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| The New Year, the New Year. Everywhere the New Year! |
- Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
- Man never Is, but always To be blest:
- The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
- Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
- –Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733
Happy New Year 2013!
Tone is an author's attitude toward his subject and audience revealed through
"diction, point of view, syntax, and level of formality." (Richard Nordquist)
What is Dickens's tone in the excerpt below?
From The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang the New Year In and the Old Year Out by Charles Dickens:
"The streets were full of motion, and the shops were decked out gaily. The New Year, like an Infant Heir to the whole world, was waited for, with welcomes, presents, and rejoicings. There were books and toys for the New Year, glittering trinkets for the New Year, dresses for the New Year, schemes of fortune for the New Year; new inventions to beguile it. Its life was parcelled out in almanacks and pocketbooks ; the coming of its moons, and stars, and tides, was known beforehand to the moment...
"The New Year, the New Year. Everywhere the New Year! The Old Year was already looked upon as dead; and its effects were selling cheap like some drowned mariner’s aboard ship. Its patterns were Last Year’s and going at a sacrifice, before its breath was gone. Its treasures were mere dirt, beside the riches of its unborn successor..."
