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.] This, our last post of the season, was brought to you by an enthusiastic reader in honour of her sister Dr. J’s birthday this Friday.
This is a history column, and I’m not an entertainment critic, but it must be said: the season finale (the Christmas special, in the UK) of Downton Abbey was pretty weak. The verbal sparring between Cousin Violet and Cora’s mother was catty and unconvincing; the Barrow-Branson intrigue was simply bizarre (clenched fists?); and the stolen letter plot made very little sense and didn’t even redeem Bates.
Things were equally grim in the realm of historical detail. Foreshadowing is also a tricky thing when you’re dealing with real historical figures; it’s good to know, though, that Lady Mary absolutely won’t be surprised, in a dozen years, when the Prince of Wales takes up with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Aunt Rosamund might have a touch of clairvoyance, too, when regretting the lack of binding legal documents around the adoption of Lady Edith’s daughter: adoption would not be formally recognized under English law until 1927. Finally, this is a matter of opinion, but I found it impossible to believe that Lord Grantham would be so puritanical when it came to Tom Branson’s sex life. A wink, a nudge, and a word to the wise about keeping village girls out of the sight of nosy servants would have been much more in line with the masculine sexual ethics of the day.
So why did I enjoy watching the show this season, and why am I glad that there will be a fifth season (besides the chance to read your excellent comments)? There’s no denying Downton’s popularity: season four’s debut was watched by some nine million in the UK and over ten million in the US. Obviously, there’s a potent pleasure to be found in the combination of nostalgia, class tourism, and sheer visual luxury offered by Downton. (Hardly an episode goes by when my friends and I don’t exclaim over some wardrobe item or other—Branson’s driving gloves or Harold’s two-tone shoes, for the masculine-of-center among us; Daisy’s pink seaside dress or the presentation gowns for the feminine.) But what, exactly, is underpinning this pleasure?
Touring country houses has been a staple of respectable recreation at least since Elizabeth Bennet fortuitously encounters Mr. Darcy while touring his estate at Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice. As Peter Mandler has demonstrated, country houses were increasingly opened to visitors during the Victorian era: perhaps 100 houses were publicly advertised as open to visitors by the 1860s, and they attracted thousands of visitors. Yet by the era of Downton few of them were still open; anti-landlord sentiment and economic hard times combined to turn the mood against this kind of tourism. After World War II, interest returned, and this time the government and the National Trust (founded in 1895) worked together to use tourism, planning, and tax concessions to save country houses.
Some critics of the ‘heritage industry’, as it’s been dubbed, find it inherently, insidiously conservative. Touring country houses upholds the oppressive class hierarchies of the past, this argument runs, and tends to emphasize a small-c conservatism as well: valuing the preservation of what once was, rather than seeking innovation or change. Downton is often criticized on these grounds, with some justification. The show asks viewers to sympathize with a family openly clinging to hereditary privilege and disproportionate wealth without any particular display of talent or aptitude. We are invited to side with Mr. Carson when he puts Molesley in his place, and with Mrs. Hughes when she shames Edna Braithwaite. Lady Mary’s business acumen is in the service of her son, and Lady Edith’s rebellion is in the service of bearing her baby and raising her, if at a distance.
I think that’s all true, as far as it goes, but also that it fails to get at the heart of the show’s appeal. PBS viewers, after all, are not known for their enthusiasm to reinstate Victorian values, à la Margaret Thatcher. Rather, I think that Downton also appeals because of its ability to challenge the neo-Victorian values of our own time with a vision of a romanticized communal past.
Take Tom Branson, for example. On arrival at Downton, he was a radical socialist, borrowing Ruskin and Mill from Lord Grantham’s library and espousing the ideas of more advanced theorists, in addition, of course, to initiating a romantic relationship with Lady Sybil. But his sharp edges are smoothed by Downton. His effort to be a conscientious objector is thwarted by a minor medical defect. There’s a brief moment when he looks like he might be a dangerous Irish terrorist ready to kill a visiting general, but even that turns out to be a domesticated, pastoral threat: he was only going to throw some mud and motor oil. By season four, he’s become the estate agent, still interested in moderate Liberalism (or perhaps Labourism) but no longer the fire-breather he once was.
Tediously, the show rehearses Branson’s sense of not ‘belonging’ to Downton’s elite social world. But really, he’s almost entirely incorporated, to the point of turning in Rose for her socially inappropriate affair apparently without irony. There’s certainly a conservative arc here. But it’s equally striking that Lord Grantham and his family are portrayed as capable of absorbing Tom Branson despite national, ideological, religious, and class differences. It’s a vision of multi-cultural harmony, in a sense, very much at odds with the harsh rhetoric on immigrants currently in ascendency in Britain (and, of course, in the United States as well).
Downton functions like a utopian community in other respects, too. The characters, upstairs and downstairs, are tightly bound through gestures of reciprocal care. Lord Grantham helped Mr. Drewe hold onto his father’s tenancy on the estate; in turn, Mr. Drewe will keep Lady Edith’s secret and raise her child. Mr. Bates forges and steals to help Lord Grantham recover the purloined royal letter; Lady Mary, recognizing his loyalty to their family, burns the evidence that might point to Mr. Bates’s having murdered his wife’s attacker. Isobel unbends enough to attend the festivities in London, recognizing that her role in the family outweighs her disinclination toward such events. Visually, two couples anchor the season’s end. Tom Branson dancing with Cousin Violet signals the transcendence of difference; Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes holding hands wading into the sea provides reassurance of stability and continuity.
Much of the work of this column has been to measure Downton Abbey against our understanding of historical realities in the 1920s. But in the end, of course, the show is much more meaningful in its present context: it is not a time capsule but an antique mirror, reflecting current anxieties and aspirations in the fancy dress of another era. It conveys a certain conservatism, and even more, a certain lack of imagination in challenging some of the tropes, especially about women and violence, that dominate modern culture. But it also provides a deeply appealing vision of a communal way of life, one built adaptation and flexibility as well as tradition and structure. The wealthy, at Downton, accept their privileges, but they accept social obligations towards the lower classes, too, without rancor. Difference may rankle, but it is ultimately absorbed and reconciled. Downton Abbey’s pleasures may be simple, but the comfort of the world it portrays says much, I think, about the inadequacies of punitive discourses about poverty and immigration in our own world. And so despite its failings, this historian will keep on watching.
Sources
Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen London, 1987)
Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory Vol. I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994)
