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IAN WILKINSON
(Keele University)
“Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.”
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
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Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz is an interesting text, but it has often been undervalued by critics who privilege the later novels and do not recognize its formal and generic properties. The criticism shows that two dominant trends have arisen which regard the sketches either as representations of London in the 1830s or as evidence of the embryonic emergence of Dickens the novelist. These opinions are challenged by pointing to genre differences between the novel and sketch forms, in which Dickens's separation of the text into the four sections “Seven Sketches from Our Parish” (“Our Parish”), “Scenes”, “Characters”, and “Tales” becomes crucially important. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of double-voiced discourse locates some of the voices sounded in the text, and reveals how they replicate the polyphonia of the city, illustrating Dickens's ability to orchestrate those voices which are often ventriloquized by Boz. The narrator acts as a multiple filter, and, as J. Hillis Miller (1971, 32) has noted, is a product of literary techniques available from past writings, while the sketches themselves reveal many hybridizations of writing styles and cut across genres.
The Bakhtinian notion of the novel genre as a plastic form, capable of assimilating other generic forms within it, is useful for providing a broad context in which to assess Sketches by Boz, but only by regarding each of its four sections on its individual merits, as the text cannot be expected to display the structural unities of a novel. The critical tools provided by double-voiced discourse, polyphonia, heteroglossia, and skaz can expose Dickens's depiction of the city, the narrative character Boz's reaction to it, and something of the narrative function, but in other areas it will be inadequate.
Bakhtin suggests that the individualistic features of utterances should be the focus of linguistic studies. At the center of Bakhtinian linguistics lies the concept that language is not a monolithic form, but plural in
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the sense that each discourse carries its own ideological markers that belong to the speaker. He seeks to undermine the notion that language delivers meaning as a constant attribute of its form, that a word or a combination of...