“‘Heaps’ of Words and the Language of Things in Dickens’s Fiction: A Corpus Stylistic Approach”

It is well known that Dickens’s novels teem with all varieties of waste and dusty items, useless and curious things, invariably collected or piled up, and many a time enumerated in long lists. In most cases they represent treasures or curses for their owners and/or for other characters, disclosing a hidden, disquieting, “other” dimension of some Victorian social practices that Dickens tries to unearth and expose. Moving from these assumptions, the paper investigates Dickens’s metaphorical use of “heaps” of various objects that frequently appear in his fiction through the adoption of a corpus stylistics approach. In particular, by making use of version 5.0 of the software WordSmith Tools, Dickens’s corpus of fiction is searched in order to identify the novels and passages that are more relevant to the analysis and lemmatize the words “heap/s”. Their collocations and colligators are subsequently discussed and relevant lemmas selected for further analysis. Literary inferences and deduction on Dickens’s imagery and “language of things” are finally drawn.