Working Dialect: Nonstandard Voices in Victorian Literature.

Abstract

For all the nineteenth-century talk about talking proper, there was considerable disagreement in Victorian England about what was considered acceptable English. Literary criticism of the Victorian novel tends to ignore these debates, taking it for granted that Standard English was the prestige norm to which Victorian speakers aspired. Such a view has led to a rather narrow field for interpreting direct dialogue written in dialect. Working Dialect calls for a revaluation of nonstandard varieties of English in Victorian literature and a reassessment of some of the terms literary critics use to talk about language in the nineteenth century. This project is literary criticism inflected by both historical and modern sociolinguistics; it brings the insights of one discipline to bear on the other to interrogate and revalue dialect’s role in Victorian literature. The texts I examine comprise both working- and middle-class attempts to represent the speech and culture of the rural and industrial labourers of the North and the servant class and independent entrepreneurs of London in both fictional and non-fictional contexts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1856), the dialect writing of Lancashire’s Ben Brierley (1825-1896) and Edwin Waugh (1816-1890), Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), and Henry Mayhew’s letters to the Morning Chronicle (1849-50) and London Labour and the London Poor (1851-52; 1861). While these various representations of working-class voices are neither as accurate nor authentic as they often claimed or aspired to be, they reveal not only the importance nineteenth-century philologists placed on preserving nonstandard varieties of English but also the fascination for linguistic variation that writers and readers of all classes had.

This project aims to amplify the nonstandard voices of Victorian literature in order to parse the paradoxes and complexities attendant to them. The importance of dialect in Victorian literature should not be underestimated. In listening intently to the accents of class, gender, and region across genre and across the landscape of England, Working Dialect challenges critical assumptions about how class, gender, and regional identities were imagined, constructed, and performed in nineteenth-century England and in the pages of its literature.