Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel

There is no denying that there are insoluble technical problems in using any kind of non-standard orthography in a novel; literary dialect can, at best, provide only a rough approximation of the sounds of actual speech to the reader, and efforts to capture a precise idea of the sound through extensive use of non-standard spellings may frustrate, rather than inform, readers. Consider the following typical instance of Joseph's speech: "This is t'way on't - up at sun-dahn; dice, brandy, cloised shutters, und can'le lught till next day, at nooin - then, t'fooil gangs banning un raving tuh his cham'er, makking dacent fowks dig thur fingers i' thur lugs fur varry shaume; un' th' knave, wah, he carn cahnt his brass, un' ate, un' sleep, un' off tub his neighbour's tuh gossip wi' t' wife" (143). The language in this sentence includes an abundance of non-standard spellings, many of which can be recognized as alternate spellings for common words, "t'way" for "the way," "can'le lught" for "candle light," "dacent" for "decent." But unless the reader already knows how Yorkshire speech sounds, the sounds of this speech remain mystifying. What, for example, is the meaning of the double k in "makking"? Does it suggest emphasis? a stutter? a sound different from the ordinary k sound or a shortened a? Is "nooin" pronounced with one or two syllables? What is meant by the respelling of folks as "fowks"? Is this an instance of what is called "eye dialect" - since to my knowledge the word is never pronounced with a noticeable l, and so the respelling may suggest the standard pronunciation - or is the w particularly emphasized in this instance? While these and many other ambiguous uses of the letters of standard English to indicate Yorkshire speech may be perfectly clear to the Yorkshire reader, they thwart the outside reader who wishes to discover the key to the phonetics of this transcription. Indeed, all dialect writing will tend to leave readers with only the most approximate sense of what the speech is supposed to sound like - in large part because it is impossible to know exactly what sounds the author means the standard written orthography to represent.

While for dialect scholars and other socio-linguists, Joseph's complex dialect provides a problematic but rich source of information about the actual Haworth dialect in the 1840s, from a ficto-linguistic perspective what matters most is not the specific features of the actual speech, but that Joseph's dialect is strikingly consistent throughout the novel, and strikingly different from that of the other characters. Whether quoted directly by a narrator or quoted at several removes, and whether written down by Lockwood in his narrative or Catherine in her marginalia or Isabella in her letter, Joseph's dialect is consistently rendered. This fixing of Joseph's speech into a persistent, and, it is important to note, persistently difficult, style takes place alongside Bronte's widespread minimization of language difference (on such minimization see Sternberg and Hough) in the speech of the other characters, including Ellen Dean, whose language is almost entirely standard, though her position is similar in many respects to Joseph's (she is also a servant, born and raised in the area).