AUTHENTICITY AND NON-STANDARD SPEECH IN GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Abstract

Susan L. Ferguson shows how Victorian novelists used the reported speech of their characters to create a “ficto-linguistics” wherein “the systems of language that appear in novels . . . indicate identifiable alternative patterns congruent to other aspects of the fictional world” (1). These novels present self-contained systems, she says, in which “speech relates in style as well as content to the speech of other characters, [and] all quoted language in a novel is contained within and potentially interacts with the language of the narrator” (1). Ferguson's interpretation of novelistic speech enables more convincing analyses of reported dialect speech than earlier efforts, which compared them directly to real-life dialects – a tendency that itself reflects the “grand narrative” of “authenticism” (Sanchez-Arce) – and which assumed that discrepancies and inconsistencies were stylistic weaknesses due, for instance, to over-sentimentality or “lowness” (Quirk 5), or to the writer being reluctant to depict virtuous characters as speaking non-standard English, regardless of the likelihood or possibility that characters from badly educated backgrounds would speak anything else.