Abstract
Charles Dickens, the author of novels, novellas, stories and essays, was highly concerned with the social issues of 19thcentury Victorian period. His writing style is marked with linguistic and artistic creativity, which provided him a label: Dickensian style. The striking common traits of Dickens’s works are repetitions and parallelism in lexical level; deviations and variations in narration; a combination of imagination with reality; fragmentations united within the flow of the action; detailed depiction of setting and characters; the repeated concrete nouns to subordinate abstract meaning; variation in characterization and experimentation with varied themes related to the deficiencies of his time. Many of these common traits of ‘Dickensian’ style are vividly observed in the five short Christmas stories in Christmas Books. Stylistic and linguistic variants of the stories lead to conclude that Dickens preferred certain stylistic markers and linguistic codes for his artistic goal: to attract the readers’ attention for social issues of Industrial Age of Victorian period via the use of certain lexis and syntactical patterns. The combination of his world-view and his artistic literary style manifest Dickens’s style, which can vividly be observed by his readers in Christmas Books. The scope of this analysis contains the application of a linguistic study for a literary purpose and the study involves the analysis of lexical categories determined by G. Leech and M. Short in Style in Fiction (1981).
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