Dialect In Oliver Twist

Previously dialects were used in literature fulfilling specific purposes like comedy or laughter only exploited by low characters:

For the most part, the conspicuous vulgarity of dialect-even its funny look on the printed page-disqualified it as a serious language for the representation of personality in the nineteenth-century English novel. (Sabin 1987:16) During the Victorian age, writers have become more and more aware about non- standard language and different varieties of speech in a standard text; there was a heavy use of dialect in standard novels. Novelists differ in their use of dialect fulfilling different purposes that is to fit with the different sociolinguistic factors such as age, gender, style, social context; or following the movement of realism depicting regional,

“The frightening experience of being dropped out of the educated middle class would partly account for Dicken’s remarkable sensitivity to siciolinguistic variation in speech” Poussa (1999:28) Dickens’s realism aims at portraying low class people and depicting the sorrowful life of the poor in a harsh Victorian society. Similar to her fellow novelists, Marian Evans known by her pen name as George Eliot uses as well, a variety of dialects in her novels mainly midland dialect where she succeeds to depict detailed portraits of rural life and folk people and to represent authentically speech of her rustic characters. Dr Leavis explains Eliot’s love to the countryside and nature for:

Hating the conditions of life in London, she remembered her childhood not only for its green fields and her mother’s dairy but for the aesthetic aspects of nature as well as shaped the lives of a people whose human achievement in creating a community she deeply respected (in Eliot,