Previous installments can be found here. There will be spoilers. “An historian” is a perfectly acceptable Commonwealth convention, haters to the left [side of the road].
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” —Matthew 20:16
Is there a new revolutionary at Downton Abbey? Sarah Bunting, the local leftist schoolteacher, featured prominently in the first episode of the new season. “Here she comes, the Boudica of the North Riding,” Lord Grantham grumbled, comparing Miss Bunting with the Celtic queen who led an uprising against the Roman occupiers of Britain in the first century. But the Romans, of course, won in the end, a point surely not lost on a man who would have been schooled in the classics. Last season in this column I lamented the relative taming of Tom Branson, Irish-socialist-revolutionary turned land agent, and Rose, who has retreated from sexual liberation back into dinner-party intrigues. Can we hope for anything better from Sarah Bunting?
Portrait of Ramsay MacDonald by Solomon Joseph Solomon, 1911
The upending of the social hierarchy was the central theme of the episode (if you could find it beneath the rather tortuous plot twists and the arcane references to details of previous seasons). The Labour Party, which coalesced around the turn of the century out of fairly marginal left-wing and union organizations, formed its first government in January 1924. Ramsay MacDonald, the new prime minister, was the illegitimate son of a farm servant and a ploughman from a small fishing port on the north-east coast of Scotland: the “son of a crofter,” as Lady Mary sniffs. Labour governed as a minority party, though: the Conservatives won the largest share of seats, and Labour only took power because the Liberals declined to form a coalition with the Conservative Party. In a sense, this was the opposite of what happened in the 2010 election that put David Cameron in power. (The banter between Miss Bunting and a dinner party guest about Labour enjoying the support of the “majority of the country” is therefore strangely inaccurate.)
Although MacDonald’s first government only lasted a short nine months, it was the first lapping wave of a tidal change in British politics. The Labour Party grew rapidly and, by World War II, it had almost entirely eclipsed the Liberals on the left wing of British politics. In 1935, historian George Dangerfield wrote a beautiful book on this transformation called The Strange Death of Liberal England. In it, he imagines Liberalism as a moribund structure, the political equivalent of an old man stuck in his habits. Three rebellions, he argues, challenged that structure: the fight for women’s votes, the fight for worker’s rights, and the battle over Ireland. These forces, given strength and coherence by World War I, transformed English society beyond recognition. Julian Fellowes might consider offering Dangerfield a posthumous writer’s credit on Downton Abbey. Ireland, women, war, and workers: these have been the show’s great political forces, too, tranforming and at times threatening to overwhelm the accretion of habit and tradition embodied by the Crawley family, their home, and their servants. In this episode, the rise of workers is at the fore, but as ever, the show leaves us with a clearer sense of revolution’s limits than its possibilities.
Ripon War Memorial
All politics is local, as Massachusetts politician Tip O’Neill famously said. Ripon, Downton’s electoral constituency, elected a Conservative aristocrat in 1923, but Sunday night’s episode offers a miniature version of the rise of Labour when the local war memorial committee chooses Carson, rather than Lord Grantham, as its chairman. Lest we miss the class implications, the committee’s spokeswoman, having made the case that Carson knew the dead soldiers better and is a figure of importance in the village, asks for the milk to be put in her tea first, a sure sign of her humble background.
It’s no accident that Carson’s opportunity comes through a war memorial committee. The Labour Party’s great task, in the 1920s and 1930s, was proving itself to be able to govern on a national level; the Conservatives worked tirelessly to portray the party as sectional and divisive. It was the interwar version of contemporary accusations about class warfare and the tendency of politicians to wrap themselves in flags. The shared sacrifice of World War I was above reproach, a national symbol of communal suffering; observances through memorials and Armistice Day services grew in power in the decades after the war. Carson embodies the sober patriotism of this commemoration. Significantly, his first action in office is to keep the peace between the classes and the masses: he insists that Lord Grantham be offered an ornamental position as patron to the committee.
Sarah Bunting, of course, has no time for any of this. She suggests, at the Crawley’s dinner table, that the village should not spend its money on a permanent memorial to a senseless, horrific, and ultimately futile war. In a flash of his old ways, Branson backs her up: the only good thing to come out of the war, he says, was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ushered in the Soviet Union. Although Russian socialism was still an inspiration to many British leftists at this time, the Labour Party was keen to distance itself from communism. Indeed, accusations that it was subservient to international communism (via the so-called “Zinoviev letter”) may have helped cost the party the election in October 1924.
Even Branson backs off from his fiery speech. He’s embarassed by Miss Bunting’s insistence on meeting the servants, and he apologizes to Lord Grantham. His gesture underscores how unkind Downton Abbey is to its nascent revolutionaries. To return to Dangerfield’s categories: Downton’s feminists have been sidelined by death, romance, and childbirth; its Irish revolutionary has been fairly thoroughly domesticated; will its Labour socialist fare any better? The co-opting of radical leaders and movements by the forces of stability, conservatism, and entrenched power is an old story. In a sense, it’s exactly what Downton Abbey’s left-wing critics dislike most about the show: it takes themes of class conflict and inequality, and it assimilates them into narratives about tradition and enduring but benign hierarchy.
But is this Downton’s fault, or ours? Tony Blair, after all, invented “New Labour” by ending the party’s affiliation with unions and embracing the neoliberal consensus. I have a postcard above my desk, bought at an Anarchist Book Fair in Manchester, that mocks New Labour through a remaking of an old margarine ad: “New Labour: I can’t believe it’s not better,” the postcard proclaims, with a tagline: “Now with 20% real Labour.” What are the costs, for a radical movement, of coming to power? Perhaps Downton’s new revolutionary is not Sarah Bunting at all, but Carson.
***
Sources
George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) (First pub. 1935)
David Marquand, “MacDonald, (James) Ramsay (1866-1937),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn., Sept. 2014
Tags: downton abbey, history, labour party, mo moulton, television, watching downton abbey with an historian
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I think you will be satisfied with the rest of the season.
Oh wow, I actually didn’t read any of the UK coverage of the season so I don’t know what happens yet. Exciting! (And, please forgive any inadvertent foreshadowing.)
“an historian” is for cockneys and the french
Triumphant return of An Historian!!
I am looking forward to a more dramatic Branson…he was very quiet last season.
On another note: Boudica!!!!!!!! was anyone else obsessed with her as a kid??
Very happy to see this column come back! This column is so good at bringing to light subjects that the show’s writers try to gloss over.
I also still (a year on!) think about An Historian’s column last season about the “uneven pattern” of suffering on the show, with the harshest and most graphic violence done against women (miss that column? check it out here! http://the-toast.net/2014/01/15/watching-downton-… ).
Anyway, I’ll look forward to reading future weeks!
Discovered this series of columns only today while I should have been working, and I think the one you linked to is my favourite (if that’s not a weird word to describe a column about sexual violence against women).
I’m also getting serious flashbacks to (and making me miss) my days as an undergrad studying history. I have a little squee every time I recognise a historian’s name…
Found this series of posts today and I’ve read them trough all at once. Awesome posts!
Being raised in social democratic Sweden, what bothers me the most of the political intrigues of Downton actually is this – how the socialist, revolutionary or just liberal characters such as Branson, miss Bunting or Cousin Isobel is tamed or portrayed as unsympathetic. While we are expected to take sides with Lord Grantham, despite his many flaws.
Still really enjoy watching the show though. Just finished the last series and already longing for another!
Aw, thanks!
But the Romans, of course, won in the end, a point surely not lost on a man who would have been schooled in the classics.
I didn’t immediately make the connection, but in addition to Lord Grantham’s invoking Boudica, but in the same episode, when Carson frets over the village honoring him over the Earl, calling it “a shaking of the ground I stand on,” Mrs. Hughes says “They’ve been testing the system since the Romans.” End of an empire, indeed.
I’m covering Downton Abbey for The A.V. Club, and I’m excited —for the season and for the conversation about the season.
I think this is why I still love Downton Abbey. There can be huge plot holes (why is Barrow suddenly bringing the Bates business to a head with Baxter, months later, for example?) and then there are these smart references and resonances.
Also, your column’s point about Daisy’s facility with numbers–spot on. Can we get a visit to Downton by Grace Hopper?
But the Romans, of course, won in the end, a point surely not lost on a man who would have been schooled in the classics.
I didn't immediately make the connection, but in addition to Lord Grantham's invoking Boudica, but in the same episode, when Carson frets over the village honoring him over the Earl, calling it "a shaking of the ground I stand on," Mrs. Hughes says "They've been testing the system since the Romans." End of an empire, indeed.
I'm covering Downton Abbey for The A.V. Club, and I'm excited —for the season and for the conversation about the season.
My takeaway from Downton Abbey has always been that it’s making the point that the modern system is pretty much objectively better than the one that existed then. It opens with one kind of social contract in effect–best exemplified, IMHO, in the scene where Lord Grantham takes Matthew aside and explains to him that Molesley trained to be a valet with the expectation that Downton would employ him, and sacking him just because Matthew feels weird about having a valet would amount to unilaterally rewriting the social contract to Molesley’s detriment. There’s also Mrs. Patmore’s cataract surgery and Cora’s unhesitating, unstinting offer to care for Mrs. Hughes for the rest of her life, during the latter’s cancer scare. The Crawleys are a stand-up family and actually do behave the way aristocrats were supposed to behave, taking care of their people and all–but Lord Grantham is so terrible with money that it’s an open question whether his people are any better off than they would be if they worked for a richer aristocrat with less of a sense of obligation. (Iain Glen’s rich asshole character springs to mind, and how much does anyone want to bet that Shrimpie’s wife isn’t any fun to work for?) The modern welfare state, with universal healthcare and pensions, is a zillion times better way to handle the problems encountered by Mrs. Patmore, Mrs. Hughes, and even poor old Molesley [1]. No one has to be dependent on the lord’s largess and fiscal responsibility.
I do wish they’d delve more into the way that social mores are policed, and by whom, and under what circumstances. I wish they had made the point, during Ethel’s arc in Season 3, that Isobel’s housekeeper treated Ethel like dirt not because she was (necessarily) a bitch but because it was the only way she could establish herself as Respectable(tm). It’s all very well for someone of Isobel’s class to openly associate with ex-prostitutes, but Isobel’s housekeeper had no such social standing. The *only* thing she has is her Respectability(tm), a notoriously precarious asset that she must defend at all costs lest she lose it. If she does not visibly and vocally disapprove of Ethel, then she runs the risk of becoming Not Respectable(tm)–and she’s finished if that happens. Like many marginalized people in an oppressive system, she’s made the rational choice to protect her self-interest by policing other, even more marginalized people.
Also, am I the only one suspicious of Drewe’s motives in raising Marigold? It seemed to me pretty clearly telegraphed during the Season 4 finale that he knew the baby was Lady Edith’s and was openly offering to keep Edith’s secret (so much so that I was surprised that they spelled it out during the season 5 opener), and it came after a multiple-episode arc establishing that the Drewes are way behind on their payments. They only kept the farm by appealing directly to Lord Grantham, right where it hurt–in his sense of tradition–and even then it was a near thing. I think Drewe’s offering to raise Marigold may have been simple kindness, but it may also have been intended to elicit Edith’s gratitude and thereby gain her as an ally in their fight to keep the farm.
Finally, if I read my symbolism right, the house fire means that poor overlooked Edith’s situation has deteriorated to the point where her family can no longer ignore her pain, so hopefully there will be some help and healing for her this season. I really hope Fellowes has her end up living on a private island with a nursery for Marigold and a husband who adores her and a big fat Internet connection for her to blog with and maybe some hot cabana boys or something, because DAMN has she been shat on.
[1] Who, as Lord Grantham predicted, had to start again, at 50, when he lost his job. The old social contract is *already* breaking down. We’re watching it happen onscreen, as when Mrs. Patmore notes that fewer and fewer people are interested in being servants, and Tony Gillingham sheepishly admits he hasn’t hired a new valet because it’s just simpler not to. It’s too late for people of Molesley’s age, but the smarter/younger servants, like Daisy and Alfred and Gwen, are already making plans to *not* be tied to Downton’s fortunes for the rest of their lives.
Really interesting points! I agree that “modern welfare state, with universal healthcare and pensions, is a zillion times better way to handle the problems encountered by Mrs. Patmore, Mrs. Hughes, and even poor old Molesley.” But I wonder if that’s what Julian Fellowes means us to conclude. We haven’t seen the state intervene in any helpful ways: Daisy turns down her widow’s pension, and remember that bizarre sequence in the workhouse? I tend to see Downton as more nostalgic for an ideal (and in reality non-existent) past in which hierarchy and social order worked to everyone’s benefit. But perhaps this season will prove me wrong!
I would totally read a whole book about this, FYI. ::winkwink::