According To A Historian, Posh Accents Are Ruining Period Dramas – Not Just Austen

It’s not an isolated trend

Kennedy tells us the tendency isn’t limited to period costume dramas.

“It is widely known that the acting industry is dominated by the middle and upper classes,” she says.

In 2024, the Sutton Trust found that people from working-class backgrounds were four times less likely than their middle-class peers to work in any creative industry.

BAFTA-nominated actors are five times more likely to have gone to private school than the general public.

“While this is an issue in itself,” Kennedy continued, “it also heavily influences how history gets portrayed on screen.

“We’ve been sold this idea that everyone in the past was super polished and polite, and we’ve equated that with the classic RP accent.”

That’s not to say you can’t change up voices, actors, stories, or perspectives, especially in looser adaptations like Bridget Jones (expertly nicked from Pride And Prejudice) – but would-be “faithful” adaptations tend to sound distractingly, and sometimes inaccurately, similar.

The Brontës have fallen victim to the issue, too, Kennedy says

Take, the historian says, the 2022 film Emily.

“The Brontës are portrayed with soft-spoken middle-class voices, even though they most likely would’ve had an Irish or at least an Irish/Yorkshire mixed accent as their father was Irish,” she shares.

Indeed, Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor said the author “spoke with a strong Irish accent,” while the British Film Institute admits star Emma Mackey’s “Yorkshire accent sporadically wanders down the M1″ in the movie.

“A lot of the time” in period dramas, “the working-class accent has been attributed to comic relief, or a character who has had a troubled life,” she tells HuffPost UK.

“When everyone in a period drama speaks the same, you’re not just losing historical accuracy, you’re also reinforcing the idea that the only ‘serious’ or ‘worthy’ people in history were the ones who ‘spoke properly.’”