Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel

Richard said he was ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether he might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he had thought of that, and perhaps he was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked him what he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of that, too, and it wasn't a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised him to try and decide within himself, whether his old preference for the sea was an ordinary boyish inclination, or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well he really had tried too often, and he couldn't make out. (155)

As in Richard's answer, indirect speech can be more or less precise in its tracing of the actual words spoken. By following the format of dialogue and narrating each speaker in turn, Esther's narration of this exchange signals that it is a close account of what was actually said between Mr. Jarndyce and Richard. The language is colloquial and detailed enough (down to the italicized "had" indicating stress) to suggest that what is being presented is not only the content but, to some extent, the exact words of a dialogue of which this is (according to the fictional mimesis) the report. The responses from Richard, particularly, suggest that his own words "Perhaps I am," "It isn't a bad idea," and "I really have tried too often, and I can't make it out" are being narrated.

Indirect speech not only provides a means by which the characters' language can break across the convention of the quotation marks that ordinarily divide it from the narrator's language, but it also proves particularly noticeable when the language of the character and that of the narrator differ significantly, as is often the case where dialect is involved. But the use of indirect speech can weaken the divisions of language that the use of standard and dialect invokes. The following passage demonstrates this weakening of boundaries in the narration of Jo's speech in indirect style:

Jo suddenly comes out of his resignation, and excitedly declares, addressing the woman, that he never known about the young lady, that he never heern about it, that he never went fur to hurt her, that he would sooner have hurt his own self, that he'd sooner have had his unfornet ed chopped off than ever gone a-nigh her, and that she wos wery good to him, she wos. (589)

Jo's speech is easily distinguished from that of the third-person narrator (a style that is difficult to define precisely, but is always spelled with standard orthography), and yet, in the indirect speech of this passage, the dialect mingles with the standard in a way that is only possible in written narrative, and in a way that creates in the language a visible rendering of the very concept of connection, engagement, and unlikely interaction that occupy so much of Bleak House. While dialect in Wuthering Heights is singular and the standard language is almost always the language of narration, in Bleak House dialect is just one of many styles of speech, and, because of the use of the indirect style, it appears not only within the confines of quotation marks, but also in the narration.