“Conclusion” in “Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination”
Conclusion
The Afterlife of Idiomatic Absorption Among Novelists and Critics
When language is in a state of energy, there is a continuous reciprocal influence of colloquial speech on writing, and of writing on colloquial speech.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Writer as Artist” (1940)
The Idiomatic Body in James, Joyce, and Woolf
In December 1865, hardly before the ink was dry on the final monthly installment of Our Mutual Friend, the twenty-two-year-old Henry James penned a withering and now-famous review in The Nation. The first sentence of the review declares Our Mutual Friend “the poorest of Mr. Dickens’s works” mainly because of its supposed failure in character development: “every character here put before us is a mere bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever” (James 1865, 786). After objecting to nearly every character in Our Mutual Friend, James expands his critique to Dickens’s work more generally. He concludes that Dickens “is not serious reading,” that Dickens “is nothing of a philosopher,” and that it would be “an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists.”1 The evolving reality behind his early dismissals of Dickens was far more complicated, however. As the biographer R. W. B. Lewis (1991, 89) has pointed out, “Dickens was always a special novelistic case” for Henry James.
Just two years after his review in The Nation, in 1867, James ([1914] 2011b, 205) met Dickens in America and remembered “how tremendously it had been laid upon young persons of our generation to feel Dickens, down to the soles of our shoes.” And feel Dickens deeply he certainly did. Some of the earliest memories that James recounts in his autobiography (2011a) near the end of his life are explicitly Dickensian.2 The family’s eccentric New York dentist, Dr. Parkhurst, becomes an embodiment of “Joey Bagstock” (57); their acquaintance, Miss Cushman, is “the Nancy of Oliver Twist” (98); his cousin Henry “was more or less another Mr. Dick” (120); his cousin Helen was “another Miss Trotwood” (120). These last two associations emerge from James’s account of how, as a young boy, he hid under a tablecloth to listen to his grandmother read David Copperfield to his older cousins: “I held my breath and listened, I listened long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into the sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge” (102). After this memorable outburst of feeling, James recalls how additional Dickens novels were read aloud in his own household; the James family “breathed heavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and Little Dorrit … Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son” (102–3).
The bodily rhetoric that the older James uses to describe these recollections is also quite revealing. He describes his experiences of reading individual Dickens novels where he “held [his] breath,” he “drank deep,” he “breathed heavily.” It is interesting to note the compelling relationship between the body and the idiom in James’s most profound memories. Consider how he continued to frame the importance of Dickens’s impact on not only his own but also on his entire generation’s consciousness by way of distinctly idiomatic body language:
The force of the Dickens imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation.… To be brought up thus against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one’s consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to trod ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming large, warn us off even as they hold. He did too much for us surely ever to leave us free—free of judgment, free of reaction, even should we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. (James [1913] 2011a, 101; emphasis mine)
The older James goes on to say that “criticism, roundabout [Dickens], is somehow futile and tasteless,” acknowledging that, although Dickens’s “own taste is easily impugned,” the Inimitable nonetheless “entered so early into the blood and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the taste of overhauling him” (101; emphasis mine). This sentiment held up, too. Never again did James “overhaul” Dickens as rebarbatively as he did in his career-opening review of Our Mutual Friend. Writing from the perspective that age grants in “The Art of Fiction” (Longman’s Magazine 1884), the forty-one-year-old James eventually included Dickens among the “talents” of Miguel Cervantes, Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola—all of whom, according to James, “have worked in [novel-writing] with equal glory” ([1884] 1999).3
And then shortly before his death in 1916, James ([1913] 2011a, 103) called Dickens “the great actuality of the current imagination.” This assessment aligns with the remarkable concessions of another early and unequivocal Dickens detractor, Justin McCarthy, whose 1864 Westminster Review essay confidently held that Dickens’s literary legacy would never survive: “We cannot think that he will live as an English classic” is the verdict McCarthy ([1864] 1965, 415) delivers in his review’s final paragraph. Despite this harsh (and dead wrong) overall verdict, however, McCarthy acknowledges the popular contemporaneous impact of Dickensian language at the start of his review: “[he] has entered our every-day life in a manner which no other author has done,” McCarthy concedes. “Much of his phraseology has become common property. Allusions to his works and quotations from them are made by everybody, and in all places” (415). But by the end of the review twenty-five pages later, McCarthy is convinced that “the influence of [Dickens’s] style” will not last (415). “Before long his language will have passed away … only [to] be found in a Dictionary of Antiquities” (441). As we shall see in fiction and beyond, McCarthy could not have been more mistaken, especially in terms of idiomatic “phraseology” pertaining to the body.
The use of such idiomatic phraseology becomes more and more a part of Henry James’s common fictional property throughout his career. Just as his general regard for Dickens grows over time, so too does James’s employment of body idioms in his own fiction. For example, a major work from his early period, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), averages about one body idiom per three pages of text (233 in 647 pages [285,300 words4]). The American (1887) utilizes significantly more body idioms: 393 in 350 pages (154,330 words) for an average of more than one per page. Even The Golden Bowl (1904), from James’s mature late stage, averages about 1.5 idioms per page (572 in 374 pages [102,850 words]). I cite these numbers not because I want to suggest that there is a simple and causal connection between Dickens’s and James’s use of body idioms in their fiction. I do so instead to draw our attention to one of the paradoxical and surprising through lines of my study. As we have seen, Dickens’s use of idiomatic language was early and often held up as evidence of his “vulgarity” and of his predilection for the ostensibly low, unsophisticated ideas contained in his fiction. No one, to my knowledge, has ever raised such objections about Henry James’s work, and yet he, too, becomes a relatively high user of bodily idioms. I am also not claiming that James uses body idioms in the same way that I have argued Dickens does; nowhere in James do body idioms become absorbed into the themes, characterizations, or structures of his novels. This, as I have argued, is one of the dimensions that makes Dickens’s imagination inimitable. It is enough to point out that Dickens helps pave the way for late-Victorian and modernist novelists to write about “serious” and “sophisticated” topics using everyday idiomatic language even if critics have never tracked their usages in this specific manner. A summative section from the end of Garrett Stewart’s (1974, 225) first book, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, comes closest to the spirit of how I see Dickens’s imaginative influence working more generally: “Without his whole-hearted, brilliantly driven experiments in language, the extremist vistas of twentieth-century fiction might have settled for nearer horizons, safer terrain.” The previous chapters of this book, I hope, demonstrate that no one experimented with idiomatic language as much as Dickens. And his career-long idiomatic experimentation had real-world effects. In an ironic but fitting reversal of Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century warning to avoid the use of “licentious idioms,” the late and eminently distinguished German-born critic Edgar Rosenberg (2019, 221) recounted how after arriving in the United States in 1940 at age fourteen not knowing “a word of English,” he learned to use “correct idiomatic English” principally by reading Dickens.
A different case altogether, Dickens’s status as a writer supposedly repudiated by the modernists is perhaps never so inaccurate as it is when considering the case of James Joyce’s experimental use of language. I am not alone, of course, in this assessment. Anny Sadrin (1999, xiii) has called Dickens “a great precursor to Modernity,” and Barbara Hardy (2008, 69) sees him as a “model” for the general “creative informality of language celebrated by the Modernists.” Hardy (2008, 166) even recounts a story from early in Joyce’s life when, as he was training to become a teacher in Zurich, he submitted an essay arguing that Dickens had “entered the English Language” more than any writer since Shakespeare. Data culled from the OED would have corroborated Joyce’s statement regarding Dickens as a lexically innovative writer on par with the Bard: the dictionary cites Dickens 9,218 times—far more than any author in the last three hundred years.5 Indeed, one of the most specific ways that Dickens entered Joyce’s artistic language was through the creation of an urban, informal, and modernist vernacular.6 Much of what scholars have to say about Joyce’s language could easily be said and, in fact as we saw in the introduction, was said of Dickens. Derek Attridge (1988, 158, 174) highlights Joyce’s extensive use of language “that good writers were supposed to avoid”: “deviations from the norms of what traditionally constitute[d] ‘good’ style … that one finds in such handbooks as Hodgson’s Errors in the Use of English (1882) and Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926).” Katie Wales (1992, 78) focuses on “Joyce’s ear for the idioms and the tone of ordinary informal Dublin speech” and the ingenious way his characters “tend to think in the idiom of their speech, and speak in the idiom of their thoughts.” Wales traces Joyce’s felicity in achieving this level of ingenuity to his deep fascination with “the whole relationship between literal and figurative meanings,” where the supreme “fertility of [his] imagination” depends on “colloquialisms and idioms [that] spring to new life” (121–22). This deep fascination with and integration of the “whole” imaginative play between literal and figurative meanings of idiomatic language is a uniquely Dickensian influence.
We see this influence from the earliest points in Joyce’s career. The very first sentence of “The Dead” (Dubliners, 1914) hinges on the extended use of one particular body idiom: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” (James [1914] 1991, 119). As Hugh Kenner (1978, 15–16) has pointed out in Joyce’s Voices, “whatever Lily was literally … she was not literally run off her feet.… That first sentence was written, as it were, from Lily’s point of view, and though it looks like ‘objective’ narration it is tinged with her idiom.” This is because the story begins with Lily trying to cope with putting away too many simultaneously arriving visitors’ jackets amid the cramped quarters of the Morkan household as the group convenes for their annual Christmas dance. Speaking in a fitting tangential idiom of his own, Kenner asserts that “Joyce is at his subtle game of specifying what pretensions to elegance are afoot on this occasion” (15; emphasis mine). And Kenner is correct to invoke this idiom; there is a sense of physical crowdedness in the Morkan house throughout the story, and therefore, many of Joyce’s idioms in this famous story are derivative from the one used in the first sentence. In the cramped dancing space, for example, Aunt Kate often comes “close on [others’] heels,” while moving around the dinner table she and her sister (Aunt Julia) appear “walking on each other’s heels, getting in each other’s way,” contributing to the sense that people are often “underfoot” and “after [their] heels” (125, 134, 145, 146).
Like Dickens, much of Joyce’s most imaginative language emerges from bodily wordplay that constantly shifts between the literal and the figurative. Merve Emre (2022, 71) has commented that “life, in Ulysses, is the experience of the body … as it wanders through the world. It is sensation mediated by language, and is language mediated by sensation.” Although the entirety of Ulysses (1922) is suffused with idiomatic wordplay predicated on bodily observation and sensation, a single but otherwise unremarkable scene from Ulysses will demonstrate the point. Stephen Bloom contemplates a man eating in a Burton restaurant and thinks, “Gums: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the grill … bitten off more than he can chew.… Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw.… Couldn’t swallow it all however” (Joyce [1922] 2008, 161). Then, watching another man eating cabbage with a knife: “Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born with a silver knife in his mouth” (162). It is important, here, to emphasize Wales’s (1992, 121; emphasis mine) contention that Joyce was fascinated by “the whole relationship between literal and figurative meanings.” We see this on display in the examples above where Joyce is not content simply to use familiar body idioms. Instead, he anticipates the reader’s familiarity with them (“bitten off more than he can chew,” “tear from limb to limb”) and then alters others in ways that defamiliarize and, hence, create surprising new associations. The man in the restaurant bites off more than he can chew but then works on his food not “tooth and nail,” as the familiar idiom goes, but “tooth and jaw.” Similarly, the other man’s aggressiveness emerges from the way he tears his cabbage from limb to limb and also from the description of his being “born with a silver knife,” rather than “a silver spoon in his mouth.” This is one specific area where it is difficult not to agree with Barbara Hardy’s (2008, 66) claim that “you can’t imagine Joyce’s word-play without [Dickens’s] model.” We have seen over and over again throughout this study how Dickens’s use of body idioms exploits the whole relationship between literal and figurative meanings as he constantly tinkers with and twists them, abstracts them, stretches them, reliteralizes them, and presses them into all manner of slight and even outright violation—the full (“whole”) range of which allow him to reach extraordinary creative heights by way of ordinary everyday language.
Unlike Joyce, no one is likely to consider Virginia Woolf a “bodily” writer, including herself. Woolf went on record early and often to state her explicit disaffection for her Victorian predecessors, and her critical hostility toward them was frequently based on the view that they focused inordinately on the physiological at the expense of the psychological. In perhaps the best known of all her essays, “Modern Fiction,” Woolf ([1919] 1984, 285) bristles against the materialist interests of earlier (Victorian) fiction—saying “it is because [it is] concerned not with the spirit but with the body that [it has] disappointed us.” Mary Jean Corbett (2020, 27) has recently written that Woolf’s Victorian “predecessors are unevenly acknowledged at best, yet their presence in that past can be felt and at times heard in her work.” Woolf did not have much (good) to say about Dickens,7 but interestingly, one of the ways that he can be felt and heard in what she says nonetheless comes by way of idiomatic body language. As it turns out, she was oddly sympatico with Dickens on at least one score: Dickens’s favorite of all his novels—the “favourite child” in his “heart of hearts”—was David Copperfield (Tambling 1996, 10.) It was Woolf’s favorite as well. The only one of her hundreds of essays dedicated solely to Dickens was “David Copperfield,” a short piece in which she writes this “most perfect of all the Dickens novels” achieves “an atmosphere of beauty” (Woolf [1925] 1966, 195). Apparently, the beauty of David Copperfield’s atmosphere even had the power to heal her frequently debilitating headaches. She wrote in her diary for February 25, 1936, “I’ve had headaches. Vanquish them by lying still & binding books and reading D. Copperfield” (Woolf 1985, 5:13).
The point I wish to make about Woolf’s ([1925] 1966, 194) essay on David Copperfield does not necessarily depend on her deeply held belief that life’s “youth, gaiety, hope” “flows into every creek and cranny” of the novel. Instead, I want to draw our attention to how an inordinate number of body idioms seep into so many nooks and crannies of Woolf’s own language about David Copperfield.8 On fifteen different occasions in only four pages of text (1,600 words), Woolf uses body idioms such as when “stories [are] communicated by word of mouth” (191); “Dickens talking” would “make us blush to the roots of our hair” (192); “where the foot sinks deep into the mud” (193); “people are branded upon our eyeballs” (194); “the penetrating glance [is] … itself pierced to the bone” (194). This is not characteristically Woolfian language either. Consider her essay “George Eliot” (1919) where she uses three times fewer body idioms (5) in more than double the pages (13) and words (3,600) of her Copperfield piece. The same is true of her six-page (2,600-word) essay on “Charlotte Brontë” (Woolf 1998) where she uses only a single body idiom.
The Critic’s Hand, Subdued to What It Works In
The inordinately high number of body idioms we encounter in Woolf’s single piece of criticism on Dickens represents an early instantiation of a phenomenon that becomes uncannily consistent in twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical practice. In short, a sample of influential critics reveals that they, too, incorporate disproportionately high incidences of body idioms into their work on Dickens—and only on Dickens (i.e., not when they write on other Victorian novelists). Paul de Man (1983, 85), assessing the Geneva school critics, describes such a phenomenon as one in which “the creative impulse itself” begins to converge with the critical apparatus surrounding it. J. Hillis Miller (1991a, 35) later identifies how one particular Geneva school critic, Georges Poulet, is fundamental to the theorization of how “the critic’s language” becomes inflected with “the style and vocabulary of the author [criticized].” In “The Phenomenology of Reading,” which appeared in the inaugural issue of New Literary History, Poulet (1968, 54) describes his experience of what can happen while reading a novel: he notices that he starts, “with an unheard-of licence [sic], to think what it thinks and feel what it feels.” The “remarkable complicity … of this relationship—between criticizing subject and criticized object” initiates a “participation by the critic in the powers active in the [author’s] use of language” (63, 60, 66; emphasis original). For Poulet, “the language of the critic signifies the language of the literary work” precisely because, “on the level of indistinct thought, of sensations, emotions, images, and obsessions of preconscious life, it is possible for the critic to repeat, within himself, that life of which the work affords a first version, inexhaustibly revealing and suggestive” (61; emphasis original). Poulet characterizes this process as one that entirely “absorbs” the critic by way of a “vital inbreathing inspired [in] the act of reading” a particular author (58, 59).
I have argued throughout this study that body idioms become absorbed into the structures, themes, characters, and language of the imaginative worlds Dickens creates in his most mature and complex fiction. We have even seen how individual critics sometimes adopt the language of a particular novel’s unique idiom in their critiques of that novel (such as when Terry Eagleton, Karen Chase, and Michael Levenson discuss the “shouldering” of responsibility in Bleak House). But it is eerily consistent to consider how the bodily idiom absorption that I have analyzed in Dickens’s creative imagination also extends more generally to the language used by many of his most prominent critics. D. A. Miller’s (1988) The Novel and the Police will serve as a first example. In his forty-five-page (approximately 16,100-word9) chapter on Dickens’s Bleak House, “Discipline in Different Voices,” Miller uses nineteen body idioms whereas he uses only four body idioms in his forty-five-page (16,300-word) chapter on Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (“The Novel as Usual”), and only three body idioms in his forty-six-page (16,500-word) chapter on Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (“Cage aux folles”). A similar pattern emerges in Mary Poovey’s (1988) Uneven Developments. She uses twenty-three body idioms in her thirty-five-page (15,200-word) chapter on Dickens’s David Copperfield and only four such idioms in her thirty-seven-page (16,000-word) chapter on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
This discrepancy of between four and five times the use of body idioms in the criticism of Dickens’s fiction as opposed to that of his peers holds up even in the more recent work of critics such as Catherine Gallagher, Garrett Stewart, and Terry Eagleton. In The Body Economic, Gallagher (2008) uses twenty-eight body idioms in her thirty-one-page (15,300-word) chapter on Our Mutual Friend, only seven in her thirty-eight-page (19,100-word) chapter on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and three in her thirty-six-page (19,200-word) chapter on Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. Garrett Stewart, perhaps the foremost analyst of Dickens’s language, may very well be in a category all his own when it comes to Poulet’s sense of linguistic “complicity” that can exist between critic and author. Stewart’s (2018) The One, Other, and Only Dickens contains a whopping 332 body idioms in 191 pages (96,600 words), many of which are by far the most playfully clever I have ever encountered in serious scholarly criticism. A sampling of Stewart’s body idioms in relation to Dickens include language “spoken under one’s breath and in the ear of uptake” (xii), the “biting of a lexical tongue” (13), “prose thinking on its feet” and “keeping us on our toes” (17), “the tongue-twisting hinge of hyphenated epithet” (76), turning “the serviceable breather of the comma into something closer to quietly breathtaking” (85), “knock-kneed” associations (103), “comic phrasing that has, quite deliberately, either two legs or none to stand on” (107), the “bowlegged grammar of syllepsis” (110), a character who “lie[s] through his teeth (132, emphasis original), “passing by him almost shoulder to shoulder” (165), and so on. Despite Stewart’s prolific critical output, however, he has not yet written a monograph solely dedicated to a different Victorian author, and so we are left to compare his extremely high incidence of scintillating body idioms in The One, the Other, and Only Dickens to chapters of his other books. Dear Reader (1996), for instance, contains a chapter subtitled “Relays of Desire in Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Villette.” In this thirty-nine-page (18,200-word) chapter, Stewart uses only eight body idioms in his criticism of the Brontës. Similarly, in his twenty-eight-page (13,100-word) chapter on the “Afterlives of Interpretation in Daniel Deronda,” he uses just four body idioms when discussing George Eliot. Terry Eagleton’s (2005) The English Novel provides a slightly different, though no less congruous, example because it is comprised of chapters that consider not just a single work by a given author but that author’s whole oeuvre (a practice for which the Geneva critics advocated). In his twenty-page (8,900-word) chapter on “Charles Dickens,” Eagleton employs forty-three body idioms, whereas his twenty-page (8,700-word) chapter on “The Brontës” contains just ten body idioms. The phenomenon I enumerate in these instances would not have surprised Poulet (1969, 63) because he believed in a process of “verbal mimesis which transposes into the critic’s language … the style and vocabulary of the author” (J. H. Miller 19991a, 35). The best criticism, according to Poulet, “is not possible unless the thought of the critic becomes the thought of the author criticized, unless it succeeds in re-feeling, in re-thinking, in re-imagining the author’s thought from the inside” (J. H. Miller 1991a, 15; emphasis original). It appears that if Dickens imagined in the language of bodily idiom, many of his critics reimagine their criticism of him in the same idiom.
As J. Hillis Miller (1991a, 21; emphasis mine) has said, “Poulet thinks of criticism as beginning and ending in a coincidence of the mind of the critic and the mind of the author.” Miller (1991a, 15) obviously uses “coincidence” here in a Pouletian sense where there is a coinciding or correspondence between the critic and the author, where there is a “transposition of the mental universe of an author into the interior space of a critic’s mind.”10 But in an effort to probe the extent to which this curious phenomenon of “verbal mimesis” among critics might be merely that other kind of coincidence—just chance—I turn to the evidence culled from two of the best twenty-first-century literary biographers in the profession: Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Measuring the varying levels of bodily idiom usage in the cases of these two biographers may provide the best test cases yet for several reasons. First, both Bodenheimer and Douglas-Fairhurst have produced major, full-length literary biographies of Dickens and of another Victorian author: Bodenheimer has written one book on George Eliot and another on Dickens; Douglas-Fairhurst one on Dickens and one on Lewis Carroll. And both authors have published their biographies with the same presses—Cornell University Press and Harvard University Press, respectively. I mention the fact that both biographies by both authors were published by the same press because it gives a more accurate sense of the relationship between pagination and word count. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, Bodenheimer (1994) uses a total of just eleven body idioms in 267 pages (120,100 words). In Knowing Dickens (2007), she uses 119 body idioms in 208 pages (98,100 words). Even without adjusting for word length, Bodenheimer uses over ten times the body idioms when writing about Dickens than she does when writing about Eliot. The proportional case with Douglas-Fairhurst is only slightly less astounding. In Becoming Dickens (2011), he uses 264 body idioms in 336 pages (133,700 words). In The Story of Alice (2015), he uses only thirty-nine body idioms in 415 pages (164,300 words). These lopsided proportions, combined with what we know about Dickens as far and away the highest user of body idioms among nineteenth-century novelists, make it very likely that there is some kind of Pouletian “coincidence” between the mind of the critic and the mind of the author. Put another way, Dickens’s body idioms are contagious: they have a strong tendency to subdue the critic’s nature to the stuff it works in, like the dyer’s hand. Throughout this book, I have referred to Dickens as the “Inimitable,” and yet, paradoxically, the sharpest register of his genius turns out to be its absorptive influence, carried across to produce lexical imitation in his critics. Like no other Victorian author, we speak of Dickens using the vernacular language that his novels have put within our earshot, the idioms he has pressed into currency by putting them in our mouths and at the ends of our fingertips. Ultimately, what could be more inimitable?
1. James’s assessment (and his language) is remarkably similar to George Henry Lewes’s (1872a, 152) appraisal of Dickens as a sentimental writer, not cerebral or educated, with “no interest in philosophy, science, and the higher literature.”
2. It is quite possible that James is the “very distinguished man” Lewes (1872a, 143) discusses in “Dickens in Relation to Criticism”: “It is not long since I heard a very distinguished man express measureless contempt for Dickens, and … afterwards … admit that he had ‘entered into his life.’ ”
3. From Longman’s Magazine, September 1884.
4. For the remainder of this section, the word counts I offer of books and chapters are similarly approximate.
5. Bowles (2019, 160) arrives at a similar conclusion.
6. See Gibbons 2013.
7. She generally objected to what she saw as the (lower- and middle-)class-bound limitations of his fiction. In “Dickens by a Disciple,” which ran in the Times Literary Supplement, Woolf ([1919] 1998, 25–28) pans W. Walter Crotch for what she takes to be a blind and unreflective enthusiasm of Dickens by his admirers.
8. It is important to note that when I count critics’ use of body idioms in their writing about Dickens, I do not count any body idioms that the critics use while quoting Dickens’s prose. In other words, the only body idioms I count are those of the critic her-/himself.
9. I do not include Miller’s footnotes in this approximate word count. It is also important to note that these idiom counts used by critics were manually tallied. I want to thank my graduate students Caitlin Mathies, Luke Folk, Will Turner, Jonathan Cheng, and Trevor Bleick for helping to check and recheck my manual counts.
10. I am very lucky to be indebted to Miller for my thinking about the “coincidental” in these terms. I am even luckier to have had conversations with Hillis regarding the possible gradations of conscious intent—both in terms of Dickens’s predilections and those of the critics. In terms of the latter, he once wondered aloud about contacting the critics to ask if they were conscious of an intent to use so many body idioms when writing about Dickens. We eventually decided that doing so would be tantamount to asking Dickens if he was aware that one of the most interesting parts of his imagination was structured by certain bodily idioms. I have since taken consolation not only in a Keatsian sense of negative capability but also in the position on authorial meaning described by Garrett Stewart (2015, 231): “it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter ultimately, what the writer had in mind, because the only mind in which those thoughts are now to be had, in which they happen, is the reader’s own, guyed and guided by the filaments of a written syntax.”
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