Drusilla, mines and Cockernee
After my piece on William and Cecily, I was challenged by fenderlove, among others, to come up with a plausible explanation of pre-vamping Cockernee Drusilla and the family mines.
Talking oddly
Dru’s accent is a tricky one. However, a good starting point is the fact that London accents have changed markedly over the last couple of centuries. If you look at phonetic representations of London speech in Dickens, for example, you find something that quite simply does not translate into any modern variant of London working-class speech. Even Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father in Pygmalion does not speak quite like modern Cockneys in the 1930s film of the play.
In the period of Dickens’ youth and earlier novels, London speech was markedly different. Sam Weller, Pickwick’s servant, talks in a way which feels implausible now:
‘I had a reg'lar new fit o' clothes that mornin', gen'l'men of the jury,’ said Sam, ‘and that was a wery partickler and uncommon circumstance vith me in those days. … If they wos a pair o' patent double million magnifyin' gas microscopes of hextra power, p'raps I might be able to see through a flight o' stairs and a deal door; but bein' only eyes, you see, my wision's limited’ (ch. 34).
By 1876, however, many of the features of that type of Cockney had vanished, according to GB Shaw:
When I came to London in 1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one.
The vowel sounds are not discussed so much as that (to us) strange inversion of “v” and “w”. However, it’s clear that elements of the accent and dialect were common to Londoners of all classes, not simply of the working classes, as had become true by the end of that century. You can still hear the name pronounced "Spoik" in some parts of London. http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/cockney.aspx
Abbeys and stuff.
Drusilla was turned in 1860. At that point she was a young woman from an apparently affluent family who were either Catholic or High Church Anglican. The period around her birth, which took place presumably sometime around 1840, was one of considerable intellectual turmoil in the Church of England which led, at one extreme to the Low Church movement epitomised by the obnoxious Mr Slope of Trollope’s Barsetshire books and, on the other hand, to the Oxford Movement which aimed at reinstating many features of Catholicism removed from Church practices by the Puritans and anti-Catholics of the Civil War period. (In some cases leaders of the group actually joined the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Newman notably so.) Anglican convents were founded in the 1840s in Wantage and East Grinstead, and others followed. It is therefore not impossible that Drusilla intended to take Anglican vows, though there were also Catholic convents in England by then, after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had removed the final vestiges of anti-Catholic discrimination. There was one built in Bermondsey, for example, designed by Pugin who also designed the Houses of Parliament. Confession is, of course, normal in Catholicism but was also very much encouraged in High Church Anglicanism then and since.
Thus, Drusilla’s accent, religion and vocation can be satisfactorily explained. What remains, however, is the trickier business of her vision of a mine collapse in her family’s mines. Mining was a very important component of the Industrial Revolution which had made Britain of Drusilla’s human life the most powerful economy on earth. Families of all variants of Christianity could be mine-owners, so that raises no difficulty for us.
Mines in London, though? Not so easy. London itself lies in the valley of the Thames and is built of deposits of clay, much more recent than the Carboniferous stones in which coal seams are found. Let us look, though, at the precise information we are given; Drusilla’s words:
Drusilla: I had... (breathes deeply) I've been seeing again, Father.
Yesterday, the men were going to work in the mine. I had... (shakes) a terrible fright. (draws a frightened breath) My stomach all (draws another) tied up, and I saw this horrible... crash. (calms a bit) My mummy said to keep my peace, it didn't mean nothing. But this morning... they had a cave-in. Two men died.
So, we need mines Drusilla had at least visited. Not in London centre, certainly. However, to the north and south of the city there are hills; to the south these are of chalk. Chalk was also a much-needed resource of the period, and was mined in the area for many centuries. It is far from improbable that Drusilla’s family might have owned one of these mines.
I rather like the idea of Blackheath, south of the Thames and to the east of Greenwich as a possible location for the family’s chalk mines. There was a huge cavern there, and mine-workings, some of which had suffered from severe cave-ins, causing loss of life, in the 1840s. In April 2002 a large hole opened in the A2 road in Greenwich borough, caused by subsidence in some of the very old mine-workings and underground tunnels which apparently riddle the area. (page 16)
Alternatively, just as there were many Irish people in London from the 1840s onwards, not simply refugees from the great Famine but also of the more affluent classes (something which boosted the number of Catholics in the city and precipitated the opening of more convents), so there were many affluent families from other parts of England who moved to London to move in “Society”. Drusilla’s family appears to be large and have at least two unmarried young women, so that taking a mansion within reach of the city is not at all unlikely. By 1860 an extensive railway system made travel easy for the men of the family, involved in managing the mines, so that if they were owners of coal-mines they could still have lived somewhere more suitable to the ambitions of the parents of nubile and potentially wealthy young women.
I think I prefer the chalk-mining option, myself. Drusilla and her family perhaps lived in Greenwich, visited one of the new abbeys in London (what we are shown could well be one of Pugin’s, or another feature of the great Victorian Gothic Revival), were High Anglicans or Catholics and owned mines in the vicinity of Eltham or Blackheath. Her sheltered upbringing meant that she spoke a variant of the local Cockney, which was subtly different from the modern London accent and, like Spike’s, was influenced by the considerable travel she enjoyed later in her unlife.
I refuse even to attempt to explain away Liam’s accent. Don’t ask me!
Talking oddly
Dru’s accent is a tricky one. However, a good starting point is the fact that London accents have changed markedly over the last couple of centuries. If you look at phonetic representations of London speech in Dickens, for example, you find something that quite simply does not translate into any modern variant of London working-class speech. Even Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father in Pygmalion does not speak quite like modern Cockneys in the 1930s film of the play.
In the period of Dickens’ youth and earlier novels, London speech was markedly different. Sam Weller, Pickwick’s servant, talks in a way which feels implausible now:
‘I had a reg'lar new fit o' clothes that mornin', gen'l'men of the jury,’ said Sam, ‘and that was a wery partickler and uncommon circumstance vith me in those days. … If they wos a pair o' patent double million magnifyin' gas microscopes of hextra power, p'raps I might be able to see through a flight o' stairs and a deal door; but bein' only eyes, you see, my wision's limited’ (ch. 34).
By 1876, however, many of the features of that type of Cockney had vanished, according to GB Shaw:
When I came to London in 1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one.
The vowel sounds are not discussed so much as that (to us) strange inversion of “v” and “w”. However, it’s clear that elements of the accent and dialect were common to Londoners of all classes, not simply of the working classes, as had become true by the end of that century. You can still hear the name pronounced "Spoik" in some parts of London. http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/cockney.aspx
Abbeys and stuff.
Drusilla was turned in 1860. At that point she was a young woman from an apparently affluent family who were either Catholic or High Church Anglican. The period around her birth, which took place presumably sometime around 1840, was one of considerable intellectual turmoil in the Church of England which led, at one extreme to the Low Church movement epitomised by the obnoxious Mr Slope of Trollope’s Barsetshire books and, on the other hand, to the Oxford Movement which aimed at reinstating many features of Catholicism removed from Church practices by the Puritans and anti-Catholics of the Civil War period. (In some cases leaders of the group actually joined the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Newman notably so.) Anglican convents were founded in the 1840s in Wantage and East Grinstead, and others followed. It is therefore not impossible that Drusilla intended to take Anglican vows, though there were also Catholic convents in England by then, after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had removed the final vestiges of anti-Catholic discrimination. There was one built in Bermondsey, for example, designed by Pugin who also designed the Houses of Parliament. Confession is, of course, normal in Catholicism but was also very much encouraged in High Church Anglicanism then and since.
Thus, Drusilla’s accent, religion and vocation can be satisfactorily explained. What remains, however, is the trickier business of her vision of a mine collapse in her family’s mines. Mining was a very important component of the Industrial Revolution which had made Britain of Drusilla’s human life the most powerful economy on earth. Families of all variants of Christianity could be mine-owners, so that raises no difficulty for us.
Mines in London, though? Not so easy. London itself lies in the valley of the Thames and is built of deposits of clay, much more recent than the Carboniferous stones in which coal seams are found. Let us look, though, at the precise information we are given; Drusilla’s words:
Drusilla: I had... (breathes deeply) I've been seeing again, Father.
Yesterday, the men were going to work in the mine. I had... (shakes) a terrible fright. (draws a frightened breath) My stomach all (draws another) tied up, and I saw this horrible... crash. (calms a bit) My mummy said to keep my peace, it didn't mean nothing. But this morning... they had a cave-in. Two men died.
So, we need mines Drusilla had at least visited. Not in London centre, certainly. However, to the north and south of the city there are hills; to the south these are of chalk. Chalk was also a much-needed resource of the period, and was mined in the area for many centuries. It is far from improbable that Drusilla’s family might have owned one of these mines.
I rather like the idea of Blackheath, south of the Thames and to the east of Greenwich as a possible location for the family’s chalk mines. There was a huge cavern there, and mine-workings, some of which had suffered from severe cave-ins, causing loss of life, in the 1840s. In April 2002 a large hole opened in the A2 road in Greenwich borough, caused by subsidence in some of the very old mine-workings and underground tunnels which apparently riddle the area. (page 16)
Alternatively, just as there were many Irish people in London from the 1840s onwards, not simply refugees from the great Famine but also of the more affluent classes (something which boosted the number of Catholics in the city and precipitated the opening of more convents), so there were many affluent families from other parts of England who moved to London to move in “Society”. Drusilla’s family appears to be large and have at least two unmarried young women, so that taking a mansion within reach of the city is not at all unlikely. By 1860 an extensive railway system made travel easy for the men of the family, involved in managing the mines, so that if they were owners of coal-mines they could still have lived somewhere more suitable to the ambitions of the parents of nubile and potentially wealthy young women.
I think I prefer the chalk-mining option, myself. Drusilla and her family perhaps lived in Greenwich, visited one of the new abbeys in London (what we are shown could well be one of Pugin’s, or another feature of the great Victorian Gothic Revival), were High Anglicans or Catholics and owned mines in the vicinity of Eltham or Blackheath. Her sheltered upbringing meant that she spoke a variant of the local Cockney, which was subtly different from the modern London accent and, like Spike’s, was influenced by the considerable travel she enjoyed later in her unlife.
I refuse even to attempt to explain away Liam’s accent. Don’t ask me!