Downton Abbey Talk 1
Entails, Coattails, and Cocktails: The World of Downton Abbey
Jennifer Nesbitt, Associate Professor of English, Penn State York
January 3, 2013
Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here with you, dining like Lord and Lady
Grantham, though what the Dowager Lady Violet would say about it I do not like to think. Let
us begin with the obligatory joke, but I will depart from tradition and let you ask me a Downton
Abbey light bulb joke.
I wanted to call this talk “Entails and Entrails,” but I thought the path from the former to
the latter, through Sybil’s work as a nurse during the Great War—as the British call World War
I—might be more byzantine than Downton’s plot. So I went with something equally euphonious
but less bloody. (But there will be blood, don’t worry.)
Downton Abbey is, in general, very faithful in its depiction of Edwardian life, although—
to be particular, we should say Georgian because Edward VII died in 1910. This accuracy is
largely due to the talent and knowledge of Julian Fellowes, the creator of the series and the
Academy Award-winning writer for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. Most of you know this of
course, because—as Downton fans—you undoubtedly received, and promptly read—cover to
cover—the following holiday gift books: The World of Downton Abbey, Lady Almina and the
Real Downton Abbey, and The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook. My remarks may be
superfluous after such an orgy of information has been provided.
But back to blood—bloodlines, that is. The event that sets the series in motion is the
apparent death of Lord Grantham’s heirs on the Titanic. Thanks to the Titanic, Lord Grantham’s
plans to secure his daughters’ futures by marrying his eldest daughter Mary—who can provide a
home for her sisters—to the heir are thrown into jeopardy. Lord Grantham has urged this option
because, although Mary is his eldest child, she cannot inherit Downton because the estate is
entailed from "heir male to heir male" (Inheritance). From father to son, or—should sons be
lacking—cousins like Patrick or Matthew.
Certainly the “entail” plot seems an anachronism. Laws regarding women’s ownership
of property advanced considerably in the Victorian period, so restrictions on female inheritance
seem terribly medieval. Perhaps we are meant to think precisely that: Naming the estate
Downton Abbey implies that the house sits on the site of an ancient monastery, a property owned
by the Catholic Church in England and appropriated by Henry VIII after the 1534 Act of
Supremacy made him head of the church in England. Fellowes probably also knows his
audience: anyone who has seen or read Pride and Prejudice knows what havoc entails cause for
families of daughters. And entails do still stand: during the Edwardian period the Sackville
family was in and out of court over the inheritance of Knole, the estate immortalized in Virginia
Woolf’s novel Orlando. In the early ‘teens, Victoria and Lionel Sackville-West fought off the
claims of Henri, supported in court by testimony from their eldest daughter Vita. And yet, due to
an entail, Vita—who loved the house—could not inherit and the estate went to Lionel’s brother
Charles. When the house went to the National Trust after World War II, Sackville-West
Downton Abbey Talk 2
lamented her loss yet again: “If only I had been Dada’s son, instead of his daughter!” (Nicolson,
Diaries and Letters 196).
Vita Sackville-West shared Lord Grantham’s sense of duty and responsibility as steward
of a great estate: the heart of the conflict between modernity and tradition the series depicts.
She has none of Lady Cora’s sympathetic (American) practicality or Lady Mary’s faux ennui.
Sackville-West saw the great estates as the backbone of England: “the house is essentially part
of the country,” she wrote in English Country Houses, “not only in the country but part of it, a
natural growth.” Although Sackville-West is writing after World War II, she expresses the loss
of the “curious mixture of the feudal and the communal” that colors Downton Abbey’s late
afternoon sunshine.
That “curious mixture” is very much what we get in Downton Abbey. Sybil can “make
[Gwen’s] dreams come true” because she is the daughter of an aristocrat; conversely, Mrs.
Patmore and Daisy help her learn to boil a kettle. Lord and Lady Grantham defend Downton as
a source of employment in the face of Isobel Crawley’s remarks about their uselessness and they
are generous, and generous-minded, about those in their employ.
Domestic service remained a huge employment category until after 1945, particularly for
women, so the staff at Downton—heavy on the women—replicates usual arrangements. In 1911,
having a servant was not that unusual, but having several was. 800,000 English families had
servants, but only one-fifth of these had more than three servants. 1.4 million people were
engaged in domestic service in 1911; only 3% of them were male. In the Edwardian period,
downstairs was “a self-sustaining community set apart from their fellows” in the working class
who were agitating in trade unions (3), replicating below stairs the ranks and requirements above
stairs. This is abundantly made clear to us in the opening scene of the series, in which Daisy
asks why on earth the papers are ironed. A reasonable question, in my opinion. She gets her
answer: we can’t have his lordship’s fingers as inky black as yours, my girl. Yet the delay
before she gets a reply tells us even more: her status is the lowest and the implication is that
such questions are not worth asking. It’s just the way things are.
The overall tone of the show is, as David Kamp states in a recent Vanity Fair article,
“melancholic.” We know it’s not going to last. And that nostalgia is part of the appeal. I, as a
longtime prisoner of Masterpiece Theater, enjoy the gowns and the manners, the careful nuance
with which feelings and information are offered, but I am always caught at the moment of
identification: Where would I fit in? Do I even want to? I’m a third-generation GreekAmerican, so my closest point of entry is either Kamal Pamuk (which, if we look at the history
of Greek-Turkish relations, is highly ironic) or that disposable “Italian” Lady Violet recommends
as a marriage prospect for Mary given that she’s—what’s Sir Richard’s phrase?—“blotted her
copybook” with Mr. Pamuk. As much as I might like to think of myself as Lady Mary or Lady
Sibyl, in all likelihood even Daisy’s position wouldn’t have been open to me as a foreigner from
southern climes. Even Branson, the Irish chauffeur, is a stretch, especially given his nationalist
sympathies.
Downton Abbey Talk 3
So I think one of the real pleasures of the show is watching the characters struggle with
modern conveniences we find normal and easy. Carson can’t work a telephone, and the
indomitable Lady Violet is terrified of electricity. Most of these people can’t even drive! (This
is, by the way, why I am so fond of the Spike TV’s Downton spot—it makes this point exactly.)
Lord Grantham thinks a dinner jacket (a tuxedo for Americans) is extremely informal for
evening wear, suitable only for intimate, at-home dining, but for most of us “black tie” is an
unusual flight into formality. White tie—the coat cut high in the front with tails that is de
rigueur for dinner at Downton—is even more unusual. What we get with Downton is an
opportunity to see how and whether these characters—high and low—will become more like us.
More mobile, more technologically advanced, more socially flexible.
Downton Abbey plays as a swan-song in retrospect, but there was plenty of worry at the
time as well. In the early years of the century, the landed aristocracy faced significant threats to
its social and economic dominance. Agricultural income—on which much aristocratic income
depended—declined due to the expansion of farming in the United States, and death duties
(probate taxes) introduced in 1894 and increased after the Great War affected the transfer of
wealth, especially since these families borrowed heavily against what they thought were secure
incomes.
One solution to this loss of income was an infusion of cash, and Robert married for his.
The World of Downton Abbey offers up Mary Leiter, “the daughter of a fantastically rich
Chicago real estate speculator” who married the Honorable, but broke, George Curzon, as a
model for Cora. But the 1995 PBS production of Henry James’s novel The Buccaneers gives us
several similar stories of American heiresses seeking a title in exchange for cash.
Other factors were also straining the aristocracy’s hold on power. Over the course of the
th
19 -century, three Reform Bills had expanded the voting population, and the establishment of
County Councils in 1888 limited the aristocracy’s role in local affairs. In 1911, the Parliament
Bill effectively removed the veto power of the House of Lords, the hereditary arm of British
government.
This notion of a lost world—much like the notion of a “lost generation” in England after
the Great War—bears some investigation. Landed families may have lamented the loss of great
estates, but they also benefitted by selling the land to tenant farmers and investing the profits in
more lucrative stocks and shares. Six to eight million acres were sold from 1918-1921, and
owner-occupied land rates rose from 11% in 1914 to 37% in 1927. The landed families could
also leave behind the duties of noblesse oblige associated with an estate and focus more on “the
comfort of the owner and his immediate family,” according to Giles Worsley, author of
England’s Lost Houses. Life without the pile was, in some ways, easier.
The newly rich, like Sir Richard, Mary’s suitor, are eager to take up the mantle dropped
by the aristocracy. The conversation between this self-made man and Lady Mary indicates the
gulf between hereditary and capitalist interests. As he and Mary tour a prospective home, Sir
Richard says of the former owners, that “They’ve given up.” Mary, on the other hand, claims
that the death of the heir, Billy, in the Great War, “took the stuffing out of them.” Sir Richard
Downton Abbey Talk 4
judges the aristocracy unwilling or unable to cope; Lady Mary focuses on the emotional ties and
expectations of her set. She also alludes to the lost generation of the Great War. Lady Sibyl
comments that “it seems everyone I danced with is dead” and indeed, the Crawleys would have
seen many losses among their friends and connections. 750,000 British troops were killed during
the war (compared to 115,000 Americans and 1.5 million French). 16,000 died on the first day
of the Battle of the Somme alone. Members of the upper classes were killed in disproportionate
numbers because, as people of rank, the young men went into service as officers, leading their
troops over the top in the trenches and taking the first bullets. After the war, it was felt that the
best and brightest of the next generation had gone, leaving a vacuum of leadership for the future.
Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (published 1933; televised 1979) documents this
phenomenon.
Matthew is thus fortunate to escape. William takes his hit, as it were, and Matthew
miraculously recovers control of his legs in a scene that only just loses out to the abortive
amnesiac-horribly-disfigured-reappearing heir plot as the most trying moment in the series (so
far).
Like the characters, Downton is for the most part insulated from the political upheaval in
the country just before the war, though in the characters of Lady Sybil and Branson we get to
hear about women’s suffrage and Irish Home Rule. Lady Sybil’s interest in politics and dress
reform—evidenced by her support of Gwen’s efforts to obtain a secretarial position and her
adoption of harem pants for evening wear—echoes, in a minor key, the tumult actually
occurring. When she attends the announcement of by-election results, Sybil is exposed to the
rough-and-tumble world of politics—and is immediately knocked unconscious. Her minor
injury stands in for the violence women agitating for suffrage endured and committed.
Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903, and its
actions in support of women’s suffrage became increasingly violent up until the war began.
Activists thronged Hyde Park on Sunday, May 21 1908—estimates ranged between 300,000 and
500,000—and their actions escalated to attacking politicians with slates, tiles, and stones at
public meetings and breaking shop-windows in the prominent Regent, Bond and Oxford Street
areas. Women were jailed and engaged in hunger strikes while in prison, and the authorities
responded with force-feeding. This state of affairs engendered the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act,”
which allowed the government to release women weakened by lack of food and force-feeding
temporarily from prison to recover—or more to the point, to die—at home, but not on the
government’s watch. These actions continued until the Great War turned everyone toward a
larger goal.
Similarly, Branson’s involvement with Irish nationalism parallels agitation for Home
Rule in Ireland. A Home Rule Bill was offered in 1912, but it was opposed by the Ulster
Unionists. Efforts to amend the bill to allow the unionist counties to remain English were
rejected by the nationalists, and the Ulster Volunteer Forces made plans to secede should the bill
pass. In August 1913, the Irish Citizen’s Army was established to fight, if necessary, for the
Downton Abbey Talk 5
Irish cause. Although further developments were (temporarily) forestalled by the war, the stage
was set for the Irish “Troubles” that dominated the 20th century.
While these events occur, Downton continues with its fetes and its dinners, largely
unscathed, though women serving at dinner is shocking. The events of the world touch them
lightly—even the Spanish flu (which carried off over 200,000 British people and over 20 million
worldwide in 1918-19) helps by blamelessly divesting Matthew of Lavinia. But trouble is to
come: financial ruin of a sort awaits us in Season Three. And what else might happen? Will we
find out who killed Vera Bates? Will Patrick return and marry Edith, thus generating a Dallasworthy inheritance struggle? Or will Edith marry Lord Strallan and become the patronizing
matron she so longs to be? There’s got to be some bumps in the road ahead for Matthew and
Mary . . .
But most importantly, will we see cocktails at social events in this season of Downton
Abbey? In season two, Sir Richard asks for one during his Saturday-to-Monday—not a weekend,
please—at Downton, and Lady Mary demurs: Carson could try but she “can’t guarantee the
results.” Poor Sir Richard—as a media magnate he surely represents the future but he can’t even
get a decent drink, let alone land a blueblooded wife. The 1920s and 30s, however, are the
heyday of the cocktail, and if its on-trend for the times, we’ll be sure to see it mirrored in the
social whirl of Downton Abbey.