The struggle for the “right and proper” ways to speak was and is a continuing debate. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Devonshire accent was strongly remarked on. Local accent was a matter of comment for a long time. Wordsworth’s Cumbrian accent was noted at the end of the eighteenth century; D. H. Lawrence’s Nottinghamshire (and his dialect in poems and short stories) at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; William Faulkner’s southern American in the mid twentieth; Toni Morrison in the late twentieth century. But on the whole these were exceptions: the standard was
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