“And you know what wittles is?” (11).
Wittles is the vernacular pronunciation the convict uses to say ‘vittles’, which refers to food. Dickens gives the convict vernacular speech to show his level of education. Someone with a proper education would not pronounce the letter ‘v’ in the word ‘vittles’ as a ‘w’. Vernacular dialogue such as this appears throughout Great Expectations when Pip interacts with people who do not have a high level of education.
Works Cited: "vittles." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2008. Merriam-Webster Online. 15 December 2008.
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The literary term best applied here would be dialect -- vernacular is usually the term used to define a certain set of words used by a particular group of people in a particular context. (For example, teachers would call the warm up activities of a class an 'anticipatory set.' Or group kids of mixed abilities as 'heterogenous')
ReplyDeleteOne could say Dickens writes dialectic prose.