"Whether spoken English is any uglier than it used to be is extremely dubious."
Not to my mind, it hasn't
Dialect, accent and vernculr speech have a beauty of their own - still do, where they are still surviving.
The established pronunciation of the language language itself has an overall beauty which has apparently now been abandoned by the media - missing word-endings (brawban instead of broadband is fairly typical of what's happening) - glottal stops - have broken the flow of speech.
"The dialogue in Dickens can be pretty unattractive."
Matter of opinion - Dickens was not a dialect speaker anyway - he was reproducing what he heard.
Of course not all dialects ate attractive to everybody (I detest Birmingham accents), but they are naturally arrived at and are products of the areas they came from.
I have an odd hybrid Liverpool/Manchester/London accent - naturally arrivd at.
That is not what is happening to the language today.
There is a great deal of difference between vernacular speech and simply lazy speech
Jim Carroll