Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge.