Magnus Archives question

[kindkit]

Can someone please place Martin's accent for me, geographically? I know in S2 we learn that his mother is in Devon, but does that mean that Martin grew up there?

Heh, while writing out this question I seem to have created a headcanon for myself that Jon finds Martin's voiced esses as endearing as I do. (He was extremely irritated by them at first. After all, he changed his accent and learned to speak properly, why can't everyone else do it?) But then he started not minding because he knew Martin, was starting to like and respect Martin more than he ever thought possible . . . and then months passed when all he had of Martin was a voice on a tape recorder . . .

Comments

[rydra_wong]

Full-on RP or just southern?

Ah, you may be conflating two things (see: complicated class politics, etc.).

Jon always speaks RP, as does Jonny Sims in Q&As etc.; that's the south-of-England middle-class-ish accent that British culture thinks of as "not having a regional accent".

Then there's the more formal, over-enunciated version of it he uses some of the time, the "old-school newsreader" thing. But he does that much less in some contexts. It's not "fake", but it does modulate.

But all of it's RP.

You may be thinking of ERP, "Extreme Received Pronunciation", which is what aristocrats and the Royal Family speak, with the weird strangulated vowels (so "nice house" can turn into "nice hice").

Nobody in Magnus speaks anything like that, though I'd say Elias is a notch "posher" in his RP than Jon is.

Also! Oxford is its own special clusterfuck of class issues and I know because I went there, and am delighted if I can mine that for for people's Magnus research. *g* You can be very solidly middle-class and still come from a completely different world from a lot of people at Oxford.

(I can try to expand on the Oxford stuff in further comments if that'd be of interest?)

It's possible that Jon, Georgie and Martin could all have backgrounds that would be considered within the broad range of "middle-class", though all different flavours of middle-class, and all compatible with being less-privileged in varying ways (and having reason for the touchiness you mentioned).

[kindkit]

that's the south-of-England middle-class-ish accent that British culture thinks of as "not having a regional accent"

Yes, that's what my questions, which perhaps I have phrased clumsily, are trying to get at. I'm trying to unpick region and class. Jon's accent implies both a regional origin and a class, but it seems possible to me that he could have started out with a non-RP southern accent and then shifted it to sound more middle class.

*shrugs* This is a thing I want to be possible, because I find S1 Jon a good deal more understandable (and sympathetic) as someone clinging desperately to a middle class identity that he's acquired, and feels at risk of losing, than as someone who's always been middle class and is just a snob. He's still a snob either way, but the nuances are quite different for me.

[rydra_wong]

*shrugs* This is a thing I want to be possible, because I find S1 Jon a good deal more understandable (and sympathetic) as someone clinging desperately to a middle class identity that he's acquired, and feels at risk of losing, than as someone who's always been middle class and is just a snob. He's still a snob either way, but the nuances are quite different for me.

Oh, I think the feel you're going for rings absolutely true, with the prickliness and chip-on-the-shoulder-ness and the possibly-modified accent. He's a snob clinging to intellectual/class status that he feels is precarious/threatened, not "to the manor born".

But that could fit perfectly with a background that's middle-class but not well-off, and definitely not upper-middle. Maybe his grandmother had a decent pension so there's financial stability but not a lot of spare cash (enough to buy stacks of cheap books from charity shops to distract him, not enough to waste money on new books that might not be read). But lots of value placed on education and respectability; culturally middle-class. Possibly with a sense that we are better than Those People next door, even if we don't have any more money than them.

Like, I think he maybe went to a grammar school for secondary (Bournemouth's got some), or a minor private school (on a scholarship?). I don't think he went to the kind of Big Name private school which crams intensively for Oxbridge entry in particular and sends a large chunk of kids there every year. He was the very bright kid who got in on actual ability.

Then at Oxford he's going to be in an environment which includes a LOT of full-on upper-middle and upper-class people (I correctly deduced that Jonny Non-Fictional Sims also went to Oxford based on the authenticity of the vitriol towards posh wankers from Christ Church). And aside from the "people taking it for granted that you go on skiing holidays" thing that Georgie talks about, that also means getting slammed into people who've been trained into an extraordinary amount of intellectual self-confidence and (in humanities) the ability to perform in a particular style in academic contexts -- aggressive, bluffing, etc..

(See: Britain's political elite.)

The culture shock can be really brutal, even if it's possible to find your own people there eventually.

Which leads to both increased defences (leaning harder into his Formal Academic newsreader voice etc.) and also its own kind of snobbery, because Jon is going to know bitterly and resentfully that he's smarter than a lot of these people. And they're vulgar and stupid and terrible.

(The highly-specific disdain towards original!pothead!Elias's Third in PPE from Christchurch is hilarious and very telling, because all of those details say that original!Elias was someone who got into Oxford because he went to a very very expensive big-name private school that could funnel him in and he went to a very posh college and did the course which is often considered the one for politicians-in-training and he was still lazy/stupid enough to get a terrible degree result. And probably privileged enough that it wouldn't bar him from any future career he wanted. Jon and Jonny both scorn that person.)

So, hrm. I don't think Georgie would have dated him if he was actually snobbish about her class/regional background. They may actually have bonded over being part of the non-posh contingent.

But yeah, he's a massively prickly intellectual snob (and once he's taken against Martin initially, for whatever reason, he's going to find everything about him irritating even if he knows he shouldn't).

Anyway, this is purely me speculating/headcanon-ing, but hopefully it's some use or at least gives you something to bounce off.