ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with adverbial comments of every kind - comments that show how, or in what circumstances, something is said. It considers descriptions of movement, posture or gesture under the adverbial comments. A precisely recorded gesture can produce an effect similar to that of adjusting a pair of binoculars to make the general outlines of a distant view sharpen into detailed definition. The novelist's power of visualisation stimulates a corresponding imaginative energy in the reader. A character may reveal by some action or movement an emotion he is unwilling to express, or is perhaps unaware of feeling. Many of our small habitual movements seem random or inscrutable. Dickens records gesture with a stylistic vividness that seems a spontaneous reflex of his acuteness of observation. A total lack of response to gesture on a novelist's part could be seen as a deficiency akin to colour blindness or tone deafness.
