Middle class Downtime
I’ve managed to avoid most of that vile revisionist nonsense known as Downton Abbey. I mean – it isn’t even a proper Abbey and not really a stately home either. It’s not even a Television series - it’s been labeled as a soap with no hope. What it really is, is an exercise in lemon scented class driven romanticism, centered around the well- heeled Etonian canon-fodder stompers somewhere between World War One and the Abdication.
The carefully chosen narratives romanticize the working class as never before - I’m thinking Her Benny on diazepam here. Inadvertently, the writers remind us of the halcyon times when those awful suburbs hadn’t yet been invented – the ones that housed the gauche middle classes and their misplaced social views. Hurrah for the then halcyon period of English drama before social reform stole the hearts and drives of the subservient working class. Poor people dying and suffering had BIG currency up to this point - go read some Dickens - the finest literature before that awful Marxist ideology crept in …
Back then, the arrogant rich thought that they would never topple. The poor scumbags (my ancestors) had no intention of going anyplace in the foreseeable future - they’d been wedged up that same chimney of abject poverty since time began. Hell, the rich and the poor ‘got along’ back then according to all the revisionism - and ‘everyone knew their place’. A mythical marriage made in history.
But the invention of the middle class also gave way to a completely stand-alone brand of bitterness. They were desperate to be caring towards the poor and socially mobile, when all the time they knew that they could not be both. Of course they claimed they were Fabians and Socialists and the rest, but they would have loved to have a go on a real crown. Because the middle classes could not mobilise themselves upwards (they would have to marry into the aristocracy) they assisted the poor to spite the rich. They did this by rushing social reform through the house right under the noses of the Edwardian Lords who were still smarting from the prolapsed empire as it gradually slipped away.
Today there is a feeling that the middle classes themselves are ebbing away. All those values and three story terraces on nicer streets are finally falling into disrepair. They've all over-extended themselves, and now all those tenured lectureships and socialworking posts are being offered to part timers who’ll do it up the back alley for a Mars bar and zilch pension rights. In a way I’ll be so glad when they are once again extinct and the poor can just live out our Downton Abbey avatars and doff our caps at the squire all over again.
Downdraws Abbey skillfully reminds us that we (the born poor) used to know our place in the world. And we were once damn grateful to be around those baronial types in their palaces. Although, occasionally, a pikey would be asked for one’s opinion, but only when it could be used as some sort of reference tool or barometer for something grander, something to be considered then tossed aside as the feeling arose.
I wish the recently departed Debbo’ Mitford-Devonshire would have figured in the stream of things. I would have loved to see Downton Abbey full of English Fascists and Blackshirts - taking high tea with Dowager countess of Grantham. With Grantham later to become Margaret Thatcher’s stomping ground. (nice heads-up there, Downton.)
Of course today, Downton Abbey the building, would be an international business centre populated by the very ancestors of the same industrial capitalists - but this time as paying guests. It is to this class that the then middle classes migrated. A place where an economic slump has the same ring as losing a colony. Leaving only - yes the lower and the upper classes. With the monarch on the top of the pile and everyone below cow-towing upwards with their values as buffers of social consciousness, never again will they promise the poor things like education, health care; and culture.
Of course, the other side of the pond LOVES Downton. America responds to the feeling of something that is forbidden within a capitalist society. The feeling of entitlement and history they never had until they threw out the British. It’s a good way to imagine the whole race thing away for white American precolonialists. But they seem to love the curtseying and preening and references to the monarch. Perhaps they realise that within Downton, that their nation would soon take over the new world order and, for a while, kill off the arrogance of royal entitlement - only to reapply it on its own terms later in the century with government ‘agencies’.
The romanticism of this Edwardian system knows
no bounds. Don’t forget, it was also a time when all those
Harrovian/Sandhurstian/chinless nincompoops went over to Northern France - as
clueless as everyone else as to what the First World War actually entailed.
Once there, they endlessly sent lines of regional Tommies over the trench wall because
they knew of nothing else to do. Had they been better prepared for a modern war,
these chaps would have come up with a more effective way of protecting themselves
and their class – something they are adept at only with the right preparation.
Published version HERE
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