Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
Jane Austen letter
Guide to fashion and etiquette
Alphabet books
Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo
Jane Austen, Persuasion
P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'
Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare
Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Grammar for children
Yorkshire dialect
Punctuation for children
Anti-slavery poem
Diary description of London
Execution of a 12 year old boy
Modern Flash Dictionary
Dickens, Oliver Twist
London dialect in Dickens
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Lear's Book of Nonsense
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
The Communist Manifesto
'How do I love thee?'
Poverty and the workhouse
Poor Letter H
'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
Get your ‘air cut!
Cookery for the poor
Mary Seacole's autobiography
Mary Seacole newspaper article
Nursery rhymes
Florence Nightingale letter
Coal mining
The Woman in White
Mrs Beeton
Mrs Beeton's Christmas
Melodrama: East Lynne
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Queen's English
Letter from Charles Darwin
Text message poetry
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Music Hall
Victorian fashion
Freakshow posters
Street sellers
Invention of the telephone
Illusionists and conjurers
Oxford English Dictionary
Afrikaans novel
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Anglo-Indian dictionary
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Circus poster
Jack the Ripper murders
Match Girls Strike
Babu English
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
H G Wells, The Time Machine
English 'down under'
In his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens (1812–70) introduced Sam Weller, the smart-talking Cockney of the White Hart Inn. Weller and Dickens soon became household names. Dickens’ striking use of colloquial expressions and adapted spelling to convey a sense of the natural rhythms of London speech became a hallmark of his characterisations.
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Dickens exploits several linguistic features to capture Weller’s Cockney (London) dialect. Consonants are frequently omitted, as in ’ere (here), as are vowels or whole syllables as in ’tain’t (it isn’t) and ’cept (except). Spelling is used to suggest a different vowel quality, as in gal (girl), or socially marked pronunciation such as nothin’. Dialect grammar appears in ain’t (isn’t), a lookin’ and more tenderer. Perhaps the most unfamiliar feature to us is the switching of v and w in words such as inwariable and wery.
Shelfmark: C.144.b.1.