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Chesnutt uses nonstandard spelling and punctuation to capture dialects and speech styles that would have been in use at the time of the story’s setting: Kentucky in the early 1850s. “The Passing of Grandison” is an early example, in this respect, of the so-called “local color” stories whose popularity peaked later in the 1800s. Local color writing attempts to capture and convey the way people in a certain part of the nation—whether the antebellum South, the western frontier, the forests of Maine, or another area—spoke, dressed, and behaved. The use of nonstandard spelling to reproduce the specific sounds of a dialect is a key part of local color writing.
Chesnutt’s most striking use of dialect appears in Grandison’s speech. Chesnutt tries to capture its sound and meaning through phonetic spelling. As an example, consider the sentence: “Let ’s go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick” (“Let’s go back over the river, Master Dick”). In terms of complexity of syntax (sentence structure), Grandison’s language has the same sophistication and logic as that of other characters. However, the nonstandard spelling captures the particularities of his pronunciation.
The evident difference of Grandison’s speech stands in sharp contrast to the dialect of the white Southerners, who speak a language that marks them as wealthy and educated. The colonel, for example, demonstrates his class status through his wide-ranging vocabulary. Consider, in particular, the various adjectives he uses to describe abolitionists: “rascally,” “fanatics,” “infernal,” and “cussed,” among other colorful descriptors.
