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William Blake was sensitive to dialect and made dialect jokes himself.
Flaxman: How do you get on with Fuseli? I can't stand his foul.mouthed swearing. Does he swear at you?
Blake: He does.
Flaxman: And what do you do?
Blake: What do I do? Why.I swear again! and he says astonished, "vy, Blake, you are svaring!" but he leaves off himself!
And he illustrates the Y orkshire accent and French affectations of his bête noir Robert Hartley Cromek in
English Encouragement of Art
Cromeks opinion put into Rhyme
If you must Please Every body you will
Mennywouver both Bunglishness & skill
When you a look at a picture you always can see
If a Man of Sense has Painted he[.]
Then never flinch but keep up a Jaw
About freedom & Jenny Suck awa'
(Notebook, 41)
But what dialect did Blake use? What did he sound like when he spoke?
Blake's contemporaries did not call him a Cockney, but some modern critics have done so. For instance, David Punter refers to "the Cockney, in which he [Blake] wrote and, no doubt, spoke." However, I find no trace of Cockney pronunciation, such as the treatment of aspirates (e.g., "hartist" and "'orse"), in Blake's writings or in the records of his speech. Sometimes the justification for the term involves a wanton redefinition of "Cockney" apparently without regard to speech habits. Peter Ackroyd describes Blake as a "Cockney visionary," but for him "Cockney" apparently means a lover of London [like Samuel J ohnson?] and is not related to speech habits.
One of the few pieces of evidence pointing toward Cockney pronunciation in Blake's family is the mistranscription of "Armitage," the name of the first husband of Blake's mother, as "Harmitage" when she married Blake's father. The error must be due to the second church clerk, for when the couple wrote separate letters applying to join the Moravian Church Congregation in 1750 they signed themselves "Tho.s Artmitage" and "Catherine Armitage," though the Moravian records refer to them indifferently as "Armitage" and "Hermitage."
Blake is plausibly, but on remarkably little biographical evidence, said to have learned his letters at his mother's knee. His mother's only surviving letter indicates that she was a far more erratic orthographer than her son; she...