Everyday words and the character of prose in nineteenth century Britain Everyday Words is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen Dickens Trollope Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as a decided turn as if and that sort of thing condense nineteenth century manners tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent everyday words as signatures of character. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects natural phenomena and inanimate abstract things like physical laws the economy and legal practice. Ultimately this book revises what character meant to nineteenth century Britons by respecting the overlapping transdisciplinary connotations of the category Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Epigraphs; 1. Darwins view from Todgerss: A decided turn for character and common words; 2. Inductive attentions: Jane Austen in particular and in general; 3. Our skeptical as if: conditional analogy and the comportment of Victorian prose; 4. Something in the way realism moves: Middlemarch and oblique character references; 5. Whoever explains a but: tact and friction in Trollopes reparative fiction; Afterword; Notes; Bibliography; Index