dream visions. This is not the only case where Dickens maintained disembodied fantasies of feminine virtue and desirability. For example, since Maria Beadnell had jilted him very early on, he also built up an edifice of her in his own mind through many years of separation only to be shocked upon arranging a meeting with her later in life where he saw “an overweight woman, no longer pretty, who talked foolishly and too much” (C. Tomalin 2011, 286).
It is important that Dickens’s personal shortcomings, along with his more generalized artistic male subjectivity, not go unremarked in a book dedicated to the inner workings of his imaginative life. That said, however, I leave the far more contextualized close readings of my individual chapters to make the case that the worlds generated by his idiomatic imagination are powerfully inclusive with respect to how each idiom applies to its novel’s wider thematic concerns—even if Dickens himself is at times incapable or unaware of creating such an applicability. It is also worth noting that I am not alone in sensing these wider, thematically oriented idiomatic applications irrespective of gender, though. As we shall see, critics routinely and themselves unconsciously—thus all the more remarkably—write about both male and female characters with rhetorical variations of the idioms that I maintain are so crucial for our understanding the imaginative conception and development of Dickens’s mature novels.
1. In order to make comparisons between Victorian authors’ use of idiomatic language, I assembled a corpus of 124 novels by 11 different authors and searched for the 100 most frequently used body idioms. This list of 100 idioms is derived from the “body” sections of volumes 1 and 2 of the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English (1975, 1983). For a complete list of the body idioms as well as a list of the authors and novels used in my data, see appendixes A and B. Although it would certainly be possible to search for and count all occurrences of these idioms in every one of the 124 novels by hand, it would not be very practical. Instead of hand counting the body idioms in each novel, a simple looping script was developed that cycled through all of the novels, one at a time, testing for the presence of the idioms. When matches for a given idiom were found, the algorithm recorded/counted the occurrences, and those data were then exported to an Excel file for easier review. See appendix C for both simplified and full versions of the code used in this process. I also recorded the total number of words in each novel so that the relative frequencies of each idiom (i.e., occurrences per 100,000 words) could be calculated.
2. Early on, Gayatri Spivak (2003, 108) objected to digital methodologies’ “claim to scopic vision” and this has remained a point of skepticism.
3. Katherine Bode makes a similarly valid point about the need for transparency in quantitative analyses. See A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018). For the most sweeping, and controversial, critique of digital humanities research, see Nan Z. Da, “The Computational Case against Computational Criticism” (2019).
4. I maintain, however, that a digital approach that is open and forthright about where, how, and why it derives its data is a good deal more transparent than what we so often encounter in traditional analogue literary criticism where we almost never hear about the range of evidence that has been considered and what is considered as evidence. As Andrew Piper (2018, 11) has recently put it, “In traditional critical practices, we only ever hear about the passages and works that fit [the] thesis.… We almost never hear about the ones that did not, how many were considered, and how prevalent the phenomenon is that we are observing more generally.”
5. See “Why Distant Reading Isn’t” (Drucker 2017).
6. This openness to the interpretive possibilities that computer-assisted research can generate is shared even by corpus linguists like Michaela Malhberg (2013, 45, 46), who argue that algorithmically derived word clusters “can serve as starting points for further detailed analysis.” In Mahlberg’s view, like my own, the digital methodologies “do not replace other forms of stylistic analyses but complement them.”
7. In this endeavor, I have been influenced by the orientation of digital humanists like Andrew Piper (2018, 6), who endorse the ways in which “computation, when applied critically and creatively, can confirm, revise, but also invent new narratives about literary history.” Even so, Piper (2020, 6) acknowledges, and I concur, that no matter how exhaustive and transparent an algorithmically informed investigation of texts is, it will never “fully explicate once and for all the question of textual meaning.”
8. See the 2022 special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (16, no. 2) dedicated to the practice of “Minimal Computing” in which the editors, Roopika Risam and Alex Gil, consider minimal or minimalist digital approaches undertaken either by choice or necessity. Though the data behind Mahlberg et al.’s (2020) CLiC applications are anything but simple, I would consider a user’s interaction with the databases as a “minimal computing.”
9 . See Hayles, “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine” (2010); Marcus and Best, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009); Booth, “Mid-range Reading: Not a Manifesto” (2017); and Culler, “The Closeness of Close Reading” (2010).
10. For the purposes of this study, the seventeen novels I refer to in Dickens’s oeuvre are Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
11. Though Dickens never uses these idioms in any other novels, the numerical instances I cite here are approximate since I include collocations and variants of the expressions as well as the idioms as they are exactly worded here.
12. That Dickens’s use of idioms has gone unremarked upon is surprising when we take into account how many major critics—including Robert Alter (1996, 130)—consider him “above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare.”
13. Rambler no. 208, in Samuel Johnson 2018, 413.
14. Quarterly Review 64 (1839): 92.
15. North British Review 3 (1845): 76.
16. See also Charles Dickens and “Boz”: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (Patten 2012a), especially chapter 3, “Writing Boz (1836–1837): The Pickwick Papers.”
17. As Ivan Kreilkamp (2009, 90–91) has argued, Dickens’s ability “to transcribe and capture the energy of spoken language” helped him acquire a mass readership usually excluded from the literary field. See Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Kreilkamp 2009).
18. Stewart (1974, 21) makes a similar point in Dickens and the Trials of Imagination: “Historical distance has … done some disservice to modern commentary on Dickens’s style … as verbal adventure his style has left its context behind. We all too often take it merely, gratefully, as ‘Dickensian.’ We are not well equipped to judge its satire. Here the critics of Dickens’s own time provide a welcome adjustment for our updated approaches.”
19. This is a common but important observation often made about Dickens. Hugo Bowles (2019, 125), for instance, has recently commented on Dickens’s exceptional “auditory memory.”
20. For only a partial list of scholarship concerned with Dickensian “style,” see Mark Lambert’s Dickens and the Suspended Quotation (1981), Robert Alter’s “Reading Style in Dickens” (1996), Juliet John’s Dickens’s Villains (2001), Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s Knowing Dickens (2007), Sally Ledger’s Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007), Holly Furneaux’s Queer Dickens (2009), Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens (2011), Daniel Tyler’s Dickens’s Style (2013), Michaela Mahlberg’s Corpus Linguistics and Dickens’s Fiction (2013), Garrett Stewart’s The One, Other, and Only Dickens (2018) and “The Late Great Dickens: Style Distilled” (2022), and Hugo Bowles’s Dickens and the Stenographic Mind (2019).
21. This statistic applies for the four novels I treat in my chapters (all Penguin Classic editions): Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. I arrived at the calculation by dividing the total number of body idioms in each text by the total number of their combined pages in the Penguin editions. A novel-by-novel breakdown would appear this way: Dombey and Son contains 410 body idioms in 937 pages of text; Bleak House contains 1,085 body idioms in 977 pages of text; Great Expectations contains 271 body idioms in 481 pages of text; and Our Mutual Friend contains 184 body idioms in 784 pages of text.
22. Here, I join a steady drumbeat in literary studies that has signaled a renewed interest in philology. See Michael Holquist, “Why We Should Remember Philology” (2002); Geoffrey Harpham, “Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology” (2009); Frances Ferguson, “Philology, Literature, Style” (2013); James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of Modern Humanities (2014); Merve Emre, “The Return to Philology” (2023). Joshua Brorby has recently written about Victorian philology and its impact on Our Mutual Friend. See “Our Mutable Inheritance: Testing Victorian Philology in Our Mutual Friend” (2020).
23. For the best comprehensive study of the ways in which the “new” English philology emerged from debates about philosophy of mind and the German philological tradition, see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (1967), especially chapter 5, “Sir William Jones and the New Philology.”
24. Müller’s lectures were published in book form as Lectures on the Science of Language at the end of 1861.
25. My thinking on this topic has been influenced by Charles Altieri’s (2015) recent work Reckoning with the Imagination, where he maintains that “intentions have to be displayed—not explained”: “There need not be any claim that in postulating an intention one also justifies something such as an explanation or a unified account of the text. For often the intention is not to mean but to display a relation of significant force fields within which tensions need not be reconciled or actions submitted to rational form” (35).
26. This particular example aligns with Immanuel Kant’s (1950, 112) quintessential formulation that imagination is “a blind function of the soul, without which we would have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.”
27. For only the most recent, see Tomalin 2011, 327–28; Douglas-Fairhurst 2011, 152–53; and Hartley 2016, 7–8, 36–37.
28. In both Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913) and Experience and Judgement (1939), Husserl finds that perception is shaped both by an embodied effort and activity and by a sediment or habitus, as he calls it, deriving from earlier experience—all of which constitutes an essentially embodied disposition.
29. “See how near I may have been, to another sort of life,” Dickens wrote to Forster (December 30–31, 1844).
30. For a partial list, see Eigner 1989; MacKay 1989; Vlock 1998; and Andrews 2006.
31. Beyond scholarship on the theater, Kaplan (1975) inaugurated a host of studies on Dickens’s relationship to the physical body.
32. September 29, 1854.
33. See M. Johnson 1987. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) draw on a history of language going at least as far back as John Locke’s view in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that all awareness is experientially embodied through the senses. For a study of the primacy of the body in the idea of the human during the Victorian period, see W. Cohen 2009.
34. Turner (2014, xiv; emphasis original) is particularly interested in what he contends has been missing or undervalued in objectivist accounts of meaning and rationality: namely, “the human body, and especially those structures of imagination and understanding that emerge from our embodied experience.”
35. Dickens to Cornelius Felton, January 2, 1844.
36. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2022, 278) has even more recently noted that, while walking, Dickens’s “ear [was] permanently cocked for oddities he could use in his fiction.”
37. For one of the more recent explications of this view, see Fernando and Flavell 1981.
38. This phrase comes from the title of one of William Hazlitt’s essays, “On Familiar Style,” in Table-Talk (1905, 1821–22).
39. As Shelley argues in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821), the unacknowledged legislators of the world are those who are endowed with and who express a heightened sensitivity toward or awareness of the senses—those who possess what James Allard (2007, 143) calls the “hypersensible body.”
40. Dennis Walder (1995) uses the term “everyday” eleven times in his introduction to Sketches by Boz.
41. “A poor man, with small earnings, and a large family, just manages to live on from hand to mouth …” (Dickens [1836] 1995, 17).
42. I am drawing here on Steven Marcus’s (1972, 201) still-famous essay on Dickens’s “first and freest novel”: “Language into Structure: Pickwick Revisited.” This fits the more general consensus in which John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson (1957, 67) refer to Dickens’s more spontaneous composition practice in Pickwick Papers as “hand-to-mouth writing.” Jenny Hartley (2016, 64) more recently notes, “improvisation [not planning] was the spur” for the novels of the 1830s and early 1840s which “can seem as if they might sprawl indefinitely with weak and implausible plotlines.”
43. The “brought up by hand” idiom in Great Expectations, by virtue of its original association with breastfeeding, is always already feminized to a certain extent. For better or for worse, Biddy, Molly, Estella, and even Miss Havisham are explicitly designated as having been “brought up by hand.”
44. “My father did not understand women,” Dickens’s daughter Kate famously said. See Storey 1939, 100.
45. See Knoepflmacher 1988, 79.
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