Voices of the Past in Dickens and Others

Abstract

What matters most in a writer is the new, personal voice he brings to his art, representing a new way of seeing and feeling the world. But he hears, and uses, and blends in, other voices: voices of contemporaries he admires, voices of the past that have excited him and pervaded his blood. The nineteenth-century writers often did instinctively what Eliot later prescribed in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent.' This essay will consider how Dickens, that most distinctive and unmistakable personality, calls in two or three traditional voices, including a very familiar voice; will contrast the orchestration of the same voice in the work of his nineteenth-century rivals; and will briefly enquire whether the voices of the mid-nineteenth century can be heard in the writers of the twentieth century.