Social Inequality, Then and Now, There and Here

The British-produced television series Downton Abbey has proved very popular with American public television audiences. Somewhat in the tradition of an earlier series also shown on PBS, Upstairs Downstairs, it's about an English family of high social class and depicts the dramas in the lives of both the family (the "upstairs" part) and their servants ("downstairs").

Since Downton Abbey begins in 1912, when Lord Robert and his family receive the news of the sinking of the Titanic (and thus the loss of the heir to the family's title and property), we can say it shows life as it was 100 years ago. The lives of the family members who live in the grand house, Downton Abbey, are contrasted with the lives of those downstairs—the family's many servants who include a butler, a housekeeper, a cook, many subordinate kitchen servants, a valet, a lady's maid, a chauffeur, footmen, and more.

The family (and their guests) eat sumptuous food; whereas the servants eat simpler food.

The family eat their food off splendid china, silverware, crystal, and so forth. It's not too clearly shown but we can be sure the servants eat off more rustic china, and so forth.

The family have better clothes, and they don't dress themselves—don't button their buttons nor tie their ties--because that's what the servants are for.

Where does the hereditary wealth and power of this and other, similar familes originally come from? Sometimes it stems from the grant of land by the king to an ancestor, 400 or 500 years ago. Or the family may be descended from the conquering Normans who seized all of England in 1066 and thus had the power to take the land from the Saxon nobles who had previously possessed it.

There are other cultures with similar and perhaps even greater social inequality, for example India, with its caste system (now officially and/or in principle abolished) or Ecuador, where the people of native blood, the Indios, are discriminated against and have a very lowly status.

People in England, at least before the system began to change after the First World War, took all this inequality and the class system for granted. People who live under such a system usually accept, with little or no questioning, that there are one's "betters," who are worthy of their superior wealth and power. The idea has even been promulgated that all this is divinely ordained, that God decreed or created a hierarchical system.

I write this from the perspective of an American of the 21st century. Not that there is not and never has been any social inequality in America, or any class system--there is in fact considerably inequality of wealth and it has been worsening--but Americans do not believe that one's station is part of one's fate in life and decreed at (and by) birth. There is no hereditary privilege similar to the right to serve in the British House of Lords, which was in fact recently abolished. This was put in our Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal." And Americans have always had faith that under our system it was possible to rise. In the Great Britain of Downton Abbey, a man could achieve wealth through business but he might still not be completely accepted by the aristocracy. He would still lack the "breeding."

Thus, inevitably, I think that an American watching Downton Abbey has to find the social-class system, as depicted there, quite a curiosity.

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