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.] The things that bother me most about Downton Abbey are not simply about historical accuracy. I think that historical accuracy is a complicated issue and not actually easy to get right. How do you write dialogue for characters that would have used slang that would…

As an historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and Ireland, I resisted watching Downton Abbey for a long time. I’ve been immersed in the 1920s and the 1930s for over a decade, and I was afraid it would be like seeing all of my favorite books made into one terrible movie, every single week. I also didn’t want to be that cranky person in the corner pointing out anachronisms that don’t really matter to…