Shamed by your English?

I was very interested to see this article in The Guardian today about the 'Shamed by your English?' adverts which, it turns out, have been running for almost 50 years.

The article itself does not succeed in probing the success of the advert very deeply, suggesting only that it is because (1) it looks like a newspaper article and (2) it was often on the front page.

I think the journalist gets a bit closer to the truth when he writes "People from all walks of life, from 15 to 90, have read the words "Shamed by your English?" and thought, Yes, yes I am. Tell me more." The idea that the variety of English that you speak might be shameful is so embedded into British culture that printing it as a direct question provokes an immediate response from many people: Yes, yes I am.

This may not seem directly relevant to the study of dialect in literature, but I think that the belief that you can be shamed by your English is one of the things that makes the representation of non-standard varieties of language in print such an effective tool (and sometimes such an intractable problem) for writers.