19th century, across all of Southern England, arter without an f (non-rhotically, ) was a common pronunciation of after. The pattern of speech in some of Charles Dickens' books pertain to Kentish dialect, as the author lived at Higham, was familiar with the mudflats near Rochester and created a comic character Sam Weller who spoke the local accent, principally Kentish but with strong London influences. Modern Estuary dialect features were also reported in some traditional varieties, including L-vocalization e.g. old as owd, as well as yod-coalescence in Kent. Essex The East Anglian feature of yod-dropping was common in Essex. In addition, Mersea Island (though not the rest of Essex) showed some rhoticity in speakers born as late as the early 20th century, a feature that characterised other rural dialects of South East England in the 19th century. Th-fronting, a feature now widespread in England, was found throughout Essex in the 1950s Survey of English Dialects, which studied speakers born in the late 1800s. Many words are unique to 19th-century Essex dialect, some examples including bonx meaning "to beat up batter for pudding" and hodmedod or hodmadod meaning "snail". Several nonstandard grammatical features exist, such as irregular plural forms like housen for "houses". Surrey A unique dialect existed as recently as the late 19th century in the historic county of Surrey, in western Kent, and in parts of northern Sussex, though it has now almost entirely died out. It was first documented by Granville W. G. Leveson Gower (1838–1895), of Titsey Place, during the 1870s and first published by him in A Glossary of Surrey Words in 1893. Gower was first made aware of the dialect after reading a letter in a local newspaper. Following that, and after his own enquiries, he expressed a fear that improved transport and the spread of education would cause such local dialects to disappear and be forgotten despite the fact that, in his words, "Old customs, old beliefs, old prejudices die hard in the soil of England". Gower described certain standard English words with nonstandard pronunciations in the Surrey dialect: Gowers mentions: Acrost for across; agoo for ago; batcheldor for bachelor; brownchitis (or sometime brown titus) for bronchitis; chimley or chimbley for chimney; crowner for coroner; crowner's quest for coroner's inquest; curosity and curous for curiosity and curious ; death for deaf; disgest for digest, and indisgestion for indigestion; gownd for gown; scholard for scholar;