Somewhere or other I’d heard an ancient recording of the nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning. He was at some kind of celebration, it sounded like, and someone had brought along this new-fangled thing with a wax cylinder, and they wanted him to recite one of his poems into the horn. ‘I sprang to the saddle, and Joris and he; I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.’ His voice was excited, light, uncertain, full of laughter. He sounded so astonishingly like us. He stumbled, stopped. He’d forgotten the rest. ‘I’m incredibly sorry,’ he called out, ‘but I can’t remember.’ He laughed, and that was it.

So you could hear—sort of—what Robert Browning sounded like. But who would have brought along a wax cylinder to some hovel in Bermondsey and got an illiterate lighterman to speak into it? Even if the wax cylinder had been invented?

I wanted to create convincing dialogue. If I were writing about polite middle-class parlours I’d have been all right— I could have extrapolated from Jane Austen. But trying to think how people would have spoken in Bermondsey in the late eighteenth century, all that came to mind were a few novels in which working people made brief appearances: books by Defoe, Fielding, Sterne. Dickens did the lower orders, of course, but he was a good half-century later.

I could guess the limitations of these sources. The language they put into their characters’ mouths was their version of how working people spoke. They’d have cleaned it up, perhaps unconsciously, to make it fit for their genteel, educated readership. Like Henry Humpherus, they might refer to ‘foul oaths’, but they never wrote the oaths down.

Writing those first drafts, and thinking of how to convey the harsh, uneducated quality of the characters, I’d made every second word of their dialogue ‘fucken’. It was all ‘fucken’ this and ‘fucken’ that.

It had done the job—it got that first draft written. But, even as I was writing, I knew I hadn’t got it right. I had made the dialogue sound coarse, but at the same time too modern and too monotonous.

The closest we were ever going to get to the wax cylinder of Robert Browning, I thought, was the transcripts of the Old Bailey trials. I went back to the Reading Room at the Mitchell Library and crouched over the microfilm reader, writing down phrases as they’d fallen from the lips of the criminal class two hundred years before.

I had a kick over the knee by a bullock

Damn my eyes

There is a man killed

Get off of it

You bugger

Give it them directly

Sixpenny worth

Damn you Jack