I need not shield Drinkwater, because he will never read my book.
So I have taken the liberty of making a special example of him, as
far as that can be done without a phonetic alphabet, for the
benefit of the mass of readers outside London who still form their
notions of cockney dialect on Sam Weller. When I came to London in
1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I
should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not
discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it
from an Essex one. Some time in the eighties the late Andrew Tuer
called attention in the Pall Mall Gazette to several peculiarities
of modern cockney, and to the obsolescence of the Dickens dialect
that was still being copied from book to book by authors who never
dreamt of using their ears, much less of training them to listen.
Then came Mr. Anstey's cockney dialogues in Punch, a great
advance, and Mr. Chevalier's coster songs and patter. The Tompkins
verses contributed by Mr. Barry Pain to the London Daily Chronicle
have also done something to bring the literary convention for
cockney English up to date. But Tompkins sometimes perpetrates
horrible solecisms. He will pronounce face as fits, accurately
enough; but he will rhyme it quite impossibly to nice, which
Tompkins would pronounce as newts: for example Mawl Enn Rowd for
Mile End Road. This aw for i, which I have made Drinkwater use, is
the latest stage of the old diphthongal oi, which Mr.
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