Old Style Accents And Ways Of Talking In Tv And Films ...

[joko]

there is a strange way of speaking that is often adopted by actors when playing roles from london 1900 etc - kind of like and exaggerated dot cotton and similar to how harry enfield did in his show with a character
theres a few doing it now in ripper street
and its also a bit like eliza doolittle.

very - 'cor blimey, gov'na', a tanner and no mistake mister'

but even without all those sort of stock phrases, theres a 'tone' to the speech.

is this real? did people used to speak like that? how do we know?
or is it just something that some actors used to do that has stuck and actors now automatically just adopt it.

is there any evidence that people spoke that way?
cheers

[Quizmonkey]

No. It's a case of trained, educated actors, who naturally spoke RP, trying to play characters 'down the social scale' and overdoing it or getting it just plain wrong!

[vulcan]

They all bought the Dick van Dyke CD on elocution.

[emmie]

my nan and her family weren't so much cockneys, but would have fitted in quite well to the eliza doolittle style of speaking. They didn't do rhyming slang, that was mostly the costermongers working out of the original covent garden, I was friends with any number years ago, and they were oh gawd blimey characters to a man.

[FredPuli43]

There are some clues in literature. Dickens attempted to reproduce the sound of his London characters by his spelling, as did GBS in Pygmalion and we have it in the lyrics of character songs from music hall. We have recordings of people alive in 1900 and who spoke the language of the London working class. We know what Albert Chevalier and Gus Elen sounded like; they and their audiences were familiar with, or were themselves of,the working class and had or knew the accent and phrases of the ordinary man of the day. Add to that oral tradition; we know what our parents and grandparents sounded like and they, in turn, knew their own parents' and grandparents' phrases and ways of speaking and could hand all that down to those who were interested.