BackDrudgery in Downton: economic lessons from popular culture
Contemporary India is a far cry from the aristocratic England of a hundred years ago depicted in Downton Abbey but there are some striking parallels
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The end of the year as well as the Devyani Khobragade episode provide ample reason for this column to embark on one of its intermittent attempts to seek economic lessons in popular culture.
I have just finished watching the first season of Downton Abbey, the television series that begins on the day the Titanic went down before it could complete its maiden voyage. The season ends with a dramatic announcement that England is at war with Germany.
The series casts an indulgent eye on the life of the aristocratic Crawley family soon after the end of the Edwardian era in England. Its opulent life is sharply contrasted with the life of the servants. The five kindly members of the Crawley family are served by 16 servants, who themselves are arranged in a rigid hierarchy from butler to kitchen maid.
It was not just the aristocrats who employed servants to work in the basement and live in the attic. Peter Drucker once pointed out in an interview that the government census in England at that time defined someone as lower middle class if he employed less than three servants. It is said that most people in Victorian England either employed servants or were servants themselves.
The standard Marxist narratives of work in those years focused on the class of industrial workers that socialists believed would be in the vanguard of the inevitable revolution. The Marxist historian E.P. Thompson barely mentions domestic workers in his classic, The Making of the English Working Class. Yet, some writers have estimated that there were more house workers than industrial workers in England (and most European societies) at the end of the nineteenth century; one in every four women workers was doing some sort of housework. The fact that they are missing in many economic histories is as strange as the absence of cricket from social histories of England written at the same time.
The genteel stability depicted in the early parts of Downton Abbey was actually illusory. The old social system was coming apart at its seams. The landed aristocracy was under financial pressure, something that is indicated early on in the television series when we are told that Lord Grantham, aka Robert Crawley, married his American wife for her money. Such transatlantic marriages of conveniences were common, as the robber barons of America sought acceptance by marrying their daughters into a European aristocracy that sorely needed their money to keep up appearances.
It was not just the dwindling fortunes of the aristocracy that would eventually undermine the social system of the time. Aspirations were also rapidly changing. Housework may have seemed more comfortable than life in the factories, but young men and women began to seek newer types of work. One of the housemaids—Gwen Dawson—has taken a postal course so that she can leave Downton Abbey to work as a secretary elsewhere. The driver is an Irish socialist.
The number of English house workers began to rapidly dwindle after the end of World War 1. The financial troubles of the aristocracy grew. There were newer job opportunities for women. New labour-saving machines entered homes. Wage rates also rose after a few decades. Keeping a full-time servant became very rare in most of the rich countries by the end of World War 2, though some writers now say that growing inequality in the West has revived the demand for house workers.
“Since 1978, household expenditure on domestic service has quadrupled, bringing the absolute number of domestics in London back to Victorian levels, according to some estimates. One explanation is growing income inequality, not only within post-Thatcher Britain but between countries. Servants have always been migrants, whether farm girls streaming into London, refugees from Nazism or, today, nannies from the Philippines, where raising someone else’s offspring on a different continent may be the only way to pay your own child’s tuition," says Leah Price in a review of Servants, by Lucy Lethbridge, published in November in the New York Times.
Contemporary India is a far cry from the aristocratic England of a hundred years ago that has been depicted in Downton Abbey. But there are some striking parallels across the decades. Most domestic workers may not live with their employers in our cities (they usually trudge in from the nearby slums) but they are perhaps a significant part of the urban labour force. I suspect from anecdotal evidence that earnings in housework can sometimes be more than what a worker in a small factory may earn.
The distinctions of class may be less stark than in Edwardian England but special servant lifts or different entrances for household help are subtle reminders of social hierarchy. And then there are the occasional horror tales of child labour, torture and sexual exploitation. However, some of this is balanced by the steely determination to educate children so that they do not end up working as a maid or driver.
Niranjan Rajadhyaksha is executive editor of Mint. Comments are welcome at cafeeconomics@livemint.com
To read Niranjan Rajadhyaksha’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/cafeeconomics
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