The End of an Era

Our long running involvement with Victorian England came to an end last night, well at least the Downton Abbey part of it did.  What perhaps was not always obvious to fans of the show was the way that the fictional Crawley family was in fact a parable for a very real transition that is in some ways still ongoing.
Part of the charm of the show, in addition to the delicious snark of the Dowager Countess, was the way that we were able to look, with sufficient chronological distance, on the habits and customs of an era that has since vanished from the earth.  If I have any quibbles with the show it is simply that it sometimes took the paradigmatic differences between the historical setting and the audience rather for granted.  The most likable characters were also the ones who accepted our modern values (think Tom Branson, and Cora Crawley, who was literally an American with many of the attendant libertine values).  The most definitively Victorian characters (The Dowager, and Carson) took time to get to like, even if they were amusing.  And to the very end of the show there were still instances where modern audiences were left wondering what in the actual world was motivating people.  With regard to the central drama of the final season: the romance between Edith and Bertie Pelham with the complication of Marigold (a child born out of wedlock to Edith), the whole scenario seems rather like a mountain being made out of a molehill to modern sensibilities, and Bertie's mother calling Edith "damaged goods," practically makes you want to slap her upside her aristocratic head, hard.
Why compassion and just plain common sense can't seem to take precedent over propriety and appearances is, I think, part of why the drama is so intriguing to folks these days.  We get to feel just slightly superior to these people who, had we lived in the era, been certainly considered our betters.
I found Victorian sensibility infuriating at times, but I also glimpsed its value, and so was able to mourn the passing of an era with the characters of Downton.  The value came in terms of dignity of human beings.  The servants had dignity, the peasants had dignity, and the Lords and Ladies had dignity of a sort that had become so inflated that it was brittle. Admittedly part of this assumption is based on the particular slant allowed to us by fiction, not all Lords were as beneficent and gracious as Lord Grantham, nor as personally concerned with the struggles of their tenants and servants, but I think Grantham gives us a rather good sketch of what the ideal was supposed to be: a man of privilege who understood and felt the weight of his responsibility for those to whom he was Lord.  Dissolving that bond has not eliminated the aristocracy, but it has put the rest of us on shakier ground.  These days it is rare to find an aristocrat that feels such a powerful sense of responsibility towards the "little people." Perhaps it was rare then too, but history tells us that it certainly was a value that many of the landed class took rather seriously.
The way of life was, in a word, spectacular, and largely mutually beneficial, but it was, as I said, brittle.  Scandal was so dangerous because it dropped the mask of superiority.  Common townspeople could have affairs and illegitimate children and simple deal with some tongue clucking from the neighbors, but for a daughter of the Lord to be proved "immoral," threatened the very order of things.  The commoners had to accept that the aristocracy was of a higher quality than themselves.  American ideas like equality and democracy were a death knell to those assumptions.  The Dowager and Isobel Crawley had a conversation about moving into the future during the finale last night, where Isobel, ever the chipper foil to Violet, was talking about how things must always move forward.  The Dowager in her typical wry way, said something along the lines of, "If only we had a choice."  The clear implication was that if she had her way she would gladly retreat into the past, back to the time when the order of things was not quite so uncertain.
But the character of the Dowager was often one of the most powerful counter-agents to the true Victorian code.  She would often encourage her grand-daughters or even her Butler (in the finale) to do things that were quite out of order from a traditional way of thinking.  She was both a lament of the passing of Victorian society, and a symptom of that passing.
I sometimes wonder if we haven't kept the worst of the Victorian ethos and discarded the better aspects.  Because it seems that inequality, prejudice and class conflicts are still very much alive and well, and we have much worse manners about all of it than we used to.
In the end, I'm not sure that Downton Abbey really balanced its perspective with regard to the central theme of the ending of an era.  The modern prejudice against the rigidity of class was always there, with only a few glimpses here and there to how it actually worked, and why it endured as long as it did.  It let us celebrate and then mourn a little for something most of us never even knew about, and it always helped us learn a little bit more about human beings and the various faces of dignity.
Good show old chap.