Sally Ledger had begun to think about the history of affect and of sentimentality in particular. The present chapter, which is an exploration of the emotions and language, crosses some of her concerns. The final section springs from her work on Charles Dickens. I think she would have agreed that the turn to the emotions and passions as an important category in literary study is a fascinating development in our discipline. Certainly, the emotions have come to be seen as one of the "goods' of literature. They are no longer bracketed off, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's familiar dictum, "what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence", no longer holds.¹ Yet what is this "good", and how do we define it?