Of Class and Accent in Britain and America: A Few Thoughts

In The English Tribe Stephen Haseler, considering Englishness and Britishness as the twentieth century drew toward its end, with "Europe" looking very much like Britain's future (how remote all that seems now!), he considered among much else the development of a distinct upper-class English accent in the country's public schools by late Victorian times, reinforced by social and other pressures at Oxbridge, the Bar, the Church and the Court (in short, the gamut of what AJP Taylor called "The Thing!"), "which would serve as the authoritative voice of Englishness, and . . . mark out rulers from ruled" not just at home but internationally (as the language of a not merely national but imperial ruling class) which has since come to be called "Received Pronunciation." In turn, the then-emergent means of mass communication reinforced in a manner Haseler did not hesitate to call Orwellian and totalitarian--indeed, "the most 'totalitarian' piece of cultural engineering" the country saw in the entire twentieth century.

I am inclined to agree, and struck by how after the passing of all that the accent was supposed to represent and serve--empire and hegemony and the Victorian social order, the plausibility of a view of Britain at the center of and dominant force in world affairs--and what many regard as the sheer obnoxiousness of the accent (Haseler himself uses words like "ungenerous" and "unengaging" to describe it), it has endured, and so too at least some of the respect shown its users. In the United States, certainly, people of conventional mind commonly equate this Received Pronunciation with superior intelligence, education, culture in that way memorably satirized by Michael Bluth's mistaking every one of a mentally disadvantaged woman's utterances for profound thoughts simply because she spoke them in that accent on Arrested Development.