I am equally guiltless of any exercise of invention concerning the story
of the West Indian estate which so very nearly serves as a peg to hang
Captain Brassbound. To Mr. Frederick Jackson of Hindhead, who, against
all his principles, encourages and abets me in my career as a dramatist,
I owe my knowledge of those main facts of the case which became public
through an attempt to make the House of Commons act on them. This being
so, I must add that the character of Captain Brassbound's mother, like
the recovery of the estate by the next heir, is an interpolation of my
own. It is not, however, an invention. One of the evils of the pretence
that our institutions represent abstract principles of justice
instead of being mere social scaffolding is that persons of a certain
temperament take the pretence seriously, and when the law is on the side
of injustice, will not accept the situation, and are driven mad by their
vain struggle against it. Dickens has drawn the type in his Man from
Shropshire in Bleak House. Most public men and all lawyers have been
appealed to by victims of this sense of injustice--the most unhelpable
of afflictions in a society like ours.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DIALECTS

The fact that English is spelt conventionally and not phonetically makes
the art of recording speech almost impossible. What is more, it places
the modern dramatist, who writes for America as well as England, in
a most trying position. Take for example my American captain and my
English lady. I have spelt the word conduce, as uttered by the
American captain, as cawndooce, to suggest (very roughly) the American
pronunciation to English readers. Then why not spell the same word,
when uttered by Lady Cicely, as kerndewce, to suggest the English
pronunciation to American readers? To this I have absolutely no defence:
I can only plead that an author who lives in England necessarily loses
his consciousness of the peculiarities of English speech, and sharpens
his consciousness of the points in which American speech differs from
it; so that it is more convenient to leave English peculiarities to be
recorded by American authors. I must, however, most vehemently disclaim
any intention of suggesting that English pronunciation is authoritative
and correct. My own tongue is neither American English nor English
English, but Irish English; so I am as nearly impartial in the matter
as it is in human nature to be. Besides, there is no standard English
pronunciation any more than there is an American one: in England every
county has its catchwords, just as no doubt every state in the Union
has. I cannot believe that the pioneer American, for example, can spare
time to learn that last refinement of modern speech, the exquisite
diphthong, a farfetched combination of the French eu and the English e,
with which a New Yorker pronounces such words as world, bird &c. I have
spent months without success in trying to achieve glibness with it.

To Felix Drinkwater also I owe some apology for implying that all his
vowel pronunciations are unfashionable. They are very far from being so.
As far as my social experience goes (and I have kept very mixed company)
there is no class in English society in which a good deal of Drinkwater
pronunciation does not pass unchallenged save by the expert phonetician.
This is no mere rash and ignorant jibe of my own at the expense of my
English neighbors. Academic authority in the matter of English speech is
represented at present by Mr. Henry Sweet, of the University of Oxford,
whose Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Engliach, translated into his
native language for the use of British islanders as a Primer of Spoken
English, is the most accessible standard work on the subject. In such
words as plum, come, humbug, up, gum, etc., Mr. Sweet's evidence is
conclusive. Ladies and gentlemen in Southern England pronounce them as
plam, kam, hambag, ap, gan, etc., exactly as Felix Drinkwater does. I
could not claim Mr. Sweet's authority 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 sometimes perpetrates horrible solecisms. He
will pronounce face as fits, accurately enough; but he will rhyme it
quite impossibly to nice, which Tompkins would pronounce as newts: for
example Mawl Enn Rowd for Mile End Road. This aw for i, which I have
made Drinkwater use, is the latest stage of the old diphthongal oi,
which Mr. Chevalier still uses. Irish, Scotch and north country readers
must remember that Drinkwater's rs are absolutely unpronounced when they
follow a vowel, though they modify the vowel very considerably. Thus,
luggage is pronounced by him as laggige, but turn is not pronounced as
tern, but as teun with the eu sounded as in French. The London r seems
thoroughly understood in America, with the result, however, that the use
of the r by Artemus Ward and other American dialect writers causes Irish
people to misread them grotesquely. I once saw the pronunciation of
malheureux represented in a cockney handbook by mal-err-err: not at
all a bad makeshift to instruct a Londoner, but out of the question
elsewhere in the British Isles. In America, representations of English
speech dwell too derisively on the dropped or interpolated h. American
writers have apparently not noticed the fact that the south English h
is not the same as the never-dropped Irish and American h, and that to
ridicule an Englishman for dropping it is as absurd as to ridicule the
whole French and Italian nation for doing the same. The American
h, helped out by a general agreement to pronounce wh as hw, is
tempestuously audible, and cannot be dropped without being immediately
missed. The London h is so comparatively quiet at all times, and so
completely inaudible in wh, that it probably fell out of use simply by
escaping the ears of children learning to speak. However that may be, it
is kept alive only by the literate classes who are reminded constantly
of its existence by seeing it on paper.

Roughly speaking, I should say that in England he who bothers about
his hs is a fool, and he who ridicules a dropped h a snob. As to the
interpolated h, my experience as a London vestryman has convinced me
that it is often effective as a means of emphasis, and that the London
language would be poorer without it. The objection to it is no more
respectable than the objection of a street boy to a black man or to a
lady in knickerbockers.

I have made only the most perfunctory attempt to represent the dialect
of the missionary. There is no literary notation for the grave music of
good Scotch.

BLACKDOWN, August 1900