Accents in Hard Times

I struggled with the speech patterns of two of the characters: namely Stephen Blackpool and Sleary. Sleary had rather a pronounced lisp and reading through pages of it was hard work. I can't say if Stephen Blackpool's accent was accurately rendered, but it was also hard work to read and I did not reproduce the accent in my head. Could accents have changed since then? I gather Coketown was based on Preston. Accents seem to change every five miles up in that part of the country. I could understand Mr Bounderby's accent, although his was not written phonetically. His accent was suggested by his manner of speech, which sounded very Lancastrian to me. "I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown." "I am a Coketown man." Dickens seemed pretty good at reproducing working class speech from around London and Kent, Joe Gargery's and Magwitch's for instance. I did not think Dicken's rendering of a northern accent was as good as Emily Bronte's in Wuthering Heights. I quite enjoyed trying to decipher Joe's rants, but his speeches were relatively short. I thought Emily Bronte's rendering of the Yorkshire dialect was better than Charlotte's when she attempted to make it more understandable to southern readers.