inner mind.

Those critics who find what they call vulgarisms think they may safely go
on to accuse Dickens of bad grammar. The truth is that his grammar is
not only good but strong; it is far better in construction than
Thackeray's, the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds and is slack.
Lately, during the recent centenary time, a writer averred that Dickens
"might not always be parsed," but that we loved him for his, etc., etc.
Dickens's page is to be parsed as strictly as any man's. It is, apart
from the matter of grammar, a wonderful thing that he, with his little
education, should have so excellent a diction. In a letter that records
his reluctance to work during a holiday, the word "wave" seems to me
perfect: "Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk." In his
exquisite use of the word "establishment" in the following phrase, we
find his own perfect sense of the use of words in his own day; but in the
second quotation given there is a most beautiful sign of education.
"Under the weight of my wicked secret" (the little boy Pip had succoured
his convict with his brother-in-law's provisions) "I pondered whether the
Church would be powerful enough to shield me . . if I divulged to that
establishment." And this is the phrase that may remind us of the
eighteenth-century writers of prose, and among those writers of none so
readily as of Bolingbroke: it occurs in that passage of Esther's life in
which, having lost her beauty, she resolves to forego a love unavowed.
"There was nothing to be undone; no chain for him to drag or for me to
break."

If Dickens had had the education which he had not, his English could not
have been better; but if he had had the _usage du monde_ which as a
young man he had not, there would have been a difference. He would not,
for instance, have given us the preposterous scenes in _Nicholas_