British Accent Shadowing | Bleak House | Learn RP Pronunciation – Part 1

Welcome to British Accent Shadowing — a place to practise RP pronunciation,

intonation, and the natural rhythm of British English through classic literature.

Today we begin a new series using Bleak House by Charles Dickens — a

richly textured novel full of atmosphere, elegance, and insight into Victorian life.

I’ll first read the passage in full so you can simply listen. Then we’ll go line by line so you

can shadow each phrase and refine your accent, clarity, and fluency. Finally, we’ll go through

the whole passage again together at natural speed. There’s a free PDF download in the description if

you’d like to follow along. Alright, let’s get started.

London.

Michaelmas term lately over,

and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.

Implacable November weather.

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly

retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful

to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so,

waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle,

with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—

gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.

Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper,

and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers

have been slipping and sliding since the day broke—

(if this day ever broke)— adding new deposits to the

crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those

points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere.

Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows;

fog down the river,

where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping

and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.

Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs;

fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships;

fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.

Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners,

wheezing by the firesides of their wards;

fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin;