The Pickwick Papers: Difference between revisions

 

It wasn't doing too well, sales wise, until Samuel Weller entered the story. Weller, an early example of the chirpy Cockney archetype, is prone to punching people with little provocation, dispensing Cockney wisdom and engaging in an entire series of "as the X said" jokes, but adding something before and afterwards, such as:

 

As can be seen from the above quote, the Cockney accent has changed a lot since 1837; without Dickens's habit of using [[Funetik Aksent]] to show Weller's pronunciation, this fact would be unknown to modern linguists.