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].
Downton Abbey has become a show about fundamentally nice people. The villains were never all that villainous, it’s true; but O’Brien is a distant memory (fired in India?) and even Thomas, cleansed, apparently, by Baxter’s generosity, is now fighting on the side of the angels.
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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].
The beloved dog Isis, a yellow Labrador whose tail graced the opening sequence of every episode, has died. Last week, Cora and Robert let her sleep in bed between them on her last night; this week, we saw Lord Grantham ordering a headstone for her. Although it’s not depicted, we can imagine that the memorial will join a well-established pet cemetery at Downton.
The eminent historian of animals Harriet Ritvo has argued that, even before Charles Darwin pointed out that monkeys are our cousins, the line between human and animal had long been blurred: “determining the point where unlikeness became more significant than likeness had always been problematic.” Dogs have filled a dizzying array of roles in British society: as hunters, workers, companions, and entertainment. Loving dogs became a characteristic feature of the English by the end of the nineteenth century, an image fostered by the new animal protection movement, and breeding and showing dogs became an increasingly popular pastime.
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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].
Lady Rose, blonde, pink, and charming, is the embodiment of the “English rose” ideal. In Sybil’s absence, she’s also become Downton’s main force of multiculturalism. Last season, she enjoyed a flirtation with Jack Ross, the black American jazz singer. But that relationship was a leap too far, apparently. This season, she’s linked instead with a wealthy, fair, handsome Englishman endowed with only one vector of difference: he’s Jewish.
Atticus Aldridge’s family came to England from Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, fleeing waves of pogroms there against Jews. They joined a religious community with a long history in England. In 1290, Edward I expelled the Jews of England, a group which had dwindled to about two thousand in the face of rising persecution. At the urging of radical Puritans who believed that the conversion of Jews was linked to ultimate redemption, Jews were allowed to resettle in England beginning in 1656.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, about seven to eight thousand Jews lived in England, mainly London; they were largely descendants of Ashkenazi immigrants from elsewhere in Europe. They worked mainly as traders, peddlers, and shopkeepers. Historian Todd Endelman offers an evocative catalogue of the wares associated with them: “oranges and lemons, spectacles, costume jewelry, sponges, dried rhubarb, lead pencils, inexpensive framed pictures” in London, and in the countryside, “shoe buckles, watches, watch chains, rings, snuff boxes, crystal buttons, shirt buckles.” Charles Dickens twisted this context to draw the anti-Semitic portrait of Fagin, the fence and pick-pocket chief of Oliver Twist (1838).
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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].
My heart constricts whenever Thomas Barrow comes onscreen. He’s manipulative, scheming, and consistently creepy, but he’s the only recurring gay character. I wouldn’t like him if I knew him in person, but I have to root for him; that’s what limited representation means. And I hate the show a little bit more each time he’s made to enact homophobic tropes even while he ostensibly shores up Downton’s tolerant, liberal reputation.
In the last few episodes, we’ve seen Thomas growing ever sicker, while injecting a mysterious substance in his room on the sly. He answered an advertisement and went to London, under the pretense of an ill father. This week, we learned that he went to receive electrotherapy to make him attracted to women instead of men; the injection and pills, apparently placebos, were supposed to further the “treatment.” His illness is the result of non-sterile equipment causing infection. After breaking down and asking Baxter for help, he’s treated compassionately by Dr. Clarkson, who reveals that he’s been the victim of quackery and urges him to bear his burden bravely rather than seek, hopelessly, to change his nature.
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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].
Lord Grantham, I think, is a closet Liberal. Underneath the huffing and puffing, the dress uniforms, the autocrat-of-the-dinner-table antics, and the decision to deal with Simon Bricker by taking a swing at him, there beats the heart of a moderate progressive interested in development economics. I write this as someone with a guilty fondness for Lord Grantham, it’s true; but stay with me, there’s a real case to be made here. I offer two case studies from the last two weeks.
Case one: Lord Grantham is a Keynesian, at least when it comes to the Versailles Treaty. Last week, he and Lady Edith discussed a trial involving the Brownshirts, the German paramilitary organization associated with the new Nazi Party, from which, we presume, more will be learned about the fate of Michael Gregson, Edith’s erstwhile lover. With the grave prescience available only to characters in historical fiction, he added: “But I’m afraid we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. We pushed Germany too hard with our demands after the war.”
This is, of course, exactly the case made by economist John Maynard Keynes in his famous 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The treaty imposed by the victors in World War I, he argued, chose vengeance over reconstruction and thus committed themselves to ongoing instability rather than peace. He bemoaned rampant inflation in Germany, Italy, and the successor states to Austria-Hungary and the resulting human suffering, including widespread famine. And he warned of hunger’s consequences, as those driven to “a mad despair” might “overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual.”
...Read MorePrevious 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].
Edith and Percy Thompson were lower-middle-class residents of a London suburb, entirely ordinary until the day in 1922 when Edith’s younger lover, the sailor Freddy Bywaters, arrived unexpectedly at their home and stabbed Percy to death. Despite the total lack of evidence that Mrs. Thompson knew anything about the attack in advance, she was jointly charged and ultimately executed for the murder because of letters she had sent her lover that included some fantasies about poisoning her husband. A snappy dresser and a keen businesswoman in the hat trade, by age 28 Mrs. Thompson had no children, but spent her leisure time at respectable dances held in halls or hotels. Her letters to her lover were expressive and highly sexual, even apparently describing orgasm in terms that echo Marie Stopes: “It seems a great welling up of love—of feeling, of inertia, just as if I am wax in your hands…” These letters, in their sensuality as well as their imagined violence, effectively condemned Mrs. Thompson, who was hanged despite a paucity of evidence. Historian Lucy Bland describes Mrs. Thompson as “a woman who made her own choices and acted on her own desires,” but who was ultimately put on trial, in court as well as in public, for her sexuality rather than her deeds. She was, therefore, an apt representative of the modern woman in the 1920s, liberated but also constrained by profound fears about sex and sexuality.
Like other romances, Downton Abbey is fuelled by the marriage plot. In the first few seasons, we followed, in great detail, the waxing and waning of the marriage prospects of the three sisters, Mary, Edith, and Sybil. The marriage plot, of course, ends with the wedding, or perhaps with a soft-focus epilogue of married bliss. If you had stopped watching around the time of Sybil’s death in childbirth, it would have seemed that Mary got her happily-ever-after ending, Sybil’s rebellion ended in tragedy, and Edith was to be condemned to that twilit zone of non-reality where the marriage plot consigns the women who marry neither well nor poorly but not at all.
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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].
In 1914, a lance-sergeant from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps deserted the army after a battle and sought refuge in a nearby French village. He was arrested in March 1915; although he had difficulty answering simple questions and eventually explained that he had had a nervous breakdown, he was shot at dawn on March 23, at the age of twenty-six. He was just one of the victims of a strict Army discipline that feared mutiny above all, disregarded the mental toll of war, and believed that exemplary executions could encourage obedience.
During World War I, some 3,000 British soldiers were convicted of cowardice, desertion, or other crimes; 306 of them were executed for cowardice or desertion specifically. In an earlier season of Downton Abbey, we learned that Mrs. Patmore’s nephew, Archie Philpotts, was one of those shot for cowardice. Now, as villages and cities erect war memorials to honor the dead, the question of how to deal with this uncomfortable legacy has surfaced.
Various forms of commemoration, including the observance of Armistice Day and the building of war memorials, flourished in the decade after 1918. The bodies of those killed in World War I were buried in the countries where they died, overseen, in Britain’s case, by the Imperial War Graves Commission. This absence perhaps gave a greater impetus to the local efforts to provide physical monuments where people could read the names of the dead. The portrayal of the process in Downton Abbey is quite accurate. As Alex King has demonstrated, local committees were designed to representative and inclusive, but large landowners also took part. Lord Grantham is perhaps modeled, in this case, on the real Yorkshire landowner Lord Derwent, who proposed an obelisk “in some conspicuous place” and who took on the burden of paying the extra cost when the price of stone rose. The Imperial War Museum’s War Memorials Archive lists nearly 44,000 memorials related to World War I.
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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].
A spectre is haunting Downton Abbey. It is the spectre of the Russian Revolution.
In last week’s episode, Tom Branson described the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the only worthwhile thing to come out of World War I. This week, we learn that Rose is planning to become involved in relief efforts for Russian refugees in York, and Lord Grantham and Tom butt heads again on the subject. The episode is almost deliberately expository, even falling back on what can only be described as Corapedia: when, for instance, Lord Grantham calls Miss Bunting a “tinpot Rosa Luxemburg,” Cora helpfully explains that Luxemburg was a “German communist who was shot and thrown in the canal.” Why this sudden, intense interest in Soviet affairs, in a show that’s usually so insular it barely leaves the grounds of the Abbey itself?
The Russian Revolution of 1917 shocked a generation. A series of uprisings over the course of that year overthrew the Tsarist autocracy and replaced it with a communist government led by the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin. In July 1918, the Tsar and his family were executed, though rumors that his youngest daughter, seventeen-year-old Anastasia, might have survived circulated for decades. The revolution removed Russia from World War I, sparked years of civil war between revolutionary (Red) and counter-revolutionary (White) forces, laid the foundations for the USSR, and fueled wild fears and hopes around the world.
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