Downton Daze Introduction

Today, as many of you may know, is the premiere of the second season of ITV’s smash hit, Downton Abbey. How fortunate for the UK…and unfortunate for the rest of the world, who must now wait until networks in their own countries pick up the broadcasting rights. You can be sure I’ll be hounding the PBS website until January, when they tell me they shall finally be broadcasting.

Until then, for those of us without immediate gratification for our Downton fix, I’m devoting the next several months to trawling through period appropriate costumes, music, poetry, and other relevant media here on my blog. I’m calling this temporary change-over ‘Downton Daze’ and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I’m going to.

Starting off our series will be Cinematic Sundays, a review series of various TV and movies set in the 1900s. Next we’ll have Musical Mondays, where I’ll be featuring various popular tunes of the period, as well as several of the more well known composers. Poetry Promenade will probably float throughout, as I love poetry and I have a lot of poems and poets I’d like to feature, and Fictional Fridays will round out our offerings by discussing written fiction around the Great War Period. I’ve got a stack of books beside my bed just waiting to be read, and I can’t wait to bring them all to your attention. I’ll also be highlighting a lot of great websites throughout the internet world who are also covering Downton and the world it embodies.

Historical fanaticists, take note – I’m more of what you would probably call a popular historical type. I will mainly be reading the kinds of history texts you can buy at your local bookstore, not the more academically minded University press offerings. I apologize in advance for any misdirections on my part and will gladly and joyfully take suggestions and feedback.

So, without more ado --

Cinematic Sunday No. 1 – Manor House, BBC, 2002

Those of you who read this blog already know it is my life’s dream to be able to dress up in period clothing and teach people stuff. What would be only slightly better than that is to dress up in period clothing and teach people stuff on national TV.

Adding to a series of shows that included Colonial House, Regency House Party, Pioneer House and 1940s House, BBC and PBS put together Manor House, a show where 21 members of the general history loving population (like myself) signed up to dress, work, and behave just like their Edwardian counterparts might have done in the years leading up to the Great War.

One family, the Oliff-Coopers, were the ‘Upstairs’ while 15 other cast members formed the ‘Downstairs’ of this historical reality show. The show was filmed at Manderston House in the North of England, where all 21 members of the cast lived just as their counterparts would have nearly a hundred years before. Guiding them on the show were carefully written rule books, patterned after commonly followed advice books of the period, which outlined standards of dress and behavior for each person and their station.

The Upstairs had a pretty easy run of it, so most of the show’s drama focuses instead on the doings of the Downstairs. It turns out living as a maid in the 1900s was a lot harder than some of the cast members anticipated, and partway through the series several members of the cast actually handed in their notice because they were tired – of the long hours, of the regulations placed on the staff, and of the feeling, very strange to our modern sensibilities, that they had suddenly become so much less than the people they were serving upstairs. I don’t usually go for reality shows, but BBC’s production was well-made and very, very accessible. As someone who’s said a number of times that I was born in the wrong period, shows like this always help me put in perspective that, while time travel would be extremely fun, it does help to have been born and brought up with those expectations and social norms.

View the show’s companion page here at PBS! Be sure to check out the page’s ‘You in 1905’ feature – according to their estimates, I would have been running a lodging house with my family. I wouldn’t have married and would have lived a somewhat miserable existence in a shabby dormitory. How’s that for prospects?

You can watch the entire series on YouTube or check it out from your local library. (There's also a companion book that goes with the series.)

Happy watching!