The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth: Dialect 1 key example

Book 2: Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Gilded Age English:

Wharton employs period-specific American upper-class dialect throughout The House of Mirth. In doing so, she crafts authentic-sounding characters and gives readers a sense of time and place. For example, in this passage, Ned Silverton uses period-specific vernacular:

How any one could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera—any one with a grain of imagination—with the whole Mediterranean to choose from: but then, if one's estimate of a place depended on the way they broiled a spring chicken! Gad! what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach [...]