Ready to devote the next few Sunday nights to Season 5 of Downton Abbey? I am. But while lavish costume serials such as Downton seem on the surface as delicious as steamed treacle pudding, they do leave a strange aftertaste.
As is his wont, creator Julian Fellowes propels the happenings along this season by incorporating some of 1924's greatest historical hits. We will, for instance, see women's-rights campaigner Marie Stopes's name dropped, meet the widowed Lady Shackleton (the Dowager Countess's imperious gal pal, no less), hear about the British Empire Exhibition and bear witness to the first royal speech on the BBC, which had recently begun radio transmissions. Arguments at Downton concern both a new Labour government and a labour crisis of sorts for the aristocracy, as fewer of the Lost Generation choose to go into service and instead work in factories and shops. But gor blimey if the Abbey inhabitants ever stop dressing for dinner!
Clearly, art direction is where the production money is being spent, not in the writers' room. And according to Upstairs and Downstairs – a new book of essays, edited by James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo, analyzing British TV costume drama "from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey" – the message of these crowd-pleasing period pieces is problematic. After all, Downton may concern itself with Britain's great subject – class division – but it is nonetheless a soap opera, as smudged historically as a camera lens coated with Vaseline.
Of course, Downton's factual nods have their narrative purpose, but that's where verisimilitude ends and romance begins – and it's why, as Katherine Byrne points out in her essay on the recent dark side of the show, its popular support is hardly matched by critical acclaim. "It is eminently watchable, but at times politically or ideologically indefensible," Byrne writes, alluding specifically to the idea of a household of aristocrats living a mutually respectful, affectionate existence with their staff. Byrne cites Andrew Higson, a professor of film and television at University of York in England, who famously called such stuff "heritage" television, "a superficial, sanitized and nostalgic view of a vanished world [which] undermined the positive social change that had removed it."
One of the reasons for the runaway success of Downton in North America (and of spinoffs such as The Manners of Downton Abbey, featuring the show's adviser on Edwardian etiquette) is its cultural exoticism. Its resonance could also be chalked up, however, to the "analogy between the 'fairy-tale' class system of Edwardian England and the obsessions and desires of contemporary Americans," Upstairs and Downstairs posits. In the same way that a man from a previous generation could deduce social context from the tail fin of a car, for instance, Downton viewers with even a passing knowledge of tailoring and fashion can situate the characters. To wit, Tom Branson, the Irish former chauffeur, wears authentic Donegal tweed, while other characters' suiting is made from Scottish or English tweed. In Season 5, Lady Mary's decidedly more modern wardrobe is now inspired by the work of the innovative Parisian couturière Jeanne Lanvin, a detail that, with the knowledge of hindsight, offers clues to how her character will develop. (It is also, unsurprisingly, trendy again – see this On Trend roundup.)
Accordingly, Higson argues that shows such as Downton are deeply materialistic, the cameras continuously gliding through interiors, almost caressing the fabrics and other pretty things. (Even Tom Stoppard's recent prestige adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford tetralogy Parade's End couldn't resist lingering on the trappings, offering overhead shots of chandeliers, wrapped gifts and ornamented gowns being packed by maids.) On Downton, this happens even before the weekly plot instalments begin: The opening credits, Higson points out, "place an immediate emphasis on lamps, soft furnishings and other domestic objects, which are the historically authentic props that make the series a pleasurable spectacle for the viewer and also, in the early series, form an important part of plots concerned with the coming of modernity."
Not uncoincidentally, Downton's plots, such as they are, move forward in short scenes composed of exchanges between the different classes. These take place in a rather dizzying variety of the most exotic daily (because now bygone) rituals of the era, namely ones that showcase a picturesque range of costumes: country tweeds for cycling to a nearby farm, particular dresses for afternoon tea, ever more glamorous attire for supper (always helped into by a lady's maid or valet). In contrast to the world downstairs, a dour, clanking and bustling place, only the soft rustle of silks and clinking of beaded jewellery is audible in the soft-focus milieu above.
The series' costume designer this season is Anna Robbins, also responsible for The Bletchley Circle, about a quartet of female Second World War code breakers. The difference between Bletchley's no-nonsense cardigans and her working-class suffragette's wardrobe on Downton is vast, however. Whereas the former show is grounded in reality – Bletchley's women, working in ration-era England, wear the same few workaday garments – the plucky local schoolteacher's closet on Downton now seems to disgorge as many of the embroidered velvet fashions as those of the Abbey's socialites.
Class divison? What class division?
Nathalie Atkinson