I was a little mollified when I realized it wasn't taking place in England but in our New York
Actually,
as Gamercow pointed out, it took place in an alternate
Toronto, Canada, presumably in a universe in which it wasn't renamed (from 'York' to 'Toronto') in 1834. In the universe of this story, the city seems to have the rather odd official name of "Muddy York" (which was
one of the nicknames of the real city in the days before asphalt streets).
(I suppose it's also possible that the story took place before 1834, but I don't
think so. It's not just that the whole thing felt like later Victorian times, but also the fact that while Babbage did initially propose his Difference Engine in 1822, even if he had finished it, it's extremely improbable that it would have been done
and copies of it built across the ocean in Toronto within a dozen years.)
As to the accent; Canada was still mostly influenced by Britain in the 19th century - it didn't become its own nation until 1867 and even after that still recognized the UK monarch as its sovereign. There were no mass media to disseminate the US accent to us to the degree that happened once radio came in, and most of our immigration was from the UK (mainly England and Scotland, as the Irish mostly - though not entirely, as the main character in this story attests - went to Newfoundland, which wasn't part of Canada yet), so accents
would, I suspect, have been more similar to English ones than to US ones.
Whether they would have been of the rough street variety that I kept wishing to hear while I was listening to it, is hard to say.
ETA: Credit where credit is due, and a grammar correction
« Last Edit: October 28, 2011, 02:05:11 PM by Wilson Fowlie »
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