Everyday Words is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.
i f recurrent colloquialisms and everyday phrases inscribe the perspectives a culture most habitually assumes, then conditional analogy and the subjunctive mood were perhaps the most characteristic Victorian perspectives. "As if" underwrote the way the Victorians knew. Charles Dickens's prose contains an extraordinary number of "as ifs": 411 in Dombey and Son (1846-48), 393 in David Copperfield (1849-50), 392 in Our Mutual Friend (1865, 266 in the substantially shorter Great Expectations (1860-61), and so on. This is a common phrase and these are long books, but "as if" only appears five times each in Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne (1858) and Framley Parsonage (1860), and only about a third as much (135 instances) in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-48).This does not mean that an epistemology of "as if" did not also underwrite the styles of Trollope and Thackeray, because "as if" is just one pronounced articulation of conditional analogy and the subjunctive mood. Dickens used "as if" at a significantly higher statistical frequency than almost all other familiar writers, but other Victorian writers did use different forms of conditional similes more than preand post-Victorians. i isolate "as if" in this paper as a paradigm for a historically specific Victorian investment in the subjunctive mood because i can easily trace and count iterations of the phrase.Abstract: This essay treats "as if" as a traceable signature of a historically specific Victorian form of knowing according to which writers represented their objects-from geological forces and the light refracted by motes of dust to feelings and unconscious motives-in the form of characters. Working with texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth gaskell, Charles Lyell, and John Tyndall, the essay describes how Victorians capitalized on the speculative potential and decorous self-abnegation articulated by "as if" and other conditional analogies and subjunctive phrases. in exemplary figures like David Copperfield and Esther summerson and in the science of Lyell, "as if" signifies selfreflective depth of character, sympathetic imagination, and inductive reasoning, but Micawber, skimpole, and Tyndall reveal the concomitant detachment and relativity that underwrote this figure of virtual reality.
Here, we had better stop, though we have not told half that might be related on the subject of buttons. It is wonderful, is it not? That on that small pivot turns the fortune of such multitudes of men, women, and children, in so many parts of the world; that such industry; and so many fine faculties, should be brought out and exercised by so small a thing as the Button.—“What There Is in a Button,” Harriet Martineau (1852)
This article describes certain generic features of Household Words as evidence of an emergent epistemology of character, a way of knowing everything as divided and irreducible to systematic or numerical description. Dickens tentatively named this form of knowledge "a certain Shadow," but it should be called "character" because it is ascribed to the same generic tropes and associations that writers used to articulate psychologically complex fictional characters and the to describe the effects that such characters ought to have on readers. I analyze how Household Words personifies otherwise inanimate institutions and objects to fit this paradigm of character.
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