I also had to decide whether I wanted to spell words phonetically, as some of those lists had (‘Gawdelpus’, ‘nuffink’), to suggest how they were pronounced.

When I tried this it made the speaker into a member of some quaint group whose language had laboriously to be spelled out. It implied that the writer (and reader) were the standard from which these other speakers deviated.

You couldn’t really take a character seriously—in the sense of identifying with them and sharing their feelings—if you had to mouth out some oddly spelled version of how they were talking.

Of course, if the whole book was written in some kind of ‘dialect’—like A Clockwork Orange or Huckleberry Finn—it became the standard language rather than a peculiarity, and the reader soon adjusted.

I was wrestling with all this when I happened to hear E. Annie Proulx talking on the radio. She said that she tried to make the order of the words convey the ‘accent’ or cadence, rather than spelling it all out phonetically. She used turns of speech and vocabulary that were distinctive to the characters, but sparingly. Sometimes she did use phonetic spellings, but only when it was a word we’d got used to seeing spelled that way—like ‘git’ for ‘get’. A scattering of phonetic spellings and a lot of work on the rhythm of the sentence would give you an accent more seamlessly, she thought, than all that tedious stuff with apostrophes.

Thank you, Annie Proulx.

With relief I got rid of ‘fucken’ and almost all of the other phonetic spellings, leaving only a few common ones such as ‘ain’t’. At last I decided that my job as a novelist wasn’t to reconstruct the authentic sound of nineteenth-century vernacular. My job was to produce something that sounded authentic. No Thames waterman was going to rise up from between the lines and accuse me of getting it wrong.

And if he did, I’d be taking notes.

Around November 2003, I read all the dialogue aloud. If anything hit a false note, it was obvious straight away. This was a bad one, for example: ‘That bit of land, he said. Remember I told you. We’ll lose it if we don’t move soon.’

This sounded terribly drawing-room. I muddied it up: ‘That bit of land, he said. Remember I telled you. We’ll miss out if we don’t grab it.’

I deleted yards and yards of dialogue. This scene, for example, had made heavy weather of its speeches:

There was a meeting, Mrs Devine said. Oh my very word yes. A meeting and that. Just down here a piece, on the boat, he come up on the boat. They all got on, all the blacks, got on the boat and met the Governor, see.