"So here's a question for you. How old did you say you were?" Alice made a short calculation and said, "Seven years and six months." "Wrong!" Humpty Dumpty exclaimed triumphantly. "You never said a word like it!" "I thought you meant 'How old are you?'" Alice explained. "If I'd meant that, I'd have said it," said Humpty Dumpty (Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking-Glass).
"What is he prepared to swear?" "Well, Mas'r Jaggers," said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this time; "in a general way, anythink." Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. "Now, I warned you before," said he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, "that if ever you presumed to talk in that way here, I'd make an example of you. You infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?" The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious what he had done.... "Now I ask you, you blundering booby," said my guardian very sternly, "once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is prepared to swear?" Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson from his face, and slowly replied, "Ayther to character, or to having been in his company and never left him all the night in question." "Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?" Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before beginning to reply in a nervous manner, "we've dressed him up like-" when my guardian blustered out: "What? you WILL, will you?"... After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again: "He is dressed like a 'spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook." "Is he here?" asked my guardian. "I left him," said Mike, "a-setting on some doorsteps round the corner." (Carles Dickens, Great Expectations, pp.155-156)
The games begin immediately for Alice when she encounters Humpty Dumpty during her Looking-Glass wanderings, as they do for Mike as soon as he enters Jaggers's infamous law office. What exactly are these so-called games that both Dickens and Carroll invent? They are the games that can be played with the ambiguities of language.
Humpty Dumpty greatly frustrates Alice by toying with the double meaning of the question "how old did you say you were?", presenting Alice with a question she had not thought she had been asked. A similar circumstance occurs just before Alice first meets Humpty Dumpty. In this situation, it is Alice who uses the ambiguous nature of language to her advantage. "And how exactly like an egg he is!" she said aloud... "It's very provoking," Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence..."to be called an egg-very!" "I said you looked like an egg, Sir" (Through the Looking-Glass, p.159). Dickens also demonstrates the ambiguity in the English language. Jaggers's very success as a lawyer depends upon it. Double meanings and unclear interpretations allow him to be just vague enough to gather information from his witnesses and clients, such as Mike, without obtaining knowledge that would incriminate himself. Jaggers is not the only character in Great Expectations who experiences the dual nature of English as a language. When Pip is a young boy, his literal interpretation (based on experience) of the expression "to be brought up by hand" is amusing and also poignant. In using ambiguous language, authors such as Carroll and Dickens present a broad spectrum of emotions to their readers. It is a device that can serve to frustrate, humor or instill empathy.
"The decade of the 1860s was also the signal decade of the new philology in England. Philological discussion connected, in the popular mind, with a sense of breakthrough in many other historical and comparative disciplines" (Dennis Taylor. Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. p.97). This quest to establish the authentic meaning of written texts and documents perhaps sheds some light on why Carroll and Dickens were so fond of playing with language. Whether they were doing so in order to prove a point about the difficulties surrounding that quest, or if it was simply just a device that they both thought effective is a difficult question to answer.
