Dickens had many voices at his command (for instance, the satirical and the gravely poetic), but no reliable everyday urbanity such as Fielding had. If we like we can put this down to his social origins. The style of a gentleman was something he had to construct for himself, it did not come naturally as breathing as it did to Thackeray (to Thackeray's cost). The style of Dickens's narrators is a wavering style: it may tend to elegant irony but is just as likely to run to sarcasm or effusive sentiment. When a graver, plainer voice makes itself heard, as with Pip, it is in a novel which subjects conventional notions of the gentlemanly, in speech as well as action, to rigorous scrutiny. But perhaps Great Expectations gives us only half of the story and we should renounce at the outset any attempt to confine Dickens to just one voice? How do we choose one as standard above the others? Why choose between the voice of David Copperfield and that of the narrator of Bleak House? To speak of standards or linguistic norms suggests an oddly repressive approach to his art, to his comedy in particular. I realize that this runs against the widely held view that Dickens's comic characters speak in marginalized languages which we are asked to measure against some more standard English speaker.2 (The comic orthography allows us to patronize such speech.) I would find this easier to do if I could be at all confident as to where this standard speech was to be found. We have to remember that Dickens began to write long before the I870 Education Act (which gave such pain to Hardy when he had to invent a speech for Tess). Coming just after the Regency, before later Victorian reforms, Dickens seized the opportunity to show speech as a matter of creative choice by ordinary speakers. He could feel free from the pressures of a 'norm' which was to be increasingly determined by such things as class. There is also a good deal of more conventional writing in the novels, especially in such early characters as Nicholas Nickleby, but to notice it is not to invest mere