It happens occasionally at my house or my place of work that an interesting piece of information is in the air and I am not the last to learn of it.  It is a very gratifying feeling to know that you are ahead of the pack, if only for the brief period it takes everyone else to catch up.  The feeling is as rare for Robert as it is for me and I congratulate him on not being the last to know the parentage of wee Marigold.  It’s true that the list of people in the family who don’t know is not very long – Cora did not have to draw a second breath to recite the list.  Still, it must be pleasant for Robert that he figured it out for himself and is momentarily ahead of Mary, Tom, Isobel, and Rose (I think that’s the list).

Susan has now edged out Larry Merton for the “nastiest member of the upper classes” award.  She starts off by trying to insult the Aldridges by asking if they have any “English” relatives.  (It turns out Mrs. Aldridge does, to Susan’s surprise.)  I think the tone of her voice rather than the content carried the insult.  After all, to be English is to be a member of a distinct, identifiable ethnic group.  In that sense, the Aldridges are not English (something that Father Aldridge points out to Atticus during their heated conversation later), but then neither are Rose and her parents.  They are Scottish.  For that matter, neither were Queen Victoria’s antecedents.  If we have to have a name for what they all are — the Crawleys, Aldridges, McClairs, and all the good folk below stairs—I guess it would be ”British” (although Tom might wish to be excluded from that category) and it would have been truly insulting if Susan had phrased her sideways remark that way.

But Susan was just getting started.  It was she who arranged the honey trap at Atticus’s bachelor party.  But how did she manage those arrangements?  She has just taken the long passage from India with her husband, transferred with him to a train at Southampton and gone straight through to Grantham House, the little pied-a-terre, about the size of a museum, maintained by the Crawley family when they happen to be in London.  I assume there was no such thing as ship to shore radio in those days, so she had to make the arrangements on land after she arrived.  She had to find a suitable young woman – did she thumb through the “T” section of the classifieds to find “Tarts”? – and she had to find a photographer who could crank out the prints by next morning.  It was only at dinner that she learned where the bachelor party was being held and on top of that she would have had to learn where to have the snaps delivered for Rose to see them at lunch in the company of her second cousins.  All of this had to be managed from Grantham House without anyone knowing.  I hesitate to say that there is anything that could not be accomplished by a mother who thinks she is protecting her child (as Susan described her motivation for trying to break up the wedding), but this particular feat seems highly improbable.

Under other circumstances, Susan might have hit the jackpot.  The eye contact between Atticus and the contracted young woman and his breezy dismissal of her in the elevator suggested to me that he knows his way around this line of commerce.  Had Atticus been differently disposed that evening, his goose would have been cooked.  As it was, the only trump left to Susan was her announcement, just before Rose’s arrival at the ceremony, that she and Shrimpy are divorcing and when that failed to have the desired effect, she admitted defeat.  She is stuck with a handsome son-in-law, dripping with money, wildly in love with her daughter.  Such problems!

Meanwhile, Lord Sinderby has his own objections, none of which slowed anyone down for a moment, but I was intrigued by his use of the word “shiksa”[1].  The word struck me, first, as anachronistic and second, even if in contemporary usage at the time, unlikely to come from the mouth of someone as reserved and straight-laced as Daniel Aldridge.  I went to the OED to check on this word.  The earliest literary use captured by the Oxford readers was in 1892 and the next was in 1928, well past the date of our story.  So, the word was not in wide literary use in 1924.  I somehow doubt that the Aldridges walk around the house speaking Yiddish, so the word would have found its way into Lord Sinderby’s vocabulary by way of English, if at all.  I just doubt that the word was in common use in British English in 1924.  Obviously, a new word will find its way into the language only when a critical mass of individuals uses it.  Bankers, whether Jew or Gentile, would not have provided the necessary linguistic creativity to produce a new coinage.  (I believe “mezzanine finance” was the last linguistic contribution of the bankers.)  The walks of life that attract more voluble participants – writers, lyricists, lawyers, journalists – would have been more likely to supply a word like that, so I would reckon that when it entered English, it did so on the U.S. side of the water, where there were more Yiddish-speaking immigrants engaged in the lines of work that use language intensively.  I find it hard to believe that there would have been a sufficiently large critical mass of Jewish members of the chattering classes in Britain to have pushed the word over the top in that locale.  And if I am wrong and the word was somehow in common use on London streets in 1924, I doubt that Lord Sinderby would use slang.

Incidentally, did you notice the menorah sitting on the shelf to the side of Lord Sinderby’s desk?  Just in case you thought that maybe he’s not really Jewish, the menorah pretty much seals the deal.

Kudos to Mother Aldridge for steering her son’s bark through the various shoals, rapids, and eddies presented by her husband and her son’s future mother-in-law and landing herself a lovely Scottish daughter-in-law, shiksa though she be.  I hope the newlyweds will be very happy.  In my humble opinion, they are the best looking couple we have seen to date on this show and they seem just as nice as that to boot.

The Amritsar Massacre, discussed briefly by Shrimpy, Sinderby, Isobel, and Robert, was actually in the news in the U.K. on Monday, the day after this episode aired in the U.S.  When World War One ended in November 1918, India had hoped for increased autonomy.  This would have been a suitable recompense for India’s contribution to Britain’s war effort, but what India received instead was martial law.  By April 1919, Indian tempers were flaring and the British were worried about their ability to maintain order.  On April 10, 1919, the general in charge of the Amritsar district in the north of India, a General Dyers, became increasingly concerned about civil unrest.  As it happened, April 13 was a local festival day and large numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus came to Amritsar to celebrate, although some historians believe that the crowd was there not to celebrate bur rather specifically to provoke the British.  The crowd entered a square that was surrounded on four sides by walls, with very few exits.  General Dyers and a contingent of native troops arrived and, according to an investigation conducted by the British government shortly after these events, began firing on the crowd.  When people threw themselves to the ground, the troops directed their fire to the ground.  When the crowd tried to flee through the narrow exits, the troops fired on the exits.

The British government has maintained since that day that 379 people were killed and some 1,200 wounded.  The Indian government has maintained that about 1,000 were killed and 500 wounded.  Some 1,600 shell casings were collected from the scene, and there seems to be broad agreement between the two governments that the total number of killed and wounded is roughly equal to the number of cartridges expended.

Opinion within Britain, both in the government and the public, has been divided from then until now.  Here is an excerpt from a long speech delivered to the House of Commons in 1920 by the Secretary of State for War, who was none other than Winston Churchill:

[W]hen the ammunition had reached the point that only enough remained to allow for the safe return of the troops, and after 379 persons, which is about the number gathered together in this Chamber to-day, had been killed, and when most certainly 1,200 or more had been wounded, the troops, at whom not even a stone had been thrown, swung round and marched away.  I deeply regret to find myself in a difference of opinion from many of those with whom, on the general drift of the world’s affairs at the present time, I feel myself in the strongest sympathy; but I do not think it is in the interests of the British Empire or of the British Army for us to take a load of that sort for all time on our backs.  We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or another, that this is not the British way of doing business.

I shall be told that it “saved India.” I do not believe it for a moment. The British power in India does not stand on such foundations.

These events occurred 95 years ago.  No one who witnessed or participated in the events is still alive, but the controversy continues.  David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, was in India last week and was invited to apologize for the 1919 massacre.  He declined to apologize, but adopted Churchill’s formulation that the event was “monstrous”.  On Monday, I found this headline at the website of the (London) Daily Mail:

David Cameron was right not to apologise – the monstrous massacre of Amritsar SAVED thousands of lives, says one of Britain’s top historians

The historian in question is Andrew Roberts, who is indeed eminent but also highly controversial.  He is not at all convinced that the standard account, including the account presented by Churchill in 1920 (and dramatized in the film Gandhi), is correct.

At the time, the House of Commons, under the control of the Liberals, condemned General Dyers.  The more conservative House of Lords did not agree and supported the General.  At the wedding reception, Lord Sinderby takes Dyers’s side, but Shrimpy politely and Robert rather less politely disagree.  Robert insists that Sinderby must defer to Shrimpy, who knows India.  But Shrimpy was based in Bombay (now Mumbai), more than 1,000 miles by road from Amritsar.  It’s as if a person who spent a lot of time in Denver were to be treated as an expert on Chicago politics.  Sinderby does not reply, but I doubt that he is persuaded by Shrimpy’s authority[2].  It is remarkable that this is one of the best documented events of its kind in history, yet the responsibility for the event and significant details are still disputed nearly a century after the fact.  As William Faulkner said, the past is not dead; it is not even past.

In 1984, history repeated itself when the Indian government under Indira Gandhi ended a Sikh protest at the Golden Temple in Amritsar by using armed troops to attack the temple.  Perhaps 1,000 Sikhs died in the same city that had witnessed another massacre by a different government 65 years earlier.

In other news, Anna has been arrested for the murder of Mr. Green.  Two people have guaranteed her innocence in slightly different terms.  Bates tells Mary that Anna will not be convicted, but Mrs. Hughes guarantees that neither Anna nor Mister (Bates that is) had anything to do with it.  Bates, noble fellow that he is, pretty clearly plans to take the rap for Anna.  Since it appears that he was not actually in London on the day of the murder (unless Mr. Fellowes is throwing a second head fake at us), it’s hard to see how this effort is going to succeed.  But how can Mrs. Hughes be so very sure that neither of the Bateses did the crime?  Is it possible, is it conceivable that Mrs. Hughes was in London on that day?  Let me say that as far as the actual character of Mrs. Hughes is concerned, I find the suggestion completely unbelievable.  It’s just that I don’t put anything past this writing crew, who have proven to be alternatively cruel and frivolous when it suits them.

Robert once again demonstrates his innate decency when he arranges for a stone plaque to commemorate Mrs. Patmore’s nephew to be set up on the path near the war memorial.  He can’t put Archie’s name on the memorial, but offering the reason that the lad was not from Downton is a fitting substitute for the real reason, in the interest of healing wounds.

The lines read by Mr. Carson at the unveiling of the memorial are from a poem titled “For the Fallen” written in 1914 by Robert Laurence Binyon.  (Anyone starting out to be a poet should be sure to have three names.)  It was written just after the Battle of the Marne, after the heavy losses of the first month of fighting but before the losses multiplied beyond understanding.  It is said to be a favorite among the British for honoring their war dead.  I confess I find most of it trite and flat.  For example, it starts:  “With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea.”   I realize that my certificate from the Literary Critics Society of America is still in the mail, but I find nothing in these lines to capture the heart or the imagination; the image of nation as mother is too tired to count even as a cliché.  The poem continues in that same uninspired vein for six of its seven quatrains, but in the middle, for one moment the poet strikes gold.  The fourth verse begins with the lines that Mr. Carson read:  “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.”  And in those two lines, the poet earns his three names and captures some of the sadness that was part of the lives that continued as thousands, then millions, went to early graves.

I noticed that a few household staff members are complaining about reductions in numbers.  Robert needs to sell his prize painting to pay for the cottage construction project.  Money seems to be an issue, if only a marginal one, for the first time since Mr. Swires’s timely death put funds back into the estate just when they were needed.  Still, the Crawleys are better off than Rose’s parents, who seem to be completely tapped out.  Some of the landed gentry appear to be coming under financial pressure.  So far, the Aldridge family seems to be doing fine, no doubt because they are not landed gentry.  They use the income from their banking business to finance the country life that a family like the Crawleys was born into.  Judging from the brief preview, we’ll get a good look at the Aldridge domestic operation during the next episode, the last of the season.

Until next time!

[1] A word meaning “a non-Jewish girl,” which came to English from Yiddish and to Yiddish from Hebrew.  It is from this word that we have the concept of “shiksappeal”.

[2] Perhaps not without reason.  Shrimpy seems to feel that the end of British India is near, but independence arrived only in 1947, nearly a quarter century after Shrimpy’s prediction.

I think Edith should be proud that she kept her secret for more than two years.  When I say “kept her secret” I mean of course apart from her grandmother, her aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Schroeder, Mr. and Mrs. Drewe, and, at least so it appears, Mrs. Hughes.  I can think of English novels where secrets have been kept considerably longer (Middlemarch and Bleak House come to mind), but two years is nothing to sneeze at.  She is still keeping the secret from everyone else except her mother, but I feel that any entry into the record books for her effort beyond this point must be marked with an asterisk.

Edith’s secret will leak a bit further, I think.  That might be the point of having Anna witness the little Keystone Kops scene at the train station.  The spread may have halted for now thanks to a sharp word to Anna from Mrs. Hughes –does she know the secret, or did she figure it out independently?—but it does seem likely that the process will continue in inexorable Downton fashion.  In the meantime, Edith will be able to pursue a career in writing and publishing and will have the formidable Downton child care establishment at her disposal.  She’ll be able to have it all, give or take a murdered lover and a child out of wedlock.

It’s good to see that Mr. Mason has lost none of his capacity to dispense wisdom on a wide variety of subjects more or less on demand.  When his advice on education is called for, he can summon up a vision of the untold millions whose lives might have been improved by a bit of it.  Indeed, a person sitting at his very table is able to bear witness.  And when it turns out that Daisy’s desire to continue her studies is failing in sympathy with the declining fortunes of the Labor government, Mr. Mason suggests that in the future, a Labor government will seem quite ordinary.  Here again, he hits the mark.  There have indeed been several Labor governments since the 1920s and they have seemed quite ordinary.[1]

I was beginning to feel slightly relaxed about the chances that Mr. and Mrs. Bates might avoid further legal entanglements but I was alarmed that they themselves have begun to feel that the worst was behind them.  This is a dangerous attitude and I fear that they were unwise to tempt fate by giving it voice.

The treatment of British anti-Semitism in this story reminds me of the treatment of Jim Crow in The Secret Life of Bees (I saw the movie, don’t plan to try the book).  We know the bad thing is out there, but it’s something that only bad people engage in.  In the Bees movie, Jim Crow does not come into focus until a couple of pre-teens of different races try to hold hands in the section of a movie theater “reserved” for African Americans.  In Downton the only overtly negative statement about Jews is made by the most ill-mannered upper class character to have appeared in the five seasons the show has aired.

The reality would have been more complex, more subtle, I think.  For example, it’s interesting that Cora’s ancestry has been mentioned only recently.  Occasionally, the sharper-tongued members of the family – Violet and Mary – will throw her American heritage at her, but no one ever mentions her ancestry.  I can think of three reasons.  The Crawleys may be above common name calling.  Or, Cora deserves a break because she has performed her job admirably.  Her parents’ money saved the Abbey, she has supplied the line with three daughters – sons would have been nice, but remember that it is Robert who has the Y chromosomes – and she has been a suitable mistress of a stately home.  Or – and this is the one I would like to explore a bit – the Crawleys and the rest of their class don’t think of Cora as Jewish.  Her father, yes, but it seems not Cora herself.

Under traditional Jewish law, and modern Israeli positive law, a person’s status as a Jew is determined by the status of that person’s mother.  If the Israeli test looks to one immediate ancestor, the test of the infamous Nuremberg laws, adopted by Germany in 1935, looked farther back.  They counted grandparents.  Three or four Jewish grandparents meant you were Jewish.  Four “Aryan” grandparents meant you were German.  One or two Jewish grandparents meant that you were “mixed”.  Different rules applied to people with zero, one, two, or more Jewish grandparents, and to people married to them.  So, Cora, Mary, Edith, and Sibyl would have been “mixed” to one degree or another, but little Siby, George, and Marigold would have been in the clear.  This would have mattered later had things gone differently in the 1940s.

The British attitude was less definitive, as it is on most things.  Consider the career of the politician Benjamin Disraeli.  He was a larger-than-life figure who lived from 1804 to 1881.  He served as Prime Minister twice.  His parents were Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Italy to Britain before he was born.  His father had a falling out with the congregation of his local synagogue.[2]  Rather than find a new congregation, he converted to the Church of England and had Benjamin baptized at the age of 12.  In 1837, in his early 30s, Disraeli was elected to Parliament.  However, British law prohibited Jews from sitting in Parliament at that time; the ban was not lifted until 1858.  Yet Disraeli was in no way disqualified from taking his seat.  My point is that the British attitude at that time, at least as far as the law was concerned, did not consider a person’s ancestry but rather his or her professed religion in determining whether he could sit in Parliament.  Disraeli had a character of Shakespearean complexity and drew political enemies from every corner.  His rivals often went after his Jewish ancestry as well as his politics; the fact of his baptism did not immunize him from being attacked as a Jew.  Yet, Queen Victoria, that most serene and reserved British monarch, far preferred the company of Disraeli to that of his lifelong political rival William Gladstone, who was English to the marrow, a graduate of Christ College, Oxford, and a High Church Anglican.  When Disraeli and the Conservatives lost power after the election of 1880, Victoria is said to have looked for a way to prevent Gladstone from taking office as prime minister.  That plan would have required the suspension of the British constitution, but that is a measure of how much she enjoyed Disraeli’s company and tried to avoid that of the stuffy, holier-than-thou Gladstone.

So, if the guests at the Crawley dinner table had been asked whether Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew, how would each of them have answered?  It wouldn’t be a simple question for some of them.  It would be better to ask this before Larry began insulting the Crawley family because of their rag-tag collection of in-laws, including as they do a middle class solicitor, an Irish chauffer, and – coming soon – a Jewish banker.

One other point on this subject.  In Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now, the relations between Britain’s upper classes and British Jews are explored in considerable depth.  The principal character – a Mr. Auguste Melmotte – is “ambiguously Jewish” (that is, he is clearly Jewish but never identified as such by the author or overtly by any of the characters) and is as thoroughly unpleasant a character as one would hope to encounter in or out of the pages of a book.  He is a bully, a liar, and an accomplished swindler who raises fantastic sums through the issuance of fraudulent shares.  At the same time, the novel’s most benign, almost saintly, character, a Mr. Brehgert, upstanding, honest, thoughtful, well-spoken, is “unambiguously Jewish” (that is, the author so identifies him and everyone in the story knows that he is a Jew).  Brehgert, a middle-aged widower, is at one point engaged to be married to a Miss Georgiana Longestaffe, who is some thirty years his junior and the daughter of a family of high rank but low funds.  Her parents are wildly opposed and her friends refuse to have anything to do with her.  Ultimately he (not she) breaks off the engagement.  But what I find most interesting is a related story that is only referred to in the novel by some of the characters, not narrated independently by the author.  Mr. Brehgert has a partner by the name of Goldschein.  We are told that a young woman of a high-ranking family, named Lady Julia Start, eloped with Lionel Goldschein, the partner’s son.  The story is that her family is just fine with the arrangement and “everyone” visits them.  The secret seems to be that young Lionel is thoroughly anglicized (e.g., he is described as being an excellent shot), he has lost the ethnic markers that identify the members of his father’s generation as “unambiguous” and no doubt most importantly he has plenty of money.  Just like Atticus Aldridge.  He is dripping with wealth and his family lost the ethnic markers several generations ago.  For example, if you asked Pop Aldridge, or rather Lord Sinderby, “How’s business?” I bet he wouldn’t say “Please, don’t ask.”  So, I think things between Atticus and Rose are going to be all right.  Love conquers darned near all, and money takes care of the rest.

Unfortunately, the person most immediately affected by Larry’s rudeness is dear Isobel.  The rest of the Crawleys will run into Larry and his less rude but equally unpleasant brother only rarely, but Isobel will see them constantly.  And all the people who were on friendly terms with the Merton boys’ late mother are likely to view Isobel with skepticism if not hostility.  And where would she be able to turn for help and support?  Violet would be willing, possibly, but she can’t spend half her time running over to Merton Hall or whatever the Merton version of Downton Abbey is called.  I wonder if Lord Merton would consider living somewhere more modest?  Let’s leave Isobel to turn this problem over.  Perhaps she will give us her answer before the season ends.

Meanwhile, the Blake Plan was fulfilled, but not without some additional difficulty.  The only way to get Gillingham to take no for an answer from Mary is for him to witness her kissing another man, such as Blake to take a random example.  And what better place to stage this scene than the lobby of a movie theater?[3]  Gillingham appreciates instantly that the whole thing was staged, but realizes that he can now fold and file the walking papers that Mary handed him episodes ago.  I assume that Mr. Blake and Mary will eventually marry, but in the meantime he is going to Poland as part of a trade mission.  The Polish economy was an absolute shambles at the time.  The Polish state, which had ceased to exist in the 1790s, had been re-established in 1918 out of leftover pieces of Germany, Russia, Austria, and Lithuania.  The country did not even have a single national currency until 1924, so it’s not clear what Britain might hope to sell to Poland or what Poland might be able to buy from Britain.  But, you never know if you don’t try, so off goes Mr. Blake for as much as a year.  No doubt we will see him again next season if not before.

It remains to discuss briefly our dear friend Isis, whose tush has guided our path to the Abbey for almost every episode so far.  Will Isis be there next week to get the opening credits rolling when the melodramatic music starts?  Why was this little piece of bathos necessary?  If the writers felt that Robert had to be distracted by something when the plan to install Marigold was being discussed, why couldn’t it have been some crisis with the war memorial?  Was it necessary to sacrifice the dog for their convenience?  Or, did the dog snap at one of the writing staff – was this another case of petty revenge, like the way they killed Sibyl?  Or perhaps this episode aired on Christmas Day in the U.K. and they were worried that somewhere, someone would be able to enjoy Christmas dinner for once.  Whatever the reason, it seemed gratuitous.  My heartstrings are tuned just the way I like them.  I don’t need people pulling at them.

Finally, I would like to commend Thomas for his new-found kindness to his fellow servants.  Any of us can become irritable and difficult to live with when we have an abscess caused by repeated injections with an unsterile hypodermic needle.  But it’s not every day that the patient, once recovered, becomes a model of good cheer and helpful advice.  (“Doctor, will I be able to play the violin after the operation?” “Yes, of course.”  “That’s funny.  I can’t play it now.”)  There’s just something in the air of Downton Abbey.  You live there long enough, you become a better person.  Maybe they should invite Larry back.  I bet even he would come round, eventually.

I wonder whether the next episode will wrap this season up.

[1] MacDonald’s troubles mounted and he was forced to call an election in November 1924.  The Tories re-took power and remained in office for five years.  MacDonald returned as Prime Minister when Labor emerged from the general election of 1929 as the largest party, although still short of a majority.  He headed a Labor government into 1931 and then a coalition government to 1935.  So, kidding aside, Mr. Mason was right in the long run.

[2] My Uncle Joe was a superb raconteur and loved to tell the story about the Jewish sailor who was shipwrecked for twenty years on a remote Pacific island.  One day, a passing ship found him.  He asked the captain to join him on a tour of the island before taking his leave forever.  When they had finished, the captain was very impressed.  “You have built a beautiful house, a substantial barn, a granary, a storehouse.  But tell me, why did you build two synagogues?”  The answer: “This one over here I attend, and the other one, I wouldn’t be caught dead in.”

[3] The British prefer the word “cinema” but did you notice that Blake calls it the “kinema”?  I learned that kinema is an acceptable although unusual British spelling and pronunciation.  The word cinema entered English from French, and the French spell it sensibly with a “c”.  But the French word was a conscious invention and derives from the Greek word for movement which transliterates to “kinema”.  Yes, it’s true that the Greeks would have called it “kinema” if they had named it, but it was two French brothers who coined the term, so you would think that their spelling would settle the question.  Blake’s pronunciation strikes me as an affectation, something I don’t expect from such a grounded fellow.

It was a bad night for Edith and for the Bateses, but things seem to be rounding into form for everyone else.  Cora and Robert are back together.  Isobel is going to accept Lord Merton.  Gillingham is again chasing Lane Fox, leaving Mary available for Blake, who will not miss his second chance.  Rose and Atticus are about to enter full romantic mode.  His family’s religion doesn’t seem to bother anyone, eliciting a mere “It’s always something” from Violet.  (I’m sure the writers put that in as a special favor to Maggie Smith.)  Violet has enjoyed a face to face visit with her old flame Prince K and the frisson of excitement as he resumed the seduction that was merely interrupted half a century earlier.

(Slight pause while I yawn.)  Mrs. Patmore has found a sound investment for the inheritance she received.  She is not the least put off by the “outdoor privy”.  Mr. Carson has proposed marriage to Mrs. Hughes in the most oblique manner possible.  Still, his meaning was unmistakable.  Baxter had a further opportunity to demonstrate her purity of heart by helping to get Thomas much-needed medical treatment even after he had posted an anonymous letter that put her through an unnecessary encounter with the police.  The effect on Thomas seemed to be positive, but he is someone about whose moral reformation we must remain guarded.  Finally, Daisy’s education has reached the War of the Spanish Succession, a series of events the study of which has caused the ambitions of many a young scholar to founder[1].  Fortunately, Mr. Molesley is there to help and provides a slim volume of 700 pages for context.  His ambition to become a teacher will not be fulfilled, but he can experience some of the pleasures of pedagogy by helping young Daisy, whose growing confidence must be a source of pride and satisfaction to the entire viewing audience.

All of this contentment and improvement is not helping Anna and Mister Bates.  Things were looking quite bad for them when Bates discovered the birth control device that Anna is keeping for Mary.  He draws the obvious if incorrect conclusion that Anna is trying to avoid having a child with him.  She cannot provide the true story without compromising the reputation of Lady Mary.  What a spot to be in!  In the course of their mutual tear-laden confessions and revelations, we learn that Julian Fellowes gave us a first class head fake last season.  Mister Bates never went to London.  All that discordant music, his purposeful stride as he left the grounds with murder in his heart, and the London train ticket in his coat pocket on his return were designed to lead us to the conclusion that Bates killed Green.  I fell for it without a second thought, but now it turns out the blighter never traveled to London that day!  Why didn’t Mrs. Hughes or Lady Mary notice that the train ticket had not been used?  In my defense, I don’t know the ways of the British rail system.  I can’t tell whether a ticket has been used, but the two ladies in their very different stations in life know all about these things.  Why didn’t one of these intelligent, perceptive females notice that the ticket had not been used?

Well, whatever the explanation, Bates is now in real trouble.  I had speculated earlier this season that there was no way the writers were going to send Bates to the gallows for a crime he actually committed.  But now that he is innocent he is completely without protection.  Sending an innocent man to prison or the gallows is purely routine in this kind of story.  A writing crew that could send Matthew Crawley to his death on the day his son was born – and remember that in the UK that episode aired on Christmas Day – that crew is capable of anything.

I confess that the thought has crossed my mind that maybe Anna really did kill Green.  She was in London at the right time (as we or at least I learned last week) and she had motive.  It would be completely out of character, and it’s hard to imagine that she would have withheld confessing to Bates when he bewailed the lost train ticket, but it is not impossible.  Needless to say, I do not predict.  I offer the possibility for consideration.

Edith has been temporizing for two years, waiting for news of Michael.  Our worst fears were confirmed this week when his body was finally found.  There seems to be a slight hitch in the chronology of these events.  His death is being attributed to the violence attendant upon the “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich in November 1923.  This was an attempt by the National Socialist party, led by Adolf Hitler and assisted by Erich Ludendorff, who had been in effect the commander of the German army during the last years of World War One, to take over the government of the state of Bavaria by force.  Some people died in the putsch, most of them party members, some of them police.  The chronological hiccup is that Michael went missing in 1922, probably 20 months before the Munich violence.

That’s just another one of those little nits that I like to pick at.  The main point is that he is now confirmed dead and that tells Edith that there is no point waiting for better days.  She needs to act now.  Last week, I thought she was going to kidnap the child because the alternative would have been to reveal the truth, which appeared to be a psychological impossibility for her.  I thought a full confession might have been the better course in the long run.  She found a compromise by taking the child after revealing the truth to Mrs. Drewe, who is heartbroken and furious at the same time, but telling no one else anything more than that she is going away.

By going away with her child, Edith may be opening up possibilities that she couldn’t see from the drawing room at Downton.  Last week we learned that she is still writing her column about the changing times.  In the current episode we learned that Mr. Gregson left his publishing firm to her in his will.  Incidentally, that makes the fourth will to have figured in this story by my count:  (1) the original will by Robert’s father entailing the estate; (2) the Swires will that puts funds into Matthew’s hands just when they are needed; (3) Matthew’s will leaving everything to Mary; and now (4) Gregson’s will to Edith.

Cora is moved by Mr. Gregson’s generosity.  But what about Mrs. Gregson, who is living in a mental institution somewhere?  Perhaps Gregson had other more liquid assets that could be devoted to the maintenance of his wife for the remaining half century or so of her life.  Otherwise, let’s not be surprised if her representatives raise an objection to the Gregson will.

Assuming that Edith gets to keep the publishing house, what is to prevent her from running that business, continuing her writing career, and doing all of that while acknowledging openly that she is a single, indeed unwed, mother?  She apparently is the beneficiary of a trust fund, so between her own funds and the income from the publishing house, she doesn’t have to worry about anyone’s opinion.  (I believe publishing was a lucrative business in the 1920s.)  She may not be asked to any fashionable parties, but then she might be just as well off avoiding members of her social class and finding new more bohemian companions.  I have to say that I like Edith’s chances in this situation, and she may agree once she has an opportunity to appraise things away from the constricting if stately confines of Downton.

As a final note, Isis the dog seems to be either ill or pregnant.  The fact that Robert is unconcerned suggests that the situation will soon be dire.  I hope that Robert decides to use the local vet and not some knighted fellow who will leave a path of devastation and mourning behind him.

[1] It’s interesting to note that the commander of Britain’s army in that war was John Churchill, the first Duke of Malborough, an ancestor of both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana.

The secret of comedy is, as everyone knows, .   .   .   .   timing. Just ask Mr. Bricker and Lord Grantham. Had I known last week what Bricker was going to pull this week, I would have saved the joke about the linguist and the maid. As it is, for a topical chuckle on an event that resulted in a rare example of overt physical violence on this show (putting aside World War One), I refer the reader to the footnoted joke that appears in the commentary to Episode Four. And at one time I thought Bricker might be gay! In an idle moment, I pictured him and Barrow together in a seaside cottage somewhere. Instead, he ends up getting cold-cocked by a jealous husband, an earl of the realm no less, and fighting it out with him on the bedroom carpet. The hidden depths of these art historians!

I was curious to see that when Mr. Bricker left, he tipped Carson but not Molesley. I had not noticed anyone tipping Carson before now. I found an article on proper decorum at house parties written in 1922. It said that gentlemen guests should tip the butler, the valet if one was “supplied” and possibly the chauffeur, but no one else. Once again, Molesely draws the short straw. By the way, when the house was preparing for the cocktail party – such a racy event! – there were numerous young fellows rolling up carpets and doing other heavy work. Couldn’t they help polish silver, put away dinnerware and the like so that Molesely doesn’t have to do everything? Where are all these people in between cocktail parties?

The show has been hinting at a Jewish angle for two years, and it appears that things are now getting serious. I expected something a couple of years ago when Cora’s mother (Shirley MacLaine) was a guest at the Abbey. Her name, and therefore Cora’s name before she married, was Levenson. Her husband, deceased, was a furrier in Cincinnati. No other information was supplied. No doubt there are plenty of men named Levenson active in the fur trade who are pillars of their local Presbyterian church, but I wouldn’t bet it that way. In the current season, while Cora is sauntering about the tonier districts of London’s West End with Mr. Bricker, she tells him that her father was Jewish. When she puts it that way, it’s a fair inference that her mother was not.

The writers might have left us with this interesting genealogical footnote, but have instead opened new possibilities through the introduction of a fully Jewish character with the unlikely name of Atticus Aldridge. The two consequences of Mr. Aldridge’s entry into the story are demonstrations, respectively, of Russian anti-Semitism and Rose’s naïveté.

Rose is described as administering to a group of Russian émigrés, but in fact only two have really entered the story: Prince Kuragin, who is the moody fellow with a Violet past (sorry), and Count Rostov, who has lost control of his emotions twice so far. The first occasion was Rose’s tea party at the Abbey, when Rostov lost it under the prodding of Sarah Bunting, who we learned later had been just warming up, preparing for her big moment at the Crawley dinner table. The second incident was in the present episode, when Rostov’s quiet game of chess with Kuragin was interrupted by the presence of Mr. Aldridge. When Rose reports that the ancestors of her new friend were fellow countrymen of Rostov and Kuragin and first left Russia in 1859, Rostov is able to conclude that the rest of the family left Russia in 1871. When this chronology is confirmed, Rostov announces that the Aldridge family is not Russian but Jewish. After this bit of deduction, he flies into a rage and storms away. It’s bad enough that he has to fill his time with chess and tea in an old church in York, but it is more than he can bear to have his peace interrupted by a descendant of those that his own ancestors drove out of his native land.

Russian and Ukrainian anti-Semitism was (is) virulent, violent, and remarkably durable. The Aldridge family, as they are now called, left by way of Odessa after pogroms in 1859 and 1871. The Ukrainians put on another pogrom in 1881. In 1891 the Russian government forcibly removed all Jews living in Moscow (some 200,000 persons) and St. Petersburg (another 2,000) to the “Pale of Settlement” – an area where Jews were at first permitted, later encouraged, then finally required to settle. A new series of even more violent pogroms began in 1903 and continued through 1905. That 1905 pogrom was as much as my great-grandfather was willing to put up with. He left for America and after getting established here, he sent for the rest of his family in 1910. The timing of their emigration had a pattern similar to that of the ancestors of our new friend Atticus, but more compressed as circumstances no doubt dictated.

The Russians and Ukrainians put millions of people in such fear for their physical safety, the security of their homes, and the lives of their families that some two million Jews left Russia between 1880 and 1920 and started all over again in places like Britain, western Europe, and most particularly the United States. I have no doubt that those people, like tens of millions of others who immigrated to the United States at that time, would have gladly contributed to their native country what they ended up contributing to the societies that they joined.

It might have occurred to Rostov that here we have (courtesy of Julian Fellowes) one of history’s little ironies. Rostov and Aldridge have washed up on the same shore via very different routes, and have met through the agency of the same lovely young lady. They have a lot in common despite appearances. It might have been to Rostov’s advantage to explore, or at least leave open, the possibility of a cordial relationship if not more. Not in this episode, and maybe not in this life. When Czar Nicholas II’s ministers informed him of the importance of the military arrangements with Britain that were then being negotiated, the Czar (according to Barbara Tuchman) combined his two favorite prejudices by announcing “An Englishman is a zhid (a Jew).” He agreed to the military arrangements, but he retained both prejudices. Rostov seems to be of the same mind as to one of them.

In the meantime, Rose’s naïveté concerning the relationship between Jews and the wider societies in which they lived is almost staggering. She has not been locked in a convent her entire life; she might figure something out now and again. On the Russian side, she might have heard that Russian pogroms had driven out countless Jews. And on the British side, has it never occurred to her that she really doesn’t run into very many people who are not rich, titled, and in communion with the Church of England? (OK, the Russians are only formerly rich and are Orthodox Christians.) She seems to know two Americans (Cora and Mr. Ross, who let us agree she got to know well enough to kiss), one Catholic (Tom), and now one Jew. (Atticus? That’s really his name?) She is not a candidate for Britain’s Miss Diversity of 1924. So, it seems hopelessly (what’s the word?) jejune for her to blithely spout that after all we’re all just plain English, as if to say what difference does anything else make as long as we all drink tea at 11:00 and 4:00.

Well, I may find her ignorance exasperating but clearly Mr. Aldridge does not. He is entranced not only by her beauty but by the simplicity and purity of her personality. He is going off to London to start a new job, but we find out later, after they part, that his family has just acquired a stately home in the neighborhood – well, the same county – and a title (money and a title – two out of three, only missing on the Church of England connection) so we know that we’ll be seeing more of him.

Meanwhile, Carson and Barrow are each reverting to their worst impulses. Carson is becoming stuffier and more insufferable as each episode unfolds. He doesn’t know anything about investing, but he has to pretend he is an expert because he won’t admit that there is something he doesn’t know. Incidentally, did you notice that Mrs. Patmore asks him if a local builder has gone public (except that like a good Yorkshirewoman she says “pooblic” just as Bunting wishes Daisy good “look” instead of luck)? The expression did not enter the language until mid-century, and even then I doubt that it was immediately on the tongue of country house cooks. I expect that the anachronism was intentional.

Barrow’s course of medication is clearly damaging his health. He is sweating like a draft animal, he has bags under his eyes, and even Violet notices that he looks pallid. But as the outer man deteriorates, the inner man retains his bitter sarcasm and his habit of retailing the most damaging gossip. Those around him who are not annoyed are instead offended. It’s hard to see this ending well for Mr. Barrow.

I know that I occasionally miss points of detail in the plot, but I was truly surprised to learn that Anna had been in London on the day of Mr. Green’s death. Unless the writers added this point after the fact in order to make her a more realistic murder suspect, I just missed it completely when Green died. Now that Anna has no alibi, it seems a racing certainty that she is going to be charged. When are these English police going to get one right, finally?

I would like to say that Mr. Blake is a very clever and patient fellow and I think he has hatched an excellent plan. He and Mary clearly bonded in the pig sty and I think she will soon come to see that sending him away was not a good move. He knows that he has to get rid of Gillingham and the best way to do that is to lure him away to his first love, the fabulously wealthy heiress Lane Fox. He also knows that Miss Fox is someone too intelligent to be manipulated through subtlety, so he manipulates her openly by telling her his plan. The fact that her reaction was to leave the manger à trois in a huff demonstrates that Mr. Blake’s spell is already taking hold. If she had said “Don’t be ridiculous” and then dug into a hearty plate of roasted beef, that would have signaled that she had no further interest. Her hasty departure tells us that Blake has touched a nerve and she will come around in time. By the time Gillingham leaves Mary for the third and last time, Blake will be flavor of the month.

I have a plea to make to Tom. Please, Tom, do not go running after Sarah Bunting. If you look, you are sure to find another companionable socialist in the neighborhood, one that can get along with the Crawley family and at the same time work toward the complete rearrangement of society.

Just a final word about Edith. It looks like she is going to kidnap Marigold (on the advice of her aunt and her grandmother) and then install the child somewhere in London. Aunt and grandmother strongly prefer France, where we learn that there are numerous boarding schools that cater to children born to wealthy but unmarried parents. The London arrangement will allow Edith to play some kind of role in Marigold’s life beyond a couple of visits a year, which is the most to be expected of the French arrangement. Couldn’t all of these problems, both logistical and emotional, be resolved if Edith just told the truth and claimed Marigold as her own child? Of course that would fly in the face of convention and would be a terrible shock to family and friends. It would lead to gossip and the occasional nasty comment face to face. But the family and friends would get over the shock and the scandal would ultimately fade. A lot of the plot of this show is the result of tension between what the characters want and what convention demands of them, so the cleanest solution of Edith’s problem may not contribute to the telling of the tale. I expect that Edith’s and Marigold’s story will come out eventually, but in droplets as with so many other Downton developments.

I apologize that I am posting this comment a full week after the show aired. I think I could produce at a faster pace if there were something actually, you know, happening on this show.