Earlier this year I worked my way through Downtown Abby, all of it. It’s about comfort, comfort and family.
As I’m sure you know, the series is centered on a country estate, Downton Abbey, in the years straddling World War I. It is home to the Crawley family, which seems remarkably amiable, and their servants. The Crawleys are aristocrats, of course, while their servants are commoners. For the most part the servants respect the Crawleys, some are even fond of them, and, in turn – naturally – the Crawleys respect and are fond of their servants.
THAT’s the conceit of this series. There is an absolute class divide between two groups of people, and yet they get along well across that divide. That’s what makes this series so very comfortable: We’re all in this together, aristocrats and commoners alike.
The series is set in a period when the aristocracy is crumbling. It is becoming more and more difficult for the landed estates to remain solvent. An agricultural and rural way of life is being displaced by an industrial and urban way of life. Gemeinschaft by Gesselshaft, to wax sociological. During the course of the series two or three families loose their estates because of financial difficulties. And the Crawleys come close to it.
How do they adapt? One daughter goes into the publishing business while another marries the chauffeur, who turns out to be a good businessman, as does his wife. See there, the divide between aristocrats and commoners was bridged through that marriage. And all’s well in the world.
And we have complex goings-on among the servants as well. One of them is gay, which leads to complexities worked out over several seasons. One has done a hitch in prison, more complexities. And one marries, her husband dies, and she inherits the tenancy of his farm, which is on the Crawley grounds.
During the war the estate becomes used as a hospital and Lady Grantham (Crawley) turns out to be an able administrator. Score one for aristocratic women! And it is revealed that the Dowager Countess had once been involved in a Russian aristocrat, now displaced by the revolution. And there’s car racing, a trip to Ireland, and who knows what else. It’s all grand, complicated and, ultimately, convivial.
What keeps it all together? Why family, of course. What else? In fact, though, what was happening at the time is that the family, the aristocratic family, was losing the last of its force as social glue and being replaced by rationalized economic relationships, by the marketplace.
No matter. A good time was had by all.
The End.
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