BRITISH author A.N. Wilson writes in a recent issue of The Daily Mail about the TV hit “Downton Abbey,” the hugely popular BBC Masterpiece Theater series about the lives of Edwardian aristocrats and their servants. Wilson contends viewers gained an overly flattering picture of Britain’s pre-socialist past. That is dangerous. He says the cult of costume dramas is not merely silly or sentimental but “sinister.”

It’s important to note his words. It is wrong and evil to portray the past in a flattering light. Wilson is incensed by remarks by Hugh Bonneville, the actor who plays Lord Grantham, an aristocrat who does not want to lose the family manor because of his love for his ancestral past. Bonneville, who plays opposite Elizabeth McGovern as his wife, the Countess of Grantham, and Maggie Smith as the elderly Dowager Countess, made the following comments on the set of the show:

This country is currently in a complete mess, and the pre-World War I era, rightly or wrongly, was one in which the structure of society worked.

Wilson retorts:

That would seem to suggest that Mr. Bonneville thinks the ‘complete mess’ of our country would be resolved if we went back to pre-1914 Britain. Does he really mean this?

Does [Bonneville] want to abolish votes for women, or limit the franchise to men over 21? Or send homosexuals to prison? Or dismantle the Welfare State, or abolish the National Health Service?

The costume drama is founded on an entirely different premise from today’s reality shows. The idea is to inspire and to indulge in unashamed nostalgia. I’m not endorsing the entire genre. Some of this nostalgia is stupid and shallow. At its best moments (and it has some very good moments), the soap opera “Downton Abbey,” written by Julian Fellowes, does not romanticize wealth so much as the endurance and quiet nobility of some of its servant characters and the industrious atmosphere of high-functioning domesticity. At its worst moments (and it has some awful moments), the series makes unfortunate concessions to the present, such as when it features a valet kissing a duke (both male) or the young heiress giving up her virginity to an unappealing Turk in a scene that is entirely unbelievable and sinister in its debunking of the past.

Wilson, however, writes:

The last thing fans of these programmes want is to be confronted with the cruel reality of what life was like in late Victorian and Edwardian England, where there were children dying of starvation on the streets of most big cities, where 80,000 prostitutes, most of them riddled with incurable syphilis, plied their trade on the streets of London, and where the average age of death for a working-class man was 35.

No, these programmes, which supposedly depict life for the upper classes and their good-humoured servants, bear as much relationship to reality as Pirates Of The Caribbean does to the real world of rum, sodomy and the lash of 18th century life at sea.

It might be understandable if Wilson despised Downton Abbey as a sinister image of England’s feudal past, but the idea that the Edwardian period was a time of darkness and oppression is too much to take. At the turn of the twentieth century, the conditions of the working classes had just passed through a time of remarkable improvement and the British were less enslaved than ever. They have since passed into a condition of modern feudalism, in which a large portion of the population is dependent on the state. As Theodore Dalrymple put it, “Collectivism has entered our soul.”

The short life span Wilson mentions was largely a result of high child mortality due to disease, not working conditions. For the working poor, most of their hardships did not doom their immediate descendents to social anarchy. Family life was intact for all but the lowest rung of society and upward mobility was within the reach of many.

It is interesting that Wilson seems unmoved by the character of Matthew Crawley (played by Dan Stevens), the unexpected middle class heir of Downton Abbey. Crawley is uncomfortable with the appurtenances of aristocracy and considers himself to be oppressing his new valet. Perhaps Wilson is unappeased because there is an affecting scene in which Lord Grantham, or Robert Crawley, tells Matthew that he is denying the valet his livelihood by refusing to allow himself to be dressed. Lord Grantham says, “We all have different roles to play and we must all be allowed to play them.” (The series contains no brilliant dialogue, but some  good straightforward lines.)

In the very long debate in the comments section that follows the article, many agree with Wilson that those years were too miserable to contemplate. For instance, one woman writes of a grandmother who was a servant as a young girl and was sexually exploited by the sons of her employers. But sexual abuse of young women today is rampant among those who grow up with their mother’s boyfriends. These young women, unlike their great grandmothers, face a future that is far less likely to bring marriage and security.

Other readers point to their relatives who were in service in upper class households. These servants went on to own their own homes and to live into their nineties.

The question in any era is not whether people suffer or not, but to what end is their suffering directed? What do they leave behind when they are gone? The head butler at Downton Abbey, played by Jim Carter, is emotionally attached to his employers. This attachment must have been unusual among butlers. After all, it was a job. But the portrayal of a loyal and happy servant in a setting of unusual grandeur is not sinister. Surely, most viewers realize it is not entirely realistic and that it constitutes an ideal of the humble worker fitting into a larger order.

By the way, Downton Abbey, said to be the most popular BBC costume drama since “Brideshead Revisited,” with ten million viewers in Britain and six million in the U.S., is scheduled to return for a second season. The prim and stodgy Wilson cannot legislate this nostalgia away.

                                                               — Comments —

Bruce writes:

A.N. Wilson has been a well-known commentator and man-of-letters in the UK for about thirty years. He is very clever, learned and hard-working. He is also very silly, shallow, and spiteful.

Laura writes:

I read his biography of C.S. Lewis years ago and liked it.

Lawrence Auster writes:

I’ve always despised the Christianity despiser A.N. Wilson, and even after his more recent announced conversion to Christianity, I still looked at him with complete mistrust. His remarks quoted in this entry confirm that I was right to do so. 

Clem writes:

I just finished watching all seven episodes of this and thoroughly enjoyed it. I highly recommended it and look forward to the second season. I really liked the storyline, costumes, the hierarchy and demeanor, the relationships and last but not least I enjoyed the fact that it is totally devoid of today’s ‘diversity’. As for A.N. Wilson and his ilk they whine about romanticizing the past yet have no problem romanticizing today and selectively picking and choosing what they deem as positive. While I can admire the past I hold no notions that all things of the past were great. I value many things about our founders and the 1700’s but I certainly am not deluded into thinking we should all go back to that time. Hopefully as a people, society and nation we take what is best from the past and incorporate things from today that reinforce, honor and sustain us. I speculate that what Wilson and others really hate is that it portrays whites in such a positive and functional light and only portrays whites. I must not have gotten the memo which dictates that period pieces or for that matter TV series in general must include all history of that time and consider everyone and everything. Only an ignorant or a very naive individual would look at a TV series and think that is all there was to life or history. I would imagine that Wilson et al is just like those who lament “Father Knows Best” and “Donna Reed.” As if portraying positive images is evil and not ‘keeping it real’. Of course we could celebrate 70 percent unwed mothers, A school system and government that seems content on producing rote spouting Borg and a nation hell bent on destruction.

Laura writes:

The series is available on Netflix. I wouldn’t say it was totally devoid of diversity. A Turk shows up to deflower the heiress Mary Crawley.

Television is considered “realistic” when it is despairing.  For instance, the depressing British teen drama series “Skins,” which has been adapted for American audiences, was welcomed by critics for its “realism.”

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