“Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks.” (Great Expectations)
“So I made up my mind to get my trouble off my mind, and to earn by the sweat of my brow what was held out to me.” (Our Mutual Friend)
“Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the tips of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left fingers, and quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly looking at his client, replies, ‘good deal is doing, sir. We have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is going round.’” (Bleak House)
Charles Dickens was unique among the literary giants of his generation in his use of vernacular language from the streets of Victorian London, particularly his use of body idioms like “skin and bone,” “hold your tongue” and “word of mouth.”
Relying on digital technology that allows a complete scan of an author’s works, Peter J. Capuano has calculated all the body idioms in Dickens’ ouevre, as well those found in novels by ten other Victorian authors, from Hardy and Elliott to Thackery and Trollope, and found that no one used more of them more frequently than Dickens. Barnaby Rudge for instance, has 28.83 body idioms per 100,000 words and the The Old Curiosity Shop has 27.29. The next closest was Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles with 20.41.
Dickens also coined more unique body idioms in his novels than any other author, with 45 in Bleak House and 41 in both Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son.
“Although critics generally agree that Dickens shaped many of his era’s most memorable characters by way of their fantastically embodied descriptions, and although there is no shortage of scholarship dedicated to the analysis of uniquely Dickensian ‘styles’ of writing, the extent to which his imaginative craft is connected to constellations of body-derived idiomatic locutions has so far entirely eluded scholarly attention.”
With a head for detail and an ear for skin and bone idioms, the author single-handedly corrects that oversight.