Previous installments in this series can be found here. There will be spoilers. “An historian” is a perfectly acceptable Commonwealth convention, haters to the left [side of the road.]
I’ve been thinking all season about how the state, in Downton Abbey, looms just off-screen. Lord Grantham and his fellow aristocrats are obviously part of a ruling elite, but the modern state itself is generally nearly invisible, just poking its head around for brief and usually implausible moments: in the form of the workhouse, earlier this season, or the police sent to investigate the charges of homosexual conduct against Thomas Barrow, in an earlier season.
What responsibility does society have for its individual members? And what role should the state play in ensuring that those responsibilities are met, and at what cost to individual liberty? These questions animated some of the major political shifts happening in Britain in the early twentieth century, and if you look closely, they’re also animating several of Downton’s narrative arcs.
Before World War I, there were two main parties in British politics: the Conservatives (colloquially, the Tories) and the Liberals. In the immediate pre-war years, the Liberals, led by H. H. Asquith, were dominant. In 1909, then-chancellor David Lloyd George proposed the so-called “People’s Budget,” which introduced new taxes on income and land in order to pay for a variety of new social welfare measures. The House of Lords vetoed the budget, leading to an epic electoral showdown featuring Lloyd George touring the country in support of his budget. It passed the next year, and in 1911, the Liberals passed the Parliament Act, ending the Lords’ veto power forever. It was a ‘nuclear option’ far beyond those dreamed of by our current legislators.
The new Liberal budget provided measures to deal with a range of social ills—the new old age pension was, touchingly, nicknamed the “Lloyd George.” It represented the legislative manifestation of a fundamental shift in ideas about the responsibility of the government to the people, and about the necessity to tax the wealthy in order to pay for welfare programs. It’s no accident that Lloyd George is the only politician consistently name-checked by Downton characters: his brand of Liberalism was fundamentally opposed to the paternalist noblesse oblige espoused by Lord Grantham.
The clash between the new Liberalism and traditional conservatism is dramatized by Lady Mary and Mr. Blake. As Mr. Blake retorts to Lady Mary before their epic pig-sty bonding moment, “Mr. Lloyd George is more concerned with feeding the population than rescuing the aristocracy.” After my column on aristocracy, a friend e-mailed to ask if the landed estates could have been economically sustainable without the heavy death duties and taxes. The answer depends, in part, on how much suffering and insecurity you’re willing to tolerate among the poorest people. Is it worth it to sell off some of Downton Abbey, if it means unemployment insurance for Molesley and an old-age pension for Mrs. Patmore once her sight finally fails?
But by 1922, the Liberal Party was in deep trouble. Lloyd George became Prime Minister in 1916, earning the nickname ‘The Man Who Won the War,” but he led an increasingly conservative coalition government. Dissident Liberals led by Asquith opposed the coalition on a variety of grounds, including its bloody counter-insurgency war in Ireland. Tom Branson, former socialist, is understandably lukewarm about going to see a coalition Liberal MP speak in Ripon, and he’s rightly skeptical of the politician’s claim that the split in the party is unimportant. In fact, the party would lose power permanently by the end of the year, and would be eclipsed by the rise of the Labour Party. Tom is picking a good moment to return to politics, if he wants to return to his socialist roots.
The state looms over Lady Edith, too, though in a very different way. In 1922, abortion was still illegal in England. It had first become a statutory offence in 1803; the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act imposed the most severe penalties in Europe for attempting to procure an abortion, up to imprisonment for life. Yet abortion, like birth control, was common in these years, and was increasingly an acceptable subject for public discourse.
Numbers are obviously quite difficult to obtain, but most women probably would have used abortifacient drugs, often prescribed and advertised as a means of ‘regulating’ or ‘restoring’ menstruation rather than as inducing abortion. Given that pregnancy was popularly not regarded to have begun in earnest until quickening, or the first movement of the fetus, the distinction would have been blurry in any case. Instrumental procedures, such as the one that Lady Edith sought, were more clear-cut, though the law was still difficult to enforce, and medical practitioners, especially men, were usually able to argue that the procedure was a necessary treatment.
Aunt Rosamund’s skepticism and low lighting shroud the clinic visited by Lady Edith in an air of unsavory mystery, and there were certainly amateurs at work in this field: it is a chilling fact that many prosecutions for detected abortion were unable to proceed because the woman was dead. Still, a woman of Lady Edith’s status and connections would have had better options. Many doctors apparently referred their patients to Dr. Daniel Powell, who had twice between acquitted of manslaughter; women from around the country attended his funeral in 1938, and even a detective who followed him admitted: “he was a great hearted and fearless man whose work was directed by the highest motives.” Dr. Laura Sanders-Bliss was less successful in avoiding the law: after a police raid on her practice, she was struck from the medical register and sentenced to three years penal servitude in 1936. Yet at the same time, case law supported the use of therapeutic abortion, and juries were generally reluctant to convict accused medical practitioners.
Those who argued, in the interwar decades, for more thoroughgoing prosecution of abortion sometimes cited the state’s interest in increasing the size and health its population. This argument was doomed to failure. Abortion was legalized in England in 1967, the same year that homosexual acts in private between men over the age of 21 was decriminalized. In both cases, privacy was a central concern: the notion that there were realms of private life into which the state should not venture. Lord Grantham, of course, might have seen the Liberal Party’s reforms as intrusions into the private running of his estate and his personal relationships with tenants and employees. Downton Abbey is ultimately a drama of private life, obsessed with domestic details and passing lightly over the politics of the day. But the boundaries between public and private are never so clearly drawn; the power of the state seeps into the most personal of relationships, for good and for ill.
Sources
Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England 1900-1967 (London: Croom Helm, 1988)
John Keown, Abortion, Doctors, and the Law: Some Aspects of the Legal Regulation of Abortion in England from 1803 to 1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Tags: downton abbey, history, mo moulton, television, watching downton abbey with an historian
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On the 96th Anniversary of the Halifax Explosion
I would actually love some kind of explanation of what exactly Mr. Blake and his more toff-ish coworker are doing in their tour of the North? Not that there’s necessarily a “real” explanation for it, I guess. From the air of anxiety they induce, you’d think they were inspecting all the estates in preparation for nationalizing them, but obviously that’s not what’s up. But if not, then … what?
“Well, we really must think of something because it’s going to be rather a special occasion. They are nationalizing the monasteries. But if they offer you one, don’t take it because if Bloody Mary gets in they’ll be de-nationalized.”
Flanders & Swann 4eva
Was anyone else disappointed when Edith didn’t go through with the abortion? God, I would like just one show, other than “Maude” 30 years ago, to honestly depict an abortion. And come on, it would have been very interesting to see Edith deal with the aftermath, emotionally, especially if what’s-his-face resurfaces. Much more so than yet another child-out-of-wedlock scandal or miscarriage.
UGH, when shows do the “convenient miscarriage” thing. I actually stop watching shows now if they do that, I find it so repugnant and cheap.
It’s demeaning to women who have experienced pregnancy losses, it’s a cop-out to avoid backlash from forced-birthers, and it’s a pathetic device to insert some DRAMA into sweeps week.
CAN WE AGREE that Lady Grantham’s miscarriage was great, though? (If miscarriages can be called great. Which they can’t. I rescind this comment. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.)
Delightfully sinister that miscarriage
I enjoyed the miscarriage, but I enjoyed even more watching O’Brien’s shrivel up a little more each time she thought about it, or meant to bring it up to Cora.
Cora’s miscarriage didn’t feel like a convenient cop-out to me. She’s 40 years old, and they’ve presumably had a history of fertility problems. (They must have been trying for a son and heir for years.) So there’s some basic plausibility there that makes it seem less cheap on the part of the writers.
YES! Dammit Edith!
At least say it’s because you’re afraid of dying. Surely you can’t believe the lame-oid “He might come back” excuse that Aunt Rosamund flung like so many turds or the over done “What about the baby?” routine.
Oh well, Julian Fellowes is an old white dude, soooo
This piling on Edith thing is also getting ridiculous. Left at the altar, abandoned by her sketchy boyfriend, now pregnant? Come on. Can’t she just be having a delightfully transgressive career as a lady journalist?
Truest point made.
This is what I call, “Edith is why we can never have nice things!”
Or is it: we are why Edith can never have nice things?
Touché, Mo Moulton. Touché.
Friday Night Lights actually did an abortion storyline with a high school student which was well done.
Tami Taylor forever cemented as a TV heroine for that storyline.
I could not have been more surprised or gratified by that turn of events.
And Shonda Rhimes has at least three characters who have had abortions, one of whom had two as central plotlines, not to mention abortion providers
UGH so disappointed. But not surprised.
A few years ago after watching yet another popular character on yet another popular TV show [to avoid spoilers, I won’t ID the show] visit an abortionist’s office, The Fella (a bonafide TV critic and an especially astute viewer) said “I can’t believe she went through with it!”
I blandly retorted “She didn’t. In a few episodes, she’ll start to show.” And she did, and this did contribute to his longheld view that I might be a witch whose very specialized powers empower her to accurately predict unlikely and specific long-arc dramatic narrative twists.
But I finally had to come clean and explain that this wasn’t even a tough prediction, at least not for female viewers who are paying attention to the implications imputed to fictional women’s choices. “We almost never get to see a sympathetic character have an abortion,” I pointed out. “Sympathetic female characters have babies or miscarriages or late-period false alarms. They don’t have abortions; they have second thoughts.”
I am still to the left, always to the left of an imperfect acceptance.
Tami Taylor forever cemented as a TV heroine for that storyline.
UGH so disappointed. But not surprised.
A few years ago after watching yet another popular character on yet another popular TV show [to avoid spoilers, I won't ID the show] visit an abortionist's office, The Fella (a bonafide TV critic and an especially astute viewer) said "I can't believe she went through with it!"
I blandly retorted "She didn't. In a few episodes, she'll start to show." And she did, and this did contribute to his longheld view that I might be a witch whose very specialized powers empower her to accurately predict unlikely and specific long-arc dramatic narrative twists.
But I finally had to come clean and explain that this wasn't even a tough prediction, at least not for female viewers who are paying attention to the implications imputed to fictional women's choices. "We almost never get to see a sympathetic character have an abortion," I pointed out. "Sympathetic female characters have babies or miscarriages or late-period false alarms. They don't have abortions; they have second thoughts."
I had to save this episode of “Downton Abbey” for almost a week before watching it, which means I also had the pleasure of saving this article for several days of delicious anticipation. Thank you, Mo Moulton!
I had to save this episode of "Downton Abbey" for almost a week before watching it, which means I also had the pleasure of saving this article for several days of delicious anticipation. Thank you, Mo Moulton!
I could not have been more surprised or gratified by that turn of events.
I feel like Sybil would have gone through with the abortion though.
In secret.