Although Cockney can be considered to be one of the most important non-standard forms of English, there had been little to no scholarly attention on the dialect prior to William Matthews s 1938 volume Cockney Past and Present . Matthews traced the course of the speech of London from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century by gathering information from many sources including plays, novels, music-hall songs, the comments of critics and the speech and recollections of living Cockneys. This book will be of interest to students of language and linguistics. ".