In William Pett Ridge's "The Alteration in Mr. Kershaw" (Idler , 1896) a cockney office boy is confronted by Mr. Kershaw, one of the senior clerks:

"Will you be good enough to explain," demanded Mr. Kershaw, hotly, "to explain, Billing, the condition of this table? Look here! I can write my name on it."

"So could I, sir," I said. "There's nothing clever in that."

This scene is typical of Ridge's fiction. He was one of the most prolific and better-known writers of the Cockney School of nineteenth-century British realism. Vincent Brome asserts in Four Realist Novelists (1965) that Ridge "is commonly assumed to translate the Cockney scene into more comedy than tragedy." With innate savvy and good humor, Ridge's Cockneys outwit the worst that the Fates can bring against them.

In Mord Em'ly (1899) the title character encounters a potential employer:

"How old might you be""

"I might be a 'undred...