London: The Biography полностью

Writers of a later generation were more concerned with polite taste and the maintenance of “good” English as the medium of enlightenment. In that context the Cockney accent becomes absurd, and deplorable. So, in dramas of the mid-eighteenth century, it is lampooned. “I have heard, good Sir, that every Body has a more betterer and more worserer Side of the Face than the other … It is the onliest way to rise in the world … all them kind of things.” Soon enough there were treatises and educational manuals which condemned the vulgarity and incorrectness of Cockney speech; their prejudice was strengthened with the proliferation of board schools and religious schools where, in the context of national education, the Cockney speaker was considered “uneducated” and illiterate. Since “London English” had become the standard of “proper” English, so in turn the native dialect of London was all the more strongly condemned. It became the mark of error and vulgarity.

The figure of the Cockney, however, never disappeared. The term itself has been considered one of derision. “Cockney” is generally supposed to derive from the medieval term “cokenay” or cock’s egg; in other words an unnatural object or freak of nature. There is another, equally derisory, explanation. A Londoner, on his first visit to the country, is supposed innocently to have asked, “Does a cock neigh too?” But there is also the possibility of more agreeable origins. One historian has suggested that it comes from the Latin term coquina, or “cookery,” and derives from the time when London was considered the great centre of cook-shops. It may also come from the Celtic myth of London as “Cockaigne,” a place of milk and honey, of whom the Cockneys are the true inhabitants. Yet even this origin has been held against them. By the fifteenth century the term was synonymous with “a milksop … an effeminate fellow” and in the sixteenth century was “a derisive appellation for a townsman as a type of effeminacy, in contrast to the hardier inhabitants of the country.” Sometimes he or she seems to be an image of pity, then, as in Dickens’s reproduction of the crossing-sweeper’s conversation-“a sov’ring as waw give me by a lady in a wale as sed she was a servant and as come to my crossin’ one night as asked to be showd this ’ere ouse.” But there are many Cockney characters in Dickens who retain their exuberance and vitality. There is Ikey in “A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle,” from Sketches by Boz, who has the very model of a Cockney manner: “He seed her several times, and then he up and said he’d keep company with her … the young lady’s father he behaved even worser and more unnatural … So then he turns round to me and says … and wasn’t he a trembling, neither.” Dickens was a master of the spoken word and throughout his fiction he evinces his command of the London dialect. It might even be said that the nineteenth century was the one in which Cockneys and Cockneyisms really flourished. They were no longer the city merchants or innkeepers of the seventeenth-century drama or the aspiring (if vulgar) neighbours of the eighteenth-century novel; they were considered to be members of a distinctive and extensive group.

The rise of rhyming slang, for example, can be dated to the first decades of the nineteenth century, when there emerged phrases such as “apples and pears” for “stairs” and “trouble and strife” for “wife.” Back-slang, or the reversal of words, also appeared at this time. Thus is “yob,” for example, slang for “boy.”

In the same century, too, the Cockney fully emerged as an identifiable if not always lovable character. Writers including Pierce Egan, Henry Mayhew and G.A.H. Sala-whose careers span the entire century-copied a recognisable idiom in such phrases as “She’s a bloody rum customer when she gets lushy” or “They doesn’t care nothink for nobody” or “She tipp’d him a volloper right across the snout.”

The literature of Cockney in the nineteenth century is for all practical purposes endless, but it found one specific focus in the language of the music hall. Performers such as Albert Chevalier, Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd and Gus Elan gave Cockney idiom artistic form and direction; it allowed the genuine outflow of communal feeling with songs such as “My Shadow is My Only Friend” and “I Wonder What It Feels like to be Poor.” They are the true songs of London. The routines of the “halls” encouraged much elaboration and ingenuity, also, so that it can fairly be said that the standard of Cockney was set by the 1880s. Certainly this was the period that witnessed the emergence of what may still be called modern Cockney.