"Downton Abbey" Series 2 hit the airwaves of public television last week, much to the delight of historians, Anglophiles, and booksellers. Yes, indeed, PBS's loyal Masterpiece Theater audience is perceived as literary and apt to pick up a book to learn more about World War I, well-bred, aristocratic England, and the servants they employed. Publishers are rushing to ready a reading list of in-print books, Kindle editions, and e-books to satisfy book-buying thirsty readers who want to learn more.
Just as in the 1970's when the popular PBS series, "Upstairs Downstairs," spurred audiences to read, as did the most recent Jane Austen Masterpiece Classic production, the NYTimes reported yesterday that Twitter is buzzing with new hashtags spawned by publicists anxious to bring their period-related proteges to the forefront for readers. PBS's "Downton Abbey" is based on Britain's best-seller, The World of Downton Abbey by Jessica Fellowes, recently released by St. Martin's Press in the U.S., and created for television by her uncle, Julian Fellowes, who has deliberately "dropped open-ended references" in scripts to spark further reading about the World War I period in history and the war-effort sacrifices made by all of Edwardian England.
Downton Abbey's elegant style of living for the well-born and its customary liveried servants in grand houses is particularly familiar to older Newport, Rhode Islanders, as it wasn't that long ago when the estates along Bellevue Avenue, all had butlers, footmen, and countless maids who ate in copper-clad kitchens and sat for meals according to household rank. The butler was positioned at the head of the table, and to his right, the secretary or head housekeeper and so on.around the table. The seating arrangement of servants was indicative of the depth of purpose and relationship with the master of the house as well.
Mary, Viscountess Rothermere's household staff at Four Winds on Bellevue Avenue, Newport, practiced this tell-tale manner of seating up until 1990, and Emily Astor Van Alen, mother of International Tennis Hall of Fame's founder, Jimmy Van Alen, was rumored to be the last dowager to have liveried servants at the family's estate, Wakehurst, now a part of Salve Regina University in Newport.
Readers can learn more about WWI and its human experience with this suggested "Downton Abbey" reading list, available at Amazon.com, not all of which was included in the recently published NY Times book list attributed above:
"The Beauty and the Sorrow, an Intimate History of the First World War," by Peter Englund, in Kindle edition and deckle edged hardcover. The Mail on Sunday writes: "Englund frees individual experience from the collective cloak of history and geography [in] this extraordinary book . . . The details build like a symphony.”
Locally, Island Books, on Wyatt Road, in Middletown, RI's community book store, offers a list of "Downton-esque" hardcover, paperback, and Google e-books, including those books suggested above and Fellowes' "The World of Downton Abbey."
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