Let's go off in another direction for a moment ...
We recommend A Man of Parts, David Lodge's story about H G Wells. Apparently Wells lived at Uppark when he was a boy as his mother worked there. This encouraged him to become a leading Fabian in later life. At one point Lodge says:
'The country house, with its army of servants, its deferential tenants and villagers, and its extensive acres of land, stolen, requisitioned or enclosed in the distant past, inherited by the privileged few and owned as if by divine right, was the clue to England. It embodied a civilised but rigidly stratified social system that had hardly changed in the last two hundred years, and assumed it would go on for ever, unconscious that its foundations were being sapped by social and economic change. He [Wells] had begun to brood on the idea of a novel which would examine the destabilising impact of the new industrial and commercial oligarchy on the traditional land-based aristocracy and gentry, but it would be some time before he managed to write it.'
The echoes for our apparent passion for Downton Abbey are obvious: 'the clue to England'. The similar popularity of Upstairs Downstairs, whose script, production values and acting is sadly nowhere near that of Downton, suggests that we are just as attracted by the lives of the upper classes on the verge of World War II. Are we nostalgically walking backwards into such a society or would we do better to
spend time with Niall Ferguson examining the paradoxes and conundrums of modern China?
