ABSTRACT
Of all the difficulties facing the slum novelists of the nineties in their attempt to draw a true picture of the working man, none caused them more concern than how to reproduce on the printed page the curious verbal sounds they heard in the streets. To make their characters appear to speak Standard English would have been an affront to the doctrine of realism, while the working-class speech used by earlier novelists seemed to have little in common with that which they themselves observed.
