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Barnaby,
My advice would be to pretty much eschew dialect. It is tiresome for the reader and makes story telling (e.g. Baker) more difficult. You can differentiate between speakers with tone and diction and vocabulary will help identifying classes. An occasional contemporary term can be tossed in but since no one today quite knows what those in the East End sounded like anyway in 1888, aiming for some sort of verisimilitude would be for naught for all but a few pedants and only make the story telling more cumbrous.
In this regard, anyone familiar with the Hercule Poirot stories knows that Christie would have Hercule mutter the occasional egregious "Sacre Bleu" and other such senseless stage French phrases into the Belgian's speech. A few years ago I read a Poirot story in French and, of course, the French phrases were just rendered in French. My feeling was that if the translator had any imagination he would have put those occasional Frenchisms into stage English, like "Cor blimey!"
Don.
My advice would be to pretty much eschew dialect. It is tiresome for the reader and makes story telling (e.g. Baker) more difficult. You can differentiate between speakers with tone and diction and vocabulary will help identifying classes. An occasional contemporary term can be tossed in but since no one today quite knows what those in the East End sounded like anyway in 1888, aiming for some sort of verisimilitude would be for naught for all but a few pedants and only make the story telling more cumbrous.
In this regard, anyone familiar with the Hercule Poirot stories knows that Christie would have Hercule mutter the occasional egregious "Sacre Bleu" and other such senseless stage French phrases into the Belgian's speech. A few years ago I read a Poirot story in French and, of course, the French phrases were just rendered in French. My feeling was that if the translator had any imagination he would have put those occasional Frenchisms into stage English, like "Cor blimey!"
Don.
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