What-ho, folks whom I ask lots of questions of as of late. (So glad this comm is still around. It's been what, ten years? Good times. God, I'm old
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I'd definitely recommend watching *Gosford Park* and the extras where they interviewed some people who were in service in the 1930s about the social structures below stairs.
There were big differences between the upstairs servants, butlers, housekeeper and valets and the downstairs ones who ideally would never be seen. They ate separately and the upstairs servants had perfect English, no accents, ideally.
I don't know about differences in accents, but Jeeves speaks very respectfully, using titles and honorifics and so forth, which could show that he is a servant. Plus, he would speak less formally when talking to other servants, and servants in lower places on the hierarchy would speak more respectfully to him
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For the most part, I'm quite fogged by this issue as well. A couple random dialectical odds and ends jump out at me from canon:
-There's an early version of "Bertie Changes His Mind" where Jeeves thinks of Bertie as "the guv'nor" throughout the text (but never addresses him that way, directly).
-There's a story (can't remember which one) where Jeeves pronounces "nine" as "niyun" while speaking on the phone. My five seconds of internet research that I did just now tells me this is something that was taught in elocution classes for telephone operators back in the day. Obviously Jeeves was not a telephone operator, but maybe he received elocution lessons as part of his professional training?
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There were big differences between the upstairs servants, butlers, housekeeper and valets and the downstairs ones who ideally would never be seen. They ate separately and the upstairs servants had perfect English, no accents, ideally.
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-There's an early version of "Bertie Changes His Mind" where Jeeves thinks of Bertie as "the guv'nor" throughout the text (but never addresses him that way, directly).
-There's a story (can't remember which one) where Jeeves pronounces "nine" as "niyun" while speaking on the phone. My five seconds of internet research that I did just now tells me this is something that was taught in elocution classes for telephone operators back in the day. Obviously Jeeves was not a telephone operator, but maybe he received elocution lessons as part of his professional training?
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