“Jumping the shark” is an idiom used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery. It is synonymous with the phrase, “the beginning of the end.” —Wikipedia
It is puzzling that there should be no close equivalent in other European cultures for the English country house drama, as known through novel, film, television series, and the stage.
n+abbey.jpg)
English it is—not, for once, more correctly British. A Scottish country house would imply a very different kind of story, while a Welsh country house (on any great scale) is a rarity. The French and Germans have their country houses in plenty, but are too discreet to prompt such universal fiction. Steam trains do not draw up at local Spanish or Italian stations, bringing the weekend guests. There are few manservants laying out the clothes before dinner in Belgium. One wonders really how Europe managed at all.
The greatest rival to the English country house tradition is the Russian, with its rich suggestions of a feudal system in decline, and with its great questions hanging in the air: How shall I live to some purpose? How can I reform the world I know? Those who ask such questions may be querulous and ineffectual, but the questions themselves are intelligent and profound, whereas the great questions that hang over the English country house come, for the most part, from the far side of stupid: Can I score a personal triumph at the flower show while forgoing first prize for my roses? Can I secure my lord’s affection by pretending to go rescue his dog? (The answer Downto(w)n Abbey offers is yes in both cases.)
Among the by-products of the series, one book stands out, Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs, which in its latest incarnation bears the subtitle “The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey.”
Powell was born in 1907, and what she describes in this memoir is an early life in service in the years after World War I, in London and on the south coast of England (nothing nearly as glamorous as Downto(w)n Abbey). First published in 1968, this appears to be a very honorable example of the editor’s art (the copyright line is shared with the dedicatee, Leigh Crutchley).
Powell had as a child won a scholarship that her parents’ poverty prevented her taking up. Work as a kitchen maid came as a prelude to marriage and motherhood. The impulse to resume her education came from the desire to keep up with the conversations of her children, simply to understand what they were discussing when they talked about history, astronomy, or French. Clearly Powell had narrowly missed, in early life, the chance to become a teacher. So this is a book about class. Clearly, too, wherever her education had taken her, she would have been forced to choose between marriage and a job. Married women simply didn’t go out to work, then, she reminds us: “Working-class husbands bitterly resented the very thought that their wives should have to work outside the home. It seemed to cast a slur on the husband and implied that he wasn’t capable of keeping you.”
A tribute then to the achievements of adult education.
9 comments:
Downstairs Abbey, brought to you by Carnival Films/NBC Universal, ‘nough said.
"Our weekly suds"?
NEVER dull Ms. Edna. Thanks.
Class and caste have been very much on my mind of late. Neo-feudalism, et. al. There's a subtlety to the English experience that eludes us here, though I am sure that, in many quarters, some are anxious for us to catch up (with their own under-stairs help). Agreed, here's to the achievements of adult education!
There’ll Always Be An England
—Vera Lynn
…even if it’s in Hollywood.
—Bob Hope
How lucky can you get?
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
- Benjamin Franklin—at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation—in the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention.
Thanks for the post I was hoping someone would voice a sober thought.
'nuf said!
The Eagle and the Crown…
Ah, we Americans and our neverending fascination with British aristocracy.
It seems paradoxical that, more than 200 years after our successful rebellion against the Crown, British aristocracy retains a hold on the American imagination.
Reverence for the monarchy was so embedded in colonial American culture that, for many, republicanism was embraced only with reluctance. George III had once been revered by his American subjects and, even once the war with Britain was underway and the breach had become irreparable, many still harbored monarchical sentiments. Pragmatism rather than principle was the underpinning of the republic, the influence of Paine notwithstanding. More than that, some Americans were unable to conceptualise how the new nation could function without the magic of royalty as a binding agent – and so Federalists lavished levées and lavish dinners on that most unlikely of surrogate kings, George Washington.
This is an argument which runs contrary to popular historical consciousness in the United States, and even, to some extent, to the prevailing historiography on the Revolution, much of which continues to emphasise its radicalism. It seems to me, however, to capture an important truth about the enduring conservatism of the new republic, or at least of important sub-cultures within it.
The whiff of glamour attached to even the most undashing aristocrats and the utter devotion shown seems to suggest that there is something inherent in royal titles. This has secured successive generations of British aristocrats and their families an automatic place in the pantheon of those whose lives have been idolised, dissected and romanticised in the American media.
One valuable service Downton Abby provides is to demonstrate how the United States views the aristocracy through the lens of an imagined England.
Whether or not tales of British aristocracy retains its own special relationship with the American people, these programs offers an interesting and in some ways revealing sidelight on American political culture. We Americans have dreaded, as well as being drawn to, change; our faith in the future has always been balanced by a ‘devotion to precedent, a love of ancient ritual, a toleration of inherited privilege, a fondness for dynastic families, a regard for titles, and deference to their head of state. It is for this insight, even more than for its delightfully soapy quality, that this program should be welcomed.
Hear, hear Bill. Well written.
Post a Comment