How Charles Dickens expanded the English language
Among the 9,218 quotations from {Dickens’}works in the OED, 265 words and compounds are cited as having been first used by him in print and another 1,586 as having been used in a new sense.
from The Words of Dickens
Something old/Something new/Something borrowed
Charles Dickens wrote for a mass readership using words that were always in service to the stories they told. At the same time he greatly expanded the vocabulary in common circulation. Shakespeare is the only writer to have ‘invented’ more words.
Often this involved popularising words which were obscure or had fallen into disuse. Dustbin for example, was in existence before Dombey and Son, while boredom precedes long precedes Bleak House. But neither might have survived without Dickens bringing theme to public attention.
Dickens did introduce the reading public to vocabulary they were unfamiliar with. Often this was popular slang from the streets where gentlemen and women rarely ventured. In first novel The Pickwick Papers (1837) Mr Weller himself draws attention to this social divide
What! Don’t you know what a sawbones is, sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller. ‘I thought everybody know’d as a sawbones was a surgeon.’
Other not-quite-neologisms include butter-fingers (“a clumsy person”), flummox (“bewilder”). In modern British English they are what might be termed polite slang terms (‘I was flummoxed by that question in the exam’).
Another specialism is creating variations on existing words. Dickens is particularly creative in converting adjectives to nouns: messy to messiness and creepy to the creeps. These in turn create new idioms. Why do we say that some people/things give us the creeps?
She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps’.
— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837
The Dickens Variations
Dickens is also brilliant at expanding the use and application of words. The original narrow definition of rampage referred to ‘the violent leaping movement of a “wild beast’). This becomes an idiom linked to the human emotion of rage (on the rampage).
When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister ‘went on the Rampage,’ in a more alarming degree than at any previous period.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860
Interestingly, Dickens was less successful when he invented or improvised entirely new words. Most of these purely manufactured neologisms — like comfoozled — have not survived. Those with an onomatopoeic dimension (whiz-bang in The Pickwick Papers) have fared better.
New idioms
Mastery of idiomatic English is where Dickens displays his genius. Two examples of modern idioms originating from the interminable legal machinations in Bleak House:
not to put too fine a point on it Mr Snagsby
you have got that person’s number Mr Bucket
Another Dickensian specialism is adapting the terminology associated with the new technology of his age to describe human activities. There are numerous references to writing as ‘getting up steam’ and in The Pickwick Papers we have ‘whiz bang’ to vividly express being ‘fired with an idea’
“‘I was…fired with an idea — rushed into wine shop — wrote it down — back again — whiz, bang — another idea — wine shop again — pen and ink…”
— Charles Dickens The Pickwick Papers, 1836
Eponyms
“I am well aware that I am the ‘umblest person going,” said Uriah Heep, modestly. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
No novelist has been more inventive in using character names to express character traits. Ernest L. Abel identifies seventeen examples that have entered general English. These ten are perhaps the best known:
- Scrooge — miserliness, anti-Christmas, bah humbug etc. more here
- Mr Micawber — spendthrift, ludicrously optimistic ‘something will turn up’
- Fagin — charming, ruthless, leader of a gang of child thieves.
- Miss Havisham — embittered reclusive spinster
- Uriah Heep — obsequious, toadying, false humility. More recently humble brag
- Podsnap — complacent jingoist who “stood very high in his own opinion”
- Pecksniff — hypocritical
- Pickwick — amiable bon viveur, ‘Pickwick paunch’
- Gradgrind — hard, ruthless businessman who reduces everything to monetary value.
Some of these names maintain a stronger cultural resonance than the works that produced them. In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) the central character is condemned to reading the entire Dickensian oeuvre in perpetuity.
We will not have any Dickens today… but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read Little Dorrit again.
Today Mr Todd would struggle find a captive with even a cursory knowledge of his favourite author. Only A Christmas Carol is widely studied in UK schools and while titles like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations still resonate they are more watched than read.
The linguistic influence of Dickens lives does live on in unexpected ways. Uriah Heep may be better known as an ancient prog rock band — but to ‘humble brag’ is a term familiar to the young and hip, strutting their stuff on social media.
