Ripper Street starts tonight (30th Dec) on UK TV (BBC1)

[Esther Wilson]

For any Canadians who haven't noticed, Ripper Street begins January 19th on Space.

Yes!! I actually hadn't read this info until today but luckily I was watching something on the weekend and saw the trailer. I wasn't sure I was going to like it but it was much better than I thought. Will deffinately be watching the rest of them. Thanks for letting us know about this and it will teach me to keep on top of all the posts here.

[richardh]

Really enjoyed tonight's episode (Sunday 28th). The characters are starting to flesh out and I'm getting more involved. Also like the flowery language they use (not sure if they spoke like that in 1888 but it's nice dialogue).

[RivkahChaya]

Really enjoyed tonight's episode (Sunday 28th). The characters are starting to flesh out and I'm getting more involved. Also like the flowery language they use (not sure if they spoke like that in 1888 but it's nice dialogue).

It's hard to tell how Victorians talked. Letters and diaries, which writing is the closest we can get to natural language, is pretty purple, but also usually contains complete sentences, and people were taught to write letters then, to a much greater extent then they were even in the mid-20th century. I was taught to write letters in school in the 1970s, but strictly form, not content; Victorians were taught content, at least people who left enough correspondence behind for study.

Playwrights certainly observed the way people talked, but play still had to have better dialogue then what the actors would produce just improvising, and when you consider that there has been a steady decline of form in dramatic dialogue, from rhymed verse, to blank verse, to the sort of dialogue Shaw wrote, to the very best TV dialogue (I've seen high school creative writing that is better than the worst of television, and I mean that in all seriousness), which is more stylized than a lot of people realize, but sounds a lot like natural speech.

On the balance, I think Victorians were wordier than people are today, because entertainment and life influence each other, and also people just had more time then to sit around and be verbose. Writers used to get paid by the word, but concise speech became valued when the radio came around, and advertisers looked for slogans that packed a lot into very short phrases. Magazines started competing with both radio and TV, and started looking for shorter articles, and stopped paying by the word. They wanted to cut corners by cutting down on ink and paper, without cutting the number of articles, so they put limits on words; they also wanted to get papers turned over faster (my grandfather was a reporter from the 1930-1960s, and remembered the push for more and more speed in getting a story).

That's just my opinion, but I've got a degree in English lit., so I've read a lot. You can even see changes in particular authors whose careers spanned the late Victorian era to well after WWI, or even II. They get a lot less wordier.

If anyone comments TL;DR, I hate you.

[curious4]

How they spoke

Hello,

Somewhere out in Google world there is a site with letters from a young man from the Edwardian era and WW1. Well worth reading for vocabulary and content. There are also some recordings, (including one of Robert Browning), bit earlier that, but sounding surprisingly modern.

I found the way of speaking in Ripper street very off-putting but it is a good series.

Best wishes,
C4

Robert Browning was You Tube I think.

[richardnunweek]

Hi,
I was more or less brought up with my grandmother, my mother and myself shared her house, and when my mother died , she and my aunt cared for me.
My grandmother was born in Feb 1880, and was very much of the Victorian era, she got married in 1900, and I can confidently say that as I knew her until I was nearly 16 years old, she was no different then any other person, her speech and mannerisms were not odd, and the tales of her youth, and family life were easy to imagine..she was certainly not in the mode portrayed in this BBC drama.
If one reads the papers of that period, away from the Ripper reports, one can see that life was similar , apart from the obvious transport, and material assets.
The ''Ripper street'' production, with all of its crudeness[ and that is amongst the police officers] and the Dickens type street scenes, simply do not ring true, but that is a personal opinion, and I am sure many people will enjoy the future episodes, it does after all give a dose of action , on what normally is a very low key Sunday evening on Tv.
Regards Richard.

[curious4]

Victorian grandmother

Hello Richard,

I also had the advantage of a Victorian/Edwardian grandmother. Nothing like talking to someone who was there at the time and family history entwined with national events is the best source material ever. Can't imagine her ever using the Ripper Street "dialect", which seems to come and go, by the way!

Best wishes,
C4

[Bridewell]

Well Monro didn't come out of tonight's episode too well. I can't believe he was that spineless. The Okrana working in London, though, doesn't seem all that improbable.

[Flagg]

It looks promising. Some of the dialog isn't necessary and we know the East End was bad, but let's not go overboard. I'm not impressed with the way Abberline is portrayed. The character is a bullish with a quick temper. The real man is described as a gentleman in every sense. I hope there's more to these characters as we progress. It's worth a look.

[Bridewell]

Episode 7 not on tonight. Disappointing.

[Tecs]

It's hard to tell how Victorians talked.

Surely people don't change the way they speak that much? I know accents can change but the way somebody speaks overall is probably the same when they are 18 and 80.

So, somebody born in 1870, who spent their formative years in the Victorian era would have been alive in the early fifties if they had lived into their eighties. Examining people from this time (for which there must be loads of recordings) would surely give us a good idea of how Victorians spoke.

Or, maybe there is another factor at work similar to the one mentioned on Q.I. recently. Everyone thinks that the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain were all posh and spoke very plummy. In fact, most were ordinary people who spoke normally. The actors who played them in the fifties and sixties, when those films were made, were posh and that is how the image stuck.

Maybe hundreds of films where Victorians spoke in a "'pon my sole, the wery same" etc kind of way has seared into our collective consciousness?

regards,

[Cogidubnus]

Very good points Tecs...My paternal grandfather was born in 1883 and when I was growing up his speech didn't seem that different to my own...sure he employed one or two slang phrases which dated him a little, but nothing very noticeable...

Written English from this era does sometimes appear a little stilted but that's a rather more formal style anyway...and I'm meaning letters rather than literature...I think you need to go back to (say) the first quarter of the 19th century to hit real differences even in written English...

All the best

Dave

[Steve S]

Thinking out loud...OK,Victorian WRITTEN stuff seems flowery and verbose...But how typical is that of the way people actually talked?

[Bridewell]

I believe it's back for Episode 7 (of 8) tomorrow evening.

[Bridewell]

Episode Seven last night was interesting as it included reference to "cadaveric spasm", which has been debated on these boards recently.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2221120_distinguish-rigor-mortis-cadaveric-spasm.html

[richardh]

Episode Seven last night was interesting as it included reference to "cadaveric spasm", which has been debated on these boards recently.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2221120_dist...ric-spasm.html

cadaveric spasm, Isn't he a Russian shot-putter?