Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on Boxin’ Day.

The line is a comic, character-revealing dismissal of elevated language. By calling poetry “unnat’ral,” the speaker treats verse as something artificial—remote from ordinary speech and practical life. The punchline (“no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on Boxin’ Day”) sharpens the satire: only a minor parish official, on a ceremonial holiday when formal speeches are expected, would adopt such inflated diction. Dickens often uses this kind of demotic, phonetic spelling to signal class, temperament, and skepticism toward pretension. The remark also hints at a broader Dickensian preference for sincerity and humane feeling over showy rhetoric: poetry is not condemned as an art, but as a mode of speech when it becomes performative and socially postured.