Dickens and language: one of the great love-matches of literary history, with a bottomless dowry to boot. It often seems as if the untapped reserves of the English vernacular were simply lying waiting for Dickens to inherit them - by marrying their riches to his story-teller’s instinct. No one ever wrote prose that way before. And at the same time few writers have ever sprung their manner from such outright imitation. The style of Dickens’s novelistic career begins in pure derivation, a sustained send-up not only of the Johnsonian high style of journalistic and parliamentary claptrap in the eighteenth-century Age of Rhetoric but of Sir Walter Scott’s editorial aliases and their prefatory paraphernalia - and then finds its true quasi-oratorical tone amid the cleared debris of tradition. Here is the launching sentence of his debut novel: