Dickens’s increasing preoccupation with kinds and degrees of illiteracy allows him to foreground the relationship between language seen and language heard. His professional Readings, starting in 1858, were taken almost exclusively from his earlier, more readily audible work, while typographic case and other specifically visual aspects of language, are increasingly important in the later novels both as topics and as features of the text which may find the transition from handwriting to print and from print into speech difficult. In Bleak House, Jo the crossing sweeper wants his message to the world written ‘large’ because he deduces from ‘the great letters on the whitewashed wall’ – represented for us as ‘GEORGE’S SHOOTING GALLERY, ETC’ – that the size of letters carries meaning and helps meaning carry Betty Higdon, who says she is ‘not much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print’ tells the illiterate Mrs Boffin that young Sloppy ‘is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices’. Dickens’s novels increasingly define themselves as designed primarily for readers rather than listeners, while social class is increasingly defined in terms of degrees literacy.

The expressive capital played an important part in the new direction which Dickens’s fiction took after Martin Chuzzlewit, and was itself used in new ways. It is central to the process in which, in Van Ghent’s words, ‘the qualities of things and people are reversed’. These processes of animation and de-animation, however, link not only people and things but also abstractions, which are now seen as participating in the constitution of reality rather than as simply obscuring it. The expressive capital now dramatises deep-rooted power relations and ontological insecurities: exemplified by the switch from ‘houselessness’ to ‘Houselessness’ and back to ‘houselessness’ in ‘Night Walks’, ‘the power of his [Mr Turveydrop’s] Deportment’ in Bleak House, the worship of ‘Shares’ in Our Mutual Friend, and (as Catherine Waters has pointed out) the patriarchal relationships in Little Dorrit (1855–57) where Amy Dorrit is ‘Child of the Marshalsea and child of the Father of the Marshalsea’. The rhetoric of Liberty and Freedom screened the reality of American society in Martin Chuzzlewit, but now abstraction, misapprehension and deception are more deeply rooted in primary social relationships, less easily seen simply as misleading advertising.

Dickens’s 1844 Preface to Martin Chuzzlewit illuminates his experience of working in the context of increasingly industrialised capitalist book production. His description of the ‘two words, THE END’, which he had previously ‘penned’, now ‘staring at me in capital letters from the printed page’ can be explained by is a combination of factors: the association of the end of the novel with ‘Death’ and other endings; the identification of ‘staring’ in the novels as something more easily done by corpses, dolls, houses and street advertising than by living people; and the transformation of a unique piece of handwriting, indexically linked to the body, into mechanically reproduced copies. The process of abstraction involved in the production of identical printed copies is compounded by the fact that these copies are commodities, products – as Marx saw it – of ‘abstract social labour’. The animation of the capitalised printed words echoes Marx’s idea of the ‘fetish-character of the commodity’ while Marx’s frequent allusions to Dickens suggest wider affinities between their attempts to expose the inner workings of a society they both saw as divided by ‘great gulfs’ and as often deeply obscure to those who lived in it.

The opening chapter of Dombey and Son – the novel that immediately followed Chuzzlewit – exemplifies the power and complexity of Dickens’s awareness of the issues which capital letters, and the word ‘capital’ itself with its many meanings, can raise. If the infant Paul Dombey is seen by his father as the ‘Son’ of the firm of Dombey and Son rather than as his son, while ‘in the capital of the House’s name’, the daughter is ‘merely a piece of base coin’, can Dickens allow Florence Dombey the dignity of a capital without turning the firm into Dombey and Daughter? Furthermore, while reading the opening chapters of the novel aloud to friends prompted Dickens to begin a second career giving Readings of his own work, the prompt-copy for The Story of Little Dombey shows him side-lining the expressive capitalisation so that this is no longer in the same way a story about capital or gender. The serial composition of Dombey and Son exposed complexities in the relationships between gender, economic capital and capital letters and in the relationship between print and speech.

What happened between Dickens and the typographic innovations of twentieth-century literary modernism and the Bauhaus printshop? An important link was Fawcett’s critique of ‘tall talk’ which was in part a defensive reaction to Dickens’s satire on activist women in Bleak House and All the Year Round. Fawcett’s fellow suffragist and Cambridge contemporary, Augusta Webster, shared her opposition to the alphabet of gender essentialism and extended the critique to other uses of the capital letter by dropping the automatic capital at the beginning of lines of verse in Portraits (1870) and suggesting that the first person pronoun could appear in poems as ‘i’ to distinguish it from the poet’s ‘substantive self’ (‘but the printers would never stand that’). Both women were alert to differences of textual condition: Webster to the interaction of writing, speaking and printing, Fawcett to the difference between language seen and language heard through reading aloud to her blind husband. The work of Fawcett and Webster anticipates in some respects the lower case aesthetics of some modernist and feminist poets and the identification, by the writer and printer Virginia Woolf, of the capitalised pronoun ‘I’ as overbearingly male, in A Room of One’s Own (1929).

William Hazlitt’s suggestion of a link between political and typographic ‘levelling’ is tested in a reading of William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798), and ‘The Frank Courtship’ (1812) by George Crabbe, who has been called ‘the lower-case poet’. In a period when the conventions of capitalisation were unstable, the meaning of, and responsibility for, the capitalisation in these poems is uncertain but does suggest links between typographic and social change, if not of the straightforward kind suggested by Hazlitt. Particularly important are words such as sister/Sister, friend/Friend, beggar/Beggar and king/King where the choice of upper or lower-case initial letter affects the extent to which individuals are seen as embodiments of their positions in the social and kinship order. It may have been principally the increased lower-casing of the names of social roles that Hazlitt had in mind when he said that, following the French revolution, ‘capital letters were no more allowed in print than letters patent of nobility were allowed in real life’. His punning on ‘decapitation’ and ‘decapitalisation’ may have been prompted by the expressive lower-casing in ‘The Frank Courtship’, a poem about latter-day Cromwellian regicides.

Alerted to the expressive possibilities of the unorthodox capital letter by Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1837), Dickens began to experiment with the dual alphabet in American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–44) following his America tour of 1840. Martin Tapley’s ‘this is the Land of Liberty is it? Very well. I’m agreeable. Any land will do for me after so much water’ uses a change of case to deflate the elevated language of American republican patriotism, which the novel identifies as the marketing language of a ruthlessly commercial slave-owning society. Dickens’s description of the Boston Institute for the Blind in American Notes is early evidence of an interest in the difference between language seen and language heard that was later to define his two careers as author and Reader and to feature as an important topic of his fiction. In the English sections of Martin Chuzzlewit, ‘Virtue’ and ‘Truth’ embody a different national form of hypocritical rhetoric, performing a screening function in the wordy moralising of Mr Pecksniff, a style named by Karl Marx as ‘Pecksniff-styl’ and identified by him as characteristic of all political and literary representatives of the English bourgeoisie with the exception of Carlyle and, implicitly, Dickens.