I have just finished Silas Hocking's best seller, Her Benny (1879), and was struck by how the author represents the accents and dialects of the various Liverpool characters in the book. The book is tale of two street children, Benny and sister Nell, who along with the reprobate Perks, are given distinctive accents and the unusual, to me, forms of the verb to be 'I's', 'You's' and 'It are'. I also tried to read their dialogue in a modern Liverpool accent are failed miserably, but that could be more due to my ignorance than anything else. The speech of the adult characters on the other hand, is represented in what appears to have become the standard for Lancashire dialect writing, which suggests that Hocking was sensitive to generational differences in the Liverpool speech of the time. Anyone who knows their northern English accents will know that the modern Liverpool accent is distinctive and doesn't spread far beyond the suburbs. Hocking's representation of late 19th-century Liverpool speech makes me wonder when this came about.
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Phil Benson
Born in Manchester when it was still part of Lancashire, which it still is really. Exiled in sunny Sydney, I love to read Lancashire books Archives
March 2013
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