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Originally Posted by HarryT
No, that's the way that working-class Cockneys spoke (and, to a large extent, still do today), reversing "W" and "V" and dropping a lot of final sounds from words.
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Hmph. I freely admit, I'd never noticed this, which surprises me. I've been around a lot of Londoners from that end of town (when in horses; Cockneys for whatever reason seem to immigrate to the States in large-ish numbers around certain breeds of horses--not all). I'm sitting here replaying speech I've heard, in my head, and never noticed the w-v. Dang. Sherlock Holmes would have to fire me for inattention!
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It was a very, very skilled "lower-class" job, and Mr Weller, in the book, regards himself as being among the "aristocracy" of working-class people. He would have been one of the extremely few people at the time who travelled widely; most people never went more than a few miles from where they were born in their whole lives.
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Interestingly enough, this pattern is somewhat repeated today (about how a working-class Cockney might view his job and status), again, in the horse biz. I'd never thought about that, either--not that way--and it's interesting to me, Harry.
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Absolutely. Exactly the same happened in England. In Dickens's early books, people travel around by stagecoach, but in his later books they use trains.
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I'm trying to remember where it was--which book--that I first encountered dialect in any substantive form. I suspect it was, indeed, Twain; although by the time I was 12, I was reading Dickens as well, and the summer before I was 12, I was reading GWTW. All have dialect to some extent or the other, so the sequence wouldn't much matter, as within a few years, Twain coming much earlier, I'd have read all of those, and been well into Dickens' works.
I don't remember struggling with Dickens. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. Just means, it was so long ago--<mumble> years--that I've killed off those brain cells. :-)
Hitch