A certain type of English novel has focused on the doings of the upper classes.  I have tried to recall every novel I have read that involves at least one scene in an upper crust country house or a grand house in London.  I have not read widely in this field, but I can list Dickens’s Bleak House, the six “Palliser” novels plus The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.[1]  In addition to the novels I have mentioned, you could add the old PBS series Upstairs, Downstairs.  It’s not a huge sample, but large enough to form some opinions.

One attraction of these stories is that they grant us a glimpse into a life we could not otherwise know, both because it is of an age much earlier than ours and because it is lived by people we could not possibly hope to know in that age or our own.  The Palliser novels are interesting to read as stories and as character studies, but they also can be read as social history.  Trollope’s characters are sufficiently dimensional that we can imagine them living a life, competing with their rivals, falling in love, making decisions and taking risks without knowing how things will turn out.  The same is certainly true of the work of Messrs. Dickens and Waugh.

In this type of story, a category to which Downton Abbey is an applicant for inclusion, as in other novels aiming at realism, there is a certain unspoken agreement between writer and reader or writer/director and viewer.  We willingly suspend disbelief and accept the local habitation and name that the author has given to airy nothing.  The writer in turn undertakes to provide a credible reproduction of life being lived by believable people who must deal with the complicated problems that the author sets for them.  We sit around the campfire (all right, the TV) in anticipation of an interesting story well told.

Over the course of the previous three seasons, Mr. Fellowes has had to ask the viewers to grant him advance after advance out of our limited store of credulity.  The two cousins were not scheduled to travel on the Titanic, but down with her they went.  The replacement cousin is just the right age to marry Lady Mary and has the looks, charm, and grace to fit the part.  An undressed Turk dies at just the wrong time, and in an even worse place, but the situation is put right – almost – with a bit of heavy lifting.  An evil, twisted, spurned wife is able to make her suicide look like murder, but her successor is so determined, yet at the same time so mild, so generous of heart, so pure of intention, that she sees justice done, almost singlehandedly.  A jilted fiancée gives up her future husband for his greater happiness, without any thought of her own desires, then dies in a manner most convenient.  Fortunes are lost, or are diverted from their preferred course, but wills have a way of turning up to get large sums of money to the recipients who will keep our story going.  Every reader can supply another dozen examples.

Through all of this, we have continued to watch in our millions because it has been fun to see these characters maneuver through the shoals of British upper class life (both above and below stairs) at the point (just before the First World War) of its maximum opulence to the beginning of its decline (where we are at the moment).  The unspoken deal between the writer/director and the viewer has been put under stress, but it has remained intact until now.

I submit that Mr. Fellowes has broken this covenant by subjecting the beloved character Anna to a barbaric sexual assault that has left her physically bruised, bloodied, and violated and emotionally devastated.

I have a weakness for police procedurals.  I was a big fan of Law & Order and Law & Order Criminal Intent.  I will watch reruns of The Closer and I like Major Crimes, a spinoff.  I like the Las Vegas version of CSI and I will occasionally check in with Criminal Minds.  When you turn on one of these shows, you know that the focus is going to be a grisly crime.  It is going to be solved.  We are going to spend some time on the personal issues of the investigators, some of them will be allowed to develop a relationship, or will have an episode where they are in greater focus than usual, but it never fails that the main focus is The Crime and The Solution.  You are never going to have an episode of CSI where the technicians plan a party, we watch various dishes being prepared outside the lab, there is a crisis hiring enough staff to serve the food and drinks, but ultimately everything turns out just fine (except that one major character feels he doesn’t fit in, and some of the techs are competing to see who will be in charge of serving the next meal).  The continuing characters keep the story moving but the crime and its solution are the focus.

This is not to say that crime cannot enter the world of the type of English upper crust story I am talking about.  There is a murder in Bleak House, a spectacular theft of jewels in one of the Palliser novels, fraud and at least the threat of physical violence in The Way We Live Now.  But when crime enters, it naturally takes over the story to the cost of all other elements.  Part of the charm of Downton Abbey up until now has been the complexity of the plot, the multi-layered intersections of characters and events within the confines of a single (grand) household.  I think the best we can hope for is that this complexity will be put on hold, and not lost permanently, as the story focuses on this horrific crime.

Apart from my anger at Mr. Fellowes for putting dear Anna through this life-altering agony, I don’t see how he continues to tell his tale without the vicious assault on Anna becoming the major focus of the story.  Word of the assault will spread gradually because Anna’s wounds, physical and emotional, are too obvious to hide and also because Mrs. Hughes does try to help any situation by bringing in reinforcements.  It appears that Mary and the rapist’s employer are going to develop a relationship, so that will throw Anna and Bates together with the criminal.  No doubt there will be endless permutations of these and related themes.

The act was, is, so horrendous that I don’t see how we can avoid having it become the center of the Downton Abbey tale from this point on until it is resolved with the capture of the criminal, or possibly his own end through violence.  But even then, won’t the breadth of the story be altered permanently?  This isn’t something that Bates and Anna will laugh about in later years, or that Mary and Lord Gillingham (??) will dismiss as “valets being valets”.  I fear that the story will be forced into a much narrower channel and will be less rich, less varied, and less interesting than it might have been.  Our energy is going to be focused on our sympathy for Anna and our desire to see that valet locked up.  That’s fine if we are watching CSI, but I fear that Downton Abbey is in serious jeopardy.

I hope that I am proven wrong (and there is no need to point out that this would not be the first time).  I await Sunday’s developments.

Isis the dog was back to walk us up to the Abbey’s front door.  And O’Brian is still gone.