WHAT LONDON READS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19608, 9 April 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

WHAT LONDON READS.

AN AMUSING ANALYSIS. Mr. Pett Ridge, the well-known writer on London life and character, recently gave an address to a working-class audience on " How nofe to writo a novel." We lived in a free country, he said, and no one was forced to read novels. Most people did, and the reason. for this was that most people led monotonous lives. Speaking of London, be said ho was inclinded to say that city men read W. J. Locke and Hugh Walpole; city girls read Berta Ruck, and business travellers read lan Hay; Common Councillors read biographies, and stockbrokers did not < read at all. Theatrical folk read only on compulsion. Barristers and solicitors read anybody who wrote about i;he free open life of the country. Hamstead read Shaw's plays and Masefield's verses; St. John's Wood missed nothing of Compton Mackenzie and Stephen McKemna; Wandsworth read Miss Ethel M. Dell, and- New Cross was faithful to Mrs. Henry Wood. A piece of advice given to would-be novelists was that if they had to make a, character speak in a rustic manner, avoid what the stage knew as the accent of Loamshire. The accent of Loamshire was mainly Cornish, with a strong touch of Yorkshire and more than a suggestion of Kent. Choose one county, Mr. Pett Ridge urged, and be faithful to it. Suppose one was wi-iting of a Cockney and did not allow him to use the superfluous aspirat-e. The Loamshire might drop the letter " hj," especially when in a hurry, but he did not give himself, the trouble of picking it up and using it where it was not wanted. Visitors to London had told him that their- greatest 'disillusionment in London came on ascertaining that omnibus conductors did not always talk in the uneducated way suggested by humorous journals. It might be added for the information of the novelist that London servants of to-day talked rather more correctly than their mistresses.