[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

In the first few lines of the first chapter of The Professor by Charlotte Brontë there is the following passage:

When I had declined my uncles' offers they asked me "What I intended to do?" I said I should reflect. They reminded me that I had no fortune, and no expectation of any, and, after a considerable pause, Lord Tynedale demanded sternly, "Whether I had thoughts of following my father's steps and engaging in trade?"

The words between the quotation marks are obviously not the actual words the speaker said; they are the meaning of what the speaker said. But the words are within quotations marks. I think that Charlotte Brontë used this 'technique' much more often than Elizabeth Gaskell or Harriet Martineau did. If I wanted to test this hypothesis by counting, what would I be counting? Is there a name for putting a speaker's meaning in quotations marks rather than the actual words the speaker would have said?

And why would a writer do it anyway? The words would convey exactly the same meaning if the quotation and question marks were left out.

I don't believe there is any particular name for the practice but it is still accepted punctuation. It is accepted when the words are not exact quotations, especially, but not necessarily, when the writer distances themselves from or disowns what is said (in which case the punctuation is commonly called a scare quote).

So referring to your quotation, while the single quotes clearly indicate that the quotes are not exact I think there may also be the intent to also recognise that the narrator disowns, at least to some extent, what is said as in both cases the narrator comments in the negative in the immediately following sentence; referring to them as scare quotes is probably then justified.

So there are at least two reasons why they were used.

Also, while it is not uncommon for people to think that there are strict rules for punctuation, the fact is that a considerable amount of flexibility due to personal preference is allowed as long as it does not become a free for all. My personal view is that great writers (although Brontë was not recognised as a great writer when she wrote "The Professor" - my use of quotes there just to annoy the purists who would demand italics today ) have considerably more freedom than the rest of us and their sometimes unconventional or uncommon usage can add a lot of interest to their prose, either to the pace of it or in the way what is written is interpreted. So this freedom may be another reason she punctuated as she did.

Perhaps Brontë wanted to make the interpretation clear in that the quotes were both not exact and also did not have her agreement. But perhaps she was not that sophisticated when she wrote the book (it being her first novel) or maybe one is just reading too much into it by thinking that was her intention.