ABSTRACT
Dialect authenticates the speech of Rudyard Kipling’s characters, as it does that of Thomas Hardy’s; more significantly, it identifies a narrative voice. This chapter describes two contrasting exponents: Kipling, who integrated his own ‘discovery’ of England into the regenerationist programme; and Ford Madox Hueffer, who, like Henry Ryecroft, wanted an England without programmes, an England against programmes. But Hueffer tried to get out of English society, as well as in; and his foreignness was no less bogus than his Englishness. The political synecdoche which, at the turn of the century, substituted England for Britain and Englishness for Britishness has recently been the subject of considerable debate. William Barnes thought that English derived its vitality from its Teutonic origins, and that the introduction of Latin or French words had only served to weaken it. As Robert Green has pointed out, the hero’s impeccable Englishness represents a despairing protest against the inhumanity of the new political doctrines.
