What the Dickens? Dickens
was also a great wordsmith
by
Howard
Richler
This year marks the
bicentenary of one of the all-time literary greats —
Charles Dickens. No other author has provided us with so many
memorable characters who are recognizable to so many people. Here is
a brief sampling of these personages: Artful Dodger, David
Copperfield, Fagin, Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Pip, Scrooge, Tiny Tim
and Uriah Heep. And aside from Shakespeare, no other writer has
endowed us with so many works that are considered classics. For
example, on the “Greatest Literature of All Time” site, these
eight works by Dickens are listed: Bleak
House, A Christmas
Carol. David Copperfield, Great Expectations,
Hard Times, Little
Dorritt, Oliver Twist, and A
Tale of Two Cities.
Therefore expect be be
inundated this year with books that mark the 200 year anniversary of
the birth of this remarkable man. Since the age of 15, Dickens life
was characterized by constant activity and metamorphoses. At
different times he worked as a legal clerk, a courtroom and
parliamentary shorthand reporter, a journalist, an actor a magazine
editor and manager of theatrical productions.
Dickens wrote in a
didactic style that revealed the squalid nature of Victorian society
characterized by its widespread poverty and lack of justice for those
on the bottom rungs of the pecking order. Many of his most memorable
characters are portrayed negatively and serve as examples of the
hypocrisies of the British class system and the cruel practices of
capitalism in 19th
century Britain.
Dickens, however, was
hardly a saint. He saddled his wife Catherine with ten children and
after 22 years of marriage decided that she wasn't worthy of him,
and then coerced her into a separation while constantly mocking her
to his friends. Dickens is also on record of making many statements
that, regardless of the different sensibilities prevalent in 19th
century England, strike us as abjectly racist. Dickens met Russian
novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862 and in a letter Dostoevsky penned
years later he related that Dickens had told him “that all the
good, simple people in his novels.. are what he wanted to have been,
and his villains were what he was.. his cruelty.. hs shrinking from
those whom he ought to love.. There were two people in him, one who
feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.”
While Dickens place in the
pantheon of literature is widely recognized it is not as well known
the contributions he made to the English language. The OED
sports almost 10,000 quotations from him and
among authors he is the sixth most cited individual. He is credited
with being the first person to use 258 words and phrases that
include “aglitter,” “bachelor apartment,” “boredom,”
“bowie knife,” “butter-fingers,” “cloak and dagger,”
“coffee shop,” “corkscrew” (verb sense), “devil-may-care,”
“dustbin,” “facts and figures,” “flummox,” “gonoph”
(to mean pickpocket, from the Hebrew word for thief), “ never say
die,” “pay off,” “preggers,” “prima ballerina,” “put
the kibosh on,” “sawbones” and “sit-down” ( noun sense).
Even more extensive are the lists of words where he is the first
person to use it in a particular context. Here we have “arabesque”
(to mean “fantastic”), “balance ( to steady the body under
the influence of opposing forces), “balloon” (cartoon sense),
“bedevilment” (maddening trouble), “card” (to mean “original
character”), “circuit (to mean “route of performers”), (the)
“creeps,” “escape (mental or emotional distraction), “gay
dog” (man given to self-indulgence), “humane” (to cause minimal
pain), “job” (to mean “responsibilty”) , “nasty” (to mean
“serious”), “peck” (to mean “kiss”), “revolver” (gun
sense), “stunning” (to mean “splendid”), “to whom it may
concern,” and “up” (a rise in prosperity).
Dickens, however, is not
responsible for the expression “What the Dickens”? The first
citation of the word is in 1599 in Thomas Heywood's King
Edward IV-Part I and Shakespeare used the
term in 1616 in Merry Wives of Windsor.
Dickens, here serves as a euphemistic word for “the devil.” The
word, “Dickensian,” however, to refer to Dickens style or the
conditions that the author describes first surfaced in our language
in 1881 only eleven years after his death.
Howard 's book From Gay (happy) to Gay (homosexual) & other mysterious semantic shifts is being published in Spring 2013 by Ronsdale Press.
