I was lucky enough to have some expert help researching eighteenth-century vernacular. On the matter of Dickens’ use of Cockney it seemed that scholars were divided. Some thought that he’d exaggerated its quaintness (that ‘werry’ for ‘very’ was thought by some to be invention), and Dickens too had drawn a veil over foul oaths. I stole a few things, though: ‘I gave him a souse across the chops’, ‘shut your bone-box’.

Cockney had changed radically since Wiseman’s day (in part because of all those Weissmanns who arrived in the nineteenth century), but just the same I made lists of words and phrases I thought I might be able to use:

He axed me

Arse about face

Had a bellyful of that

There ain’t nuffink like it

Gawdelpus

Wotcher (ie, what cheer)

Give us it

Dressed any old how

Some of these—‘dressed any old how’, for example—were things I’d heard Mum say, and they made me remember other things I’d heard from her, and from her father: ‘when all’s said and done’, ‘by and by’, ‘done us proud’, ‘my word’, ‘donkey’s years’, ‘I’ll do it directly’, ‘as plain as the nose on your face’.

Grandfather’s old-fashioned country phrases reminded me of kids I’d gone to school with. They’d said things like: ‘Are youse coming?’, ‘I never’ (meaning ‘I didn’t’), ‘I like her, but’ (meaning ‘I like her, though’), ‘You was dobbed’.

Thinking about Aboriginal speakers of English I’d heard, I realised that they used English in some subtly different ways. The word ‘gammon’ (meaning humbug or fooling) for instance—it sounded as if it could be a remnant of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English preserved in Aboriginal idiom. In any case I used it.

Private letters and journals generally weren’t much use because they were written by people more educated than Thornhill. They’d have been cleaned up, too. But I looked through some and scavenged a few things. The letters of Mary Reiby, for example, gave me a few nice phrases—‘the necessaries’ (meaning ‘the toilet’), ‘I will watch every opportunity to get away in 2 years’, ‘I have near a hundred pounds about me’, ‘I am never without a box of tea in the house’.

Having gathered all these, of course I had to use them. Early drafts bristled with those colourful turns of phrase. Characters were forever threatening to give each other ‘a souse across the chops’ or were having ‘a bellyful’ of something or other.

It began to sound like a ye olde parody.

By the end of 2003 I was weeding out the most self-consciously picturesque idioms. Each phrase had to pass two tests. Did it scream smart-alec research? Was the meaning clear to a modern reader?

The ‘antique’ words I left in were those where the meaning was clear and which were reasonably familiar, if only from literature (‘physick’, ‘apothecary’, ‘britches’) or still used today, although unusual (‘rotgut’, ‘tucker’, ‘victuals’).