On Style: An Introduction

In his 1885 essay on style, Robert Louis Stevenson declared that the ‘most perfect’ style is one that ‘attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour.’ Stevenson shares a confidence common in the lateVictorian period that a single perfected style was conceivable. What is insightful and surprising about the remark is that Stevenson commends the attainment of ‘implication’ rather than something nearer to the centre of meaning, like ‘expression’. Style, he recognises, names a quality of language that communicates more than it directly states. Those qualities of expression that are lost to paraphrase, the subtlety and suggestion of fictional prose, are the results of style. Stevenson’s essay was written at a time when a theoretical interest in an ideal prose style flourished under the influence of aestheticism, fed by movements in France; but, as the chapters in this book indicate, Victorian fiction had in practice anticipated the late-century theory in revealing that style – not always finessed or refined, but multifaceted, variable and potentially irregular – denominated a quality of the writing that delivered a greater depth of meaning and feeling than a paraphrase of it would convey. The immediate self-qualification in Stevenson’s assertion (‘unobtrusively; or if obtrusively . . . ’) alerts us to the propensity of style to resist categorisation. Any attempt to catalogue the styles manifest throughout the Victorian period is doomed to approximation, just as any attempt to isolate a single style as superior will soon seem partial. Style may be elevated, excessive, proportionate, plain, performative, and showy or muted in its verbal effects. It may be ‘elegant and pregnant’, but it can equally be rough or spare. Just as there are different styles, there are different ideas of style, and these varied throughout the nineteenth century and since. Style may be considered decorative and ornamental, a mere adornment of expression; style may refer to a characteristic manner; or it may be verbal expression itself. Thomas De Quincey takes this last view, in