Dickens’s Signs: Language, Authority, and Communication Problems

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a particular aspect of language in Dickens that has not been studied: the authority over the signs as shaping interpersonal, ethical, and social relations. Who masters linguistic signs? What does it mean for a Dickensian character to aspire to control language? Surprisingly, the work of one of the greatest geniuses of the English language betrays a distrust of those who presume to master the signs. A question that preoccupies Dickens throughout his career is whether the purpose of communication systems is, indeed, to communicate, commune, and form a community or, instead, to assert one’s exclusivity and privilege. This article compares two characters who serve as contrasted analogues: Doctor Strong in David Copperfield, the compiler of an unfinished dictionary, and Doctor Marigold, the protagonist of Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, who adopts a deaf child and invents a private sign language. The article explores Dickens’s changing conceptualization of communication, agency, and disability in the context of Victorian debates over these issues. His growing support of signing over lipreading indicates his developing view of disability and linguistic marginalization as an arena of acquired ability that the privileged agents of language are unable to possess.