ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, however, there has been no Cockney “ dialect literature” . The student of county dialects may base his discussion of nineteenth-and perhaps eighteenthcentury pronunciation upon poems and sketches written in elaborate phonetic spelling. The writers were proud of their dialects and eager to display them in all their broadness. The Cockney dialogue in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels was conventional. The novelist was content to represent a yokel’s dialect by a few
odd spellings like •wool (will) or Zunday, no matter where he was supposed to come from, and he thought it sufficient to represent a Cockney by misplacing a few t is or by interchanging w and v, consistently or inconsistently. This convention also served to represent general vulgarism. Dickens, for example, uses this “ Cockney” dialect as the speech of several country characters, Peggoty for example. This convention, as Shaw says, was copied from book to book by authors who never dreamed of using their ears.
