hority if I dared to whisper that such
coster English as the rather pretty dahn tahn for down town, or the
decidedly ugly cowcow for cocoa is current in very polite circles. The
entire nation, costers and all, would undoubtedly repudiate any such
pronunciation as vulgar. All the same, if I were to attempt to represent
current "smart" cockney speech as I have attempted to represent
Drinkwater's, without the niceties of Mr. Sweet's Romic alphabets, I
am afraid I should often have to write dahn tahn and cowcow as being
at least nearer to the actual sound than down town and cocoa. And this
would give such offence that I should have to leave the country; for
nothing annoys a native speaker of English more than a faithful setting
down in phonetic spelling of the sounds he utters. He imagines that
a departure from conventional spelling indicates a departure from the
correct standard English of good society. Alas! this correct standard
English of good society is unknown to phoneticians. It is only one of
the many figments that bewilder our poor snobbish brains. No such thing
exists; but what does that matter to people trained from infancy to make
a point of honor of belief in abstractions and incredibilities? And so I
am compelled to hide Lady Cicely's speech under the veil of conventional
orthography.

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 s