everythingzoomer.com SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019 (^) – 77
OR SIX SEASONS, starting in 2010,
Downton Abbey’s meticulous
production values offered a
sublime evocation of a rarefied milieu.
Foregrounding the fortunes of a fictional
aristocratic Crawley family and their
servants, it captured a disappearing way
of living during a period of radical change
not only in Britain but in the world.
During a worldwide economic downturn,
the workings of Downton’s closed bygone
society offered audiences an idealized
escapism. Beyond the undeniable pageantry
of this exotic social landscape, however, there was
a historical timeline, however faint, that enlivened
the melodramatic plots. It was a grand story deeply
nostalgic for the voyeurism of etiquette, gorgeous
costumes and gracious living in lavish ancestral houses.
It was also a front-row seat to the slow disintegration to
the beginning of the end of hereditary privilege and the
British class system.
Period dramas and the historic events they choose to
highlight through plots ripped from the headlines of
the day often reflect the preoccupations of the era in
which they’re made. That’s truer than ever as creator
Julian Fellowes revisits the Crawley clan this month
with a Downton Abbey movie that picks up shortly after
the series left off. Many of the issues that provided the
background for the cultural phenomenon are still
relevant and urgently haunt the present.
Staunch Victorian Violet, dowager countess
Grantham (Maggie Smith) embodied the old elit-
ist ways and clucked with disapproval (and starchy
commentary) along the way. In the last season, her
below-stairs counterpart Carson retired (from work
but presumably as much from disgust over diminish-
ing standards) but, in the movie, the head butler re-
turns to help prepare for – what else? – a visit from
King George V and Queen Mary. The royal visit could
be the last hurrah because the million-pound question
is whether Downton Abbey itself can remain a going
concern. (Or as one-percenter Violet sniffed in the last
episode, heavy with foreshadowing: “The future is no
ladies’ maids at all, but we haven’t quite got there.”)
Past the pomp and ritual of polished silver in stately
drawing rooms, the contemporary political climate has
other notable thought-provoking parallels. As with all
grand ancestral British homes in the 1920s, the fiction-
al estate is in jeopardy (even Highclere Castle, where
Downton is filmed, opens its doors to the paying public
every summer). The debate around income inequality
isn’t new – the desire to appropriately tax the one per
cent (and corporate behemoths like Amazon) is one of
the issues that divide parties in the current discourse
of U.S. electoral politics.
The series charted the Edwardian era’s gradual, often
reluctant, transition into 20th-century modernity and,
as working class and nouveaux riches alike began to
Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham,
in the drawing room at Highclere
Castle, the set of Downton Abbey.
Opposite: Dame Maggie Smith
gets ready for her closeup as
Violet, the dowager countess.
PH
OT
OG
RA
PH
Y,^
TR
UN
K^ A
RC
HI
VE
(M
AG
GI
E^ S
MI
TH
);^
JU
LIA
N^ B
RO
AD
/C
ON
TO
UR
/G
ET
TY
IM
AG
ES
(F
ILM
SE
T)
nextflipdebug2
(nextflipdebug2)
#1