routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Hardy and James
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Although Hardy was among the first English novelists who
understood the social and personal significance of dialects in relation
to Standard English, he remained for the most part constrained by the
Victorian convention that main characters in a novel, especially those
characters who are meant to engage the sympathy of the reader, should
consistently speak Standard English. Paradoxically, therefore, major
characters such as Tess and Jude (the Obscure) only rarely speak in
local dialects, in spite of their social positions. What is important,
however, is that Hardy represents his characters as speaking in a way
which would be normal both for other characters and readers. He
wanted to capture the spirit of independence in his characters but
could not risk underlining this by an over-reliance on dialect speech.
In many respects, however, Hardy paved the way for twentiethcentury
novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, who made working-class
characters central to his fiction and who in turn made more extensive
use of dialect in their language and as a central element in the
representation of values in ways suggested by the nineteenth-century
poet and writer William Barnes:
[Dialect] will not, however, be every-where immediately given up as the
language of the land-folk’s fire-side, though to outsiders they may speak
pretty good English, since ‘fine-talking’ (as it is called) on the lips of a
home-born villager, is generally laughed at by his neighbours as a piece
of affectation.
Many of the novelists of the end of the Victorian age can be considered
outsiders for one reason or another. Hardy was from the West Country,
Gissing from the industrial North. Wilde was an outsider twice over, as an
Irishman and a homosexual. This preponderance of outsiders becomes
even more noticeable between the 1890s and 1914: Henry James was
born in America, Joseph Conrad in the Ukraine (to a Polish family),
Rudyard Kipling in India where much of his work is set, and George
Bernard Shaw was another Irishman. As we move into the twentieth
century, literature’s horizons and influences expand in a broader vision.
E.M. Forster, although of the southern English middle class, was
homosexual, and his work reflects an outsider’s concern with Englishness.
D.H. Lawrence was from the working class, and spent much of his life in
exile from England. T.S. Eliot was born in America; James Joyce was