Literary Lancashire/Warwickshire Dialect in Hard Times and Silas Marner:A Challenging Issue

Dialect use in literature is inherently critical since it is the variety of spoken language which is required along side with the standard. Dickens has been recently called a sociolinguist for which he was genius in including different dialects in his novels noticeably Lancashire in Hard Times. Eliot claimed many times that she resisted many of the challenges to introduce dialects of the midlands in her novels, especially the Warwickshire dialect in Silas Marner;fearing harsh criticism, yet, enjoying her initiative. This paper targets at the idea of inserting dialect in the novel and highlights the challenging issues at such use especially because the novelist is put in a dilemma to situate the characters' attitude, education and society in addition to the characters' speech which should, to some extent, sound real. The problem is worse when you think of the reader's reaction towards such speech unknown to him, let alone a non native reader; for all that the dialect in standard literature has, sometimes, major drawbacks.