Ford Madox Brown (1821-95), Hampstead from my Window (1857)
Dear friends and readers,
A brief note for Americans like myself who are not aware of the birthdays or birthplaces of British politicians who have become symbolic figures after they exercised power in an ostentatiously as well as felt way politically.
I did not know that Grantham was the name of the place Margaret Thatcher came from (as it’s put). Her father was “a local worthy” who ran a small business. That it’s a compliment to Mrs Thatcher and at the same time an allusion meant explicitly to alert us to the political allegiance of its author.
Jim not only said, oh yes, but immediately went on to suggest that the mood and atmosphere of the mini-series as described to him (he does not watch TV) brought to mind some lines from Rupert Brooke‘s 1912 poem “The Old Vicarage, Granchester,” which ends with these lines:
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies and truth and pain? …. oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
The whole poem is online.
If the whole poem were like that, it’d indeed capture a central motif of Fellowes’s Downton Abbey, only Brooke’s poem is a kind of pastoral as satire on male muscular Christianity with some misogynistic lines thrown in here and there (“And Ditton girls are mean and dirty”) with scorn for lower class people so egregious (“folks in Shelford and those parts/Have twisted lips and twisted hearts”), that I’m tempted to say it’s ironic with the poet keeping his distance from his narrator, but I think the escape into a deep meadow and landscape world before industrialization, pre-Capitalist is at times serious, and then again mocking: “And when they get to feeling old,/They up and and shoot themselves I’m told) …
John Betjeman, Brooke is not (to be explained on my Sylvia blog this Sunday).
I don’t know if I’ve emphasized how surprising it is that there is so little filmic intertextuality in Downton Abbey. It does not imitate, borrow, allude to other mini-series; this is unusual nowadays as well as it’s rare use of montage and almost complete lack of flashbacks, voice-overs, filmic epistolarity (letters ready by characters using voice-over). What intertextuality there is (confirmed in the second volume on the series, The Chronicles of DA) is textual: Bates’s story was suggested to Fellowes by a news article and an Agatha Christie story.
So I suggest he may also have remembered or had in Brooke’s Grantchester in mind when he chose the name Grantham. I’ve chosen a couple of mid-Victorian idealizing watercolors for this blog whose typology is behind what we see of landscape (not a lot, again surprisingly for a mini-series of this type) in DA.
Perhaps the reader will recall the shot of Lady Sybil plotting Gwen Dawson, the maid who escaped to an office job in the first season, where they are in an old-fashioned wagon riding together and pass under a half-ruined arch in a vast green landscape:
Alfred Wm Hunt (1830-96), Finchale Priory (exhibited 1862)
Ellen
P.S. I’m not really surprised by the lack of filmic intertextuality, filmic sophistication and/or dream landscapes. These are part of the ways in which Fellowes has carefully kept this mini-series broad and popular in its approach & therefore appeal.
Susan wrote: “The Grantham reference is undoubtedly meant to make the UK viewer think of Thatcher, and the vast majority would get it. However I don’t think that the Grantchester idea has legs. (a) for a UK viewer, a vast country estate carries all that baggage without the need to drag in a poem about rural bliss, and (b) the Brooke poem is very well known here and its baggage is not about landed wealth or rural bliss. It’s typically read with knowledge of what happened to Brooke (who died in WW1) and is seen as nostalgic and about youth, privileged certainly, but overridden by thoughts of needless slaughter and early death.”
Gwynn: Yes, I agree with Susan. However I enjoyed your blog Ellen. I really dislike Downton Abbey because it represents all that I think is rotten throughout history in British Society yet I still watch it! I love so much of the acting although some of the writing leaves a lot to desire when it comes to historical accuracy and true depiction of how the working classes were treated ‘in service’. I am also not very keen on Julian Fellowes, when I have seen him interviewed and read columns he has written he is very much for the status quo. In a way I think my latest blog touches on this in that the way the aristocracy have risen to the position that they hold today is really through brute force and who could get the most followers of their ancestors.
I should add that Other Half is currently rather cold on the Picket Line where he and others are to be found nearly every Saturday morning and have been for the past nearly four years!
The mini-series is a tremendous hit in the US; people who rarely watch PBS watch it. I’d like to say first that if there is an audience for a genuinely socially decent mini-series, they don’t get a chance to choose it. We get melodramas justifying or accepting torture (Homeland on HBO seems part of that). The average US person would probably not get the allusion to Thatcher; I didn’t and first saw this “factoid” in a blog where others professed surprise. Nor did they go on to understand the meaning of the allusion. On Brooke: the poem in itself could be read the way Jim suggested; again I don’t have the local context, but as a British person himself he ought to have. Probably what jogged his memory was his own bitter memories of aspects of a public school he went to as a “day-boy,” which he’d then associate with this show. Brooke in the US stands (I think) for intense patriotism and pro-honor war ideas. No need for apologies Gwynn at all. The Them is 1% and the 99% are not seen in Downton so you are only claiming equal time.
Susan: Full disclosure: I dislike Downton Abbey so much that I have never watched it. But I can’t help but know about it.
I’m taking it as a way of analyzing mini-series which become sociological events. It does have ambiguous and subversive (so to speak) elements the way most Victorian novels do, especially in the areas of sex itself and, like say the Cranford Chronicles, participates in the “project” of recent costume dramas, to celebrate community and a communitarian spirit — even in the midst of its reactionary impulses. What’s demoralizing is how the pop viewers I read on blogs ignore or deride precisely those elements which are its best elements: as in the valuation of the mother’s grief in 3;6, or the way the humiliation wedding was presented. When DA deviates from conventions, you get a chorus of complaints: so we never saw the chief couple’s actual wedding (Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens) only the fuss and bother and fraught tension leading up to it.
E.M.
[...] From John Betjeman, Collected Poems, enlarged edition, intro. Philip Larkin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. I also have Betjeman’s Summoned By Bells. This was brought to mind in a note I wrote on Downton Abbey. [...]
There is a Lady Grantham in V. Sackville-West’s ‘The Edwardians’ – not the only echo, either.
David Rose
Paris
Grantham is actually a fairly ancient British aristocratic name – though i forget which family it belonged to (Robinson?) First Earl Grantham in C18 was ambassador in Vienna and his son 2nd Earl ambassador in Madrid in 1770s