Until now, I have treated Downton Abbey as if it were in the same postal code as classics such as Brideshead Revisited or The Way We Live Now, and perhaps we will someday conclude that it belongs in this company.  At the moment, we seem to be in soap opera territory.  We have some teapot-sized tempests and we have some standard elements of melodrama, but for now, that’s about it.  I’d like to take a brief look at some plot developments and then spend a few minutes on some historical musings that occurred to me as I was watching.

First, the melodrama.  Edith has a letter from her doctor telling her that she is in the first trimester of pregnancy.  Even if she were to marry within the next month – I assume that even a hurried wedding could not be arranged any sooner – the father of her child is married to someone else, he was last heard of in Munich, and now no one knows where he is.  I believe the political situation in Germany at this time was relatively calm.  Things got pretty bad in 1923 (hyperinflation, French occupation of the Ruhr, political violence), but that’s in the future.  So what can explain Michael’s disappearance?  Edith needs some answers fast.  There can’t be enough time for him to get his divorce and get back to England and marry Edith before her condition becomes obvious, so I expect this particular subplot to become more and more emotional but not necessarily more interesting.  I bet there are drug stores in Mr. Gregson’s London neighborhood, but it’s too late now.  Sorry, Edith.

Most of the rest of the developments in this week’s episode seem trivial and overworked.  Alfred gets to go to the cooking school at the Ritz after all.  Daisy is sorry to see him go and lashes out at Ivy who drove Alfred away by not caring for him.  Of course, if she had cared for him, that would have left Daisy out in the cold where she is anyway, but love is blind and irrational, so Daisy lashes out.  In the meantime, Ivy finally sees Jimmy as he really is.  He makes his move on a bench in the moonlight.  By the standards of 2014, nothing terribly shocking seems to have happened, but this is 1922 and Ivy is outraged.  Shallow lad that he is, Jimmy is taking what to him seems a logical step.  He is out of pocket the cost of several nights on the town (well, village) and he now expects a return on his investment.  Ivy doesn’t see it that way, nor do Mrs. Patmore and Mrs. Hughes, to whom Ivy dutifully reports the attempt on her virtue.  An awful lot of screen time has been spent on getting us to this rather predictable and uninteresting situation.

Now that Alfred is finally off to London, you would think that things would be looking up, at least modestly, for Mr. Molesely, but Mr. Carson is not a man to forgive a slight and that means that Mr. Molesely may be condemned to manual labor for the rest of his days.  Incidentally, I apologize that I have misspelled his name as Mosely until now.  Fortunately, Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Patmore team up once again and eventually Mr. Molesely finds work as a footman at the Abbey.  He will even retain the dignity of being addressed by his last name, a breach of protocol that clearly has Mr. Carson off balance for a moment, although not as far out of balance as he will be a bit later when the American jazz singer enters the house.

Another overworked development had to do with the merry battle between the earnest Isobel and her nemesis Lady Grantham.  Lady Grantham wins a round when her noblesse oblige trumps Isobel’s upper middle class sense of fair play, but what a lot of over-plotting we had to go through to get to the punchline!  Isobel has to feign illness at Violet’s front door when she finds Violet not at home, then toss the parlor where the precious letter opener went missing, then find the missing item in a seat cushion – really a stretch – then later confront Violet only to find that Violet has already done the right thing voluntarily.  I have no doubt that Violet restored Peg to his job so that she could show Isobel up in the end, but we spent a lot of time and attention on an incident that does not really advance the wider story line at all.

At least Violet is getting off a few decent zingers.  I thought that until now in this season her one-liners had been weak.  Tonight she was able to tell Edith to “Let your time in London rub off on you a little” (if she only knew) and when asked what she thought about the jazz band wondered “Do you think they know what the others are playing?”  (Would she say the same of a Bach concerto?)  She put down Isobel by saying that “Indignation is her fuel.”  These are not up to her earlier standard, but she is getting back into form.

We shall see what develops between Mary and Mr. Napier or Mary and Mr. Blake.  If I had to bet on one of them, I’d pick Mr. Blake.  Napier seems to have no personality at all, although his upper class credentials may give him an edge with the snobbish Mary.  Mary and Mr. Blake seem to dislike each other on sight, which is usually a sign of romantic complications ahead.  Mr. Blake has inspired Mary to use for the first time in years that sharp tongue she inherited from her grandmother.  And Mr. Blake finds Mary’s upper class manners and attitude completely off-putting.  I think we have the start of a beautiful relationship.

I’ll come to Rose and the singer in a minute, because there is not much else left to talk about.  Anna and Bates have a night out and get to show up a snobby maître d’.  Lady Cora helps the situation and reminds us all what a good person she is.  Baxter begins to chafe under the constant pestering by Barrow to provide more information about the doings upstairs.  He acts and talks as if he has some kind of hold on her, but it’s not clear what that is.

It was obvious a couple of episodes ago that Rose wanted to get back in touch with Mr. Ross, the American jazz singer.  I thought she was going to send Robert’s birthday celebration to the club where Ross sings, but instead she brought him and his band to the Abbey.  Mr. Carson has just finished explaining to Rose, who has come downstairs to warn of the band’s imminent arrival, that even simple Yorkshiremen know something of life’s diversity.  He has barely finished his little speech when in walks Mr. Ross and Mr. Carson nearly sends his teacup to the floor, something rarely seen beneath the battlements of Downton Abbey.

I do hope that we get to learn more about Mr. Ross.  We know that he is an American.  His accent combines with his self-possession and self-confidence to suggest that he is not a product of the Jim Crow South.  The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing at this time and Mr. Ross may have been an active participant, but in that case why did he leave that exciting cultural milieu to sing in the stuffy confines of a London night club?  He may have an interesting tale and I hope we get a chance to hear it.

In the meantime, Rose has decided to cross the class barrier that she has tip-toed up to in the past.  Mary descends the stairs to arrange for the band’s bill to be sent to Robert and finds that Rose and Mr. Ross are kissing in the shadows.  Ross steps out of the shadows without any hint of embarrassment.  He is ready to pursue this adventure where it leads him.  Rose’s intentions are less clear.  She went below stairs to spend time with Ross.  She did not invite him to come upstairs to a sitting room.  Is this because she wants to neck and cannot do that (with Mr. Ross or anyone else) upstairs?  Or is it because she is not really crossing the class barrier in any interesting way, but just visiting as a tourist?  Does Mr. Ross’s race add a touch of adventure for Rose, or is she genuinely attracted by his talent and his manner, race aside?  She has displayed a most shallow personality until now, so I would bet on the former until proven wrong.  Again, we would have a much more interesting story if Rose and Ross were to develop a romance, but Mr. Fellowes’s plans may be to work up nothing more than soap bubbles.

Ross’s conversation with Mr. Carson concerning England’s role in the antislavery crusade sent me to the history books.  I am not sure that Mr. Carson has the story exactly right.  Mr. Carson proudly points out that an English jurist in 1763 declared that any person who sets foot on English soil became free at that instant.  William Blackstone made a similar declaration in the first edition of his commentaries published in 1765 and it appeared that the emerging view of the Common Law was that slavery was unlawful in England (but not in the colonies) in the absence of legislation making it lawful.  The point was made poetically through the statement that “The air of England is too pure for slaves to breathe”.  Unfortunately, this view was ahead of its time.  The statement in the 1763 case was not necessary to the disposition of the lawsuit and came to be dismissed as “dictum”.  Blackstone altered his view three years after he initially expressed it, to suggest that the slaveholder who brought a slave to England might still have the legal right to demand the other’s services when they left.

The issue was revisited in 1772 in Somersett’s Case.  An English slaveholder purchased another person as a slave in Boston(!) and brought him to England.  When the slaveholder attempted to leave England with his slave, as he considered him, antislavery activists sought a writ of habeas corpus.  The English court had the opportunity to declare slavery unlawful and seemed to come close to doing so, but in the end held that the slaveholder did not have the right to compel another person to leave England against his will.  However, the case was widely believed by persons held as slaves throughout the British Empire to render slavery illegal.  The details are in a marvelous book titled “Rough Crossings”.

I will say that the English did a much better job attempting to end the slave trade than did the United States.  Both countries had made the trade illegal early in the 19^th century, and both declared that engaging in the trade was piracy, but the U.S. made only desultory efforts at enforcement, while the British devoted considerable resources to eradicating the trade.  It’s interesting to note that Britain outlawed slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.  Had the United States lost the Revolutionary War, slavery might have ended in the U.S. without the loss of 600,000 lives.  Of course, we would all have bad teeth, drink tea and warm beer, and beat each other up after soccer matches.

So, all in all, I think Mr. Carson recovered nicely from the shock of having a person of color in the servants’ hall, in all likelihood for the first time.

I was curious whether the inquiry of Messrs. Napier and Blake into the finances of the great houses of Yorkshire was based on any particular historical event.  It doesn’t seem to be.  They state that the inquiry was directed by Lloyd George, who became prime minister in December 1916 in the middle of the First World War and remained prime minister until October 1922.  By late summer 1922, where we now seem to be in our story, his political position was deteriorating rapidly.  He had been accused of selling peerages and honors and the charges seemed to be backed by evidence.  He was so busy putting out political fires that it’s hard to believe he had time to undertake a technical inquiry into upper class finances.  He remained active in politics for the next two decades until his death in 1945 and appears to have taken up an interest in land reform after he left the premiership.  I can’t say that there never was such an inquiry in 1922 but it seems unlikely.

Anyway, all this got me wondering about how these gigantic establishments sustained themselves.  Where did the vast amounts of money come from that were needed to keep them going?  The answer seems to be that originally they sustained themselves through collection of rents.  A noble family would receive a grant of land in payment for military or other service and if the grant were large enough, the tenants’ rents could pay for the upkeep of a sizeable establishment.  However, over the course of centuries, it inevitably happened through bad management or bad luck that many of these houses could not be sustained without outside help.  As the British Empire expanded in the 18^th century, fortunes were made in the Caribbean or in India and the newly enriched English colonials would find their way to England and buy into a stately home, either through purchase or by marrying into the family.  In the 19^th century, many industrial fortunes beat the same path.  Another course was to find a wealthy American or Canadian heiress and bring new money into the establishment through marriage.  That’s the solution that Robert’s father worked out by having Robert marry Cora.

An agricultural depression hit Britain in the 1880s as American and Canadian grain began flooding British markets.  The huge industrialized farming operations of the American and Canadian plains could produce grain at half the cost of the less efficient British farms.  The houses that depended on rents began to lose revenue.  Taxes began to bite as the 20^th century began.  The cost of the First World War, then the ravages of inflation (there was almost no change in prices from Waterloo to the outbreak of WWI), then increased taxation took a greater toll.  The Great Depression and the Second World War finished off a great number of these homes.  I have read that over 1,000 have been demolished since the end of WWII.

But in 1922, the tougher ones were still going strong.  An English poet wrote in 1827: The stately homes of England / How beautiful they stand! / Amidst their tall ancestral trees, / O’er all the pleasant land!  For purposes of our story, this alteration by Noel Coward is more appropriate:  The stately homes of England / How beautiful they stand / To prove the upper classes / Have still the upper hand.[1]

On a final note, the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry” was written in 1921 by Eubie Blake, himself an important participant in the Harlem Renaissance.  He died in 1983 just a week after his 96^th birthday.  He famously said “If I had known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”  The song was part of the first Broadway musical to feature an African American cast in a play about African Americans.  So, coming back to Mr. Ross, why did he not stay in New York to do things like that, rather than hang around below stairs in drafty English houses?

Until next time.