Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: What Is a Weekend?
She’s known best, not for her own words, but for those put in her mouth by others. For six years, much to our delight, Maggie Smith has seamlessly inhabited the person of Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. The character is a remarkable old lady with a (well-protected) soft heart, a sharp tongue, and a bon mot for every occasion.
Today’s quote of the day, actually the product of the fertile imagination of Downton Abbey’s creator and screenwriter, Julian Fellowes, encapsulates the enormous social upheavals taking place in Britain just ahead of World War I. The aristocratic Crawleys have discovered that the future of their magnificent estate no longer rests in the hands of “the family proper.” The heir (James) and his son (Patrick) have both gone down with the Titanic, along with the family’s hopes for a stable transition to future generations, via the marriage of Patrick to Lady Mary Crawley, the current Earl’s oldest daughter.
Upon investigation, they learn that the next Earl of Grantham will be someone (for reasons which should be obvious) have ever met. He is a distant cousin who is a lawyer and, more importantly, is the son of a middle-class doctor from Manchester. While every upper-class bone in their bodies resents him and wishes him elsewhere, their noblesse oblige, sense of duty and tradition require them to embrace him (and his mother).
The first dinner isn’t an unqualified success, as the family finds Matthew modern, brash, classless, and, in a word, deplorable. He makes it clear that the dress code requirements of the upper classes make him deeply uncomfortable. It is his determination to work as a lawyer (an actual job!) and to treat his commitment to the estate merely as a “weekend” obligation that fussels Lady Violet’s boogie to an unconscionable degree.
“What is a weekend?” she asks in her own inimitable way.
It’s a fair question for 1912. Such things were not known among the aristocracy, who didn’t need a “weekend,” to enjoy free time away from their jobs, either to spend it with friends or to go on a little holiday. They could do that whenever they wanted, regardless of the day or time of year.
Until the early decades of the 20th century, weekends were not enjoyed much by the lower classes either, as the concept of a standard “working week” with time off for rest and recreation was not codified in law until the very late 19th century. (The OED records the first use of the term “weekend” in the periodical Notes and Queries, in 1879, by which time Lady Violet would have been in early middle age.)
The fact that Matthew knows what weekends are, and that he is so comfortable with the term and expects to enjoy them himself, is an indicator of his own less-than-aristocratic upbringing. It also previews the dislocation that’s about to occur in this family’s life as it propels through what is quite possibly the most significant single decade of social upheaval in the history of Great Britain.
Much as I love this quote, it’s not my favorite emanation from the Dowager Countess. That one follows the death of Mr. Pamuk (a storyline lifted from real life and proving the DC’s point), as follows: “Last night! He looked so well. Of course, it would happen to a foreigner. No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house.” Or, perhaps it’s this one, which I’m finding more and more true every day: “At my age, one must ration one’s excitement.”
On that note, perhaps my favorite on-screen quote from this grandest of dames isn’t from Downton Abbey at all. Perhaps it’s from a different performance altogether, in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which she pithily observes: “At my age, I don’t plan that far ahead. I don’t even buy green bananas.”
Copy that. Good advice to start with, and it just gets better every day.
There’s something about this lady that brings out the best in the screenwriters. Couple that with her impeccable delivery, and you have a winner every time.
Happy 84th Birthday, Maggie Smith. Fifty years later, and you’re still in your prime.
Published in Entertainment
She was the daughter of a country clergyman; her family was supported by relatives, with whom she indeed, traveled to Bath for the Season. The popularity of her writing gave her some measure of independence, too.
No, it makes them aspirational, hopeful portraits of a fictional world – for many – into which the reader can journey for amusement/respite/pleasure… :-)
I think that’s an exaggeration. Although she did live with her mother and sisters, she was far from a recluse.
Make no mistake, I am a fervent fan of Miss Jane. But I think her books are, for the most part, portrayals of the Regency society that she knew, concerned with the things that middle, to upper-class Regency society was concerned with. Nothing wrong with that at all. Her biographies, and the Wikipedia entry on her life confirms that she had quite a bit of experience beyond home life, was quite an intellectual, and, in terms of England at least, had traveled around a bit.
At one point, she and her sister were sent to a private school in Oxford for tutoring, and she and her family actually did live in Bath for quite some time. So whether or not she was familiar with the Pump Room, she certainly knew the ambience.
I’ve always thought the grasping and foolish females so prevalent in a few of her books were probably modeled on her mother.
Twenty points for sparking a new serious conversation.
There are no pirates. How can you be amused when there are no pirates?
The universality of her themes makes them especially suitable for re-interpretation, both faithful and loose. Here are fifteen examples. I’ve seen about half of them.
Miss Anne Elliot’s Captain Wentworth is a privateer – a state-sanctioned pirate – how much better can it get? :-)
Maybe I’m being obvious but the weekend as a concept wasn’t really that original. It was an extension of the Sabbath which had been observed as a day of “rest” for centuries before. If that wasn’t codified in law, it didn’t need to be, since in Great Britain, the official church had so much cultural influence.
Also, I put “rest” in quotes, because it was really taken seriously as a day of worship, and depending on the denonimation might not be restful at all.
Well done! Thank you for the post and for the remembrances.
I, too, am a long-time fan of Dame Maggie Smith. I think my favorite of her many films is My Old Lady, with Kevin Kline, as I recall.
Off-stage. No “away all boarders” anywhere to be found.
I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was done. Maybe it’s time for Pride and Prejudice and Pirates?
I love every single movie she’s ever been in, most especially her performance as Violet in Downton Abbey. She dominated every scene in which she played. Thank you for acknowledging this fabulous actress.
Agree that in ideal circumstances, and with kind employers, the Sabbath as a day of prayer (not for drinking and carousing) was honored, even among the lower classes, before the beginning of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, not all employers were kind, and 10 and 12 hour workdays, and six day work weeks were common among the British lower classes during the early industrial revolution days. Socialists like Robert Owen led the charge for consideration of the worker’s “work/life balance,” and over the course of the nineteenth century, there came to be an acceptance that workers could, perhaps, have Saturday afternoons off (for drinking and carousing) as long as they showed up sober on Monday morning. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the work day was being normalized at eight hours for most people, and the idea of weekend qua weekend was coming into being.
The first five-day work week in the United States came into being in 1908. The Amalgamated Clothing W0rkers of America demanded and received the five-day workweek in 1929, and it was 1950 before the provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect designating a 40-hour work week as the usual, and the two-day weekend became the norm for most workers not working rotating shifts.
I worked for three or four years for a company that’s standard work week was six twelves and an eight. The overtime was nice.
If you like Lord Grantham, which I do as much as I like Cousin Violet, you might enjoy this Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas program from a year ago. This program just became available.
(This year’s, 2018’s, with Kristen Chenoweth, won’t be available for YouTube viewing until a year from now, due to complicated distribution agreements, but here is the trailer. I can’t wait to see this. I like Kristen Chenoweth very much. She has a great sense of fun. Here is the trailer for this year’s program, which audiences in Utah just enjoyed.)
This is 2017’s entire concert. I really did not like the first half–something in my head reacts badly to Sutton Foster’s singing voice. The second half with Hugh Bonneville (Lord Grantham) was amazing. Just beautiful. If you skip to the 25-minute mark, you can catch the half of the program with Hugh Bonneville.
What allowed for these policies was the capitlism that had overtaken Britain, and made their workers more productive. Technology had made life less brutish for everyone, and society could afford to require less days work for everyone. The servents portrayed in television programs like Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs were more likely to work 14 hour days and more. But they weren’t working in the fields with the hard physical labor that implied. Not that some of the work wasn’t physically challenging. Before vacuum cleaners became common in the 20th century, the servents would hang carpets, some of them heavy, on a clothes line and beat the dirt out of them. And that was considered women’s work.
As industrial jobs did allow for 5 day weeks, the nobility and gentry with servents had to compete for their labor, and they too would allow, in fits and starts, days off on Saturday, starting with, perhaps, one half day every other week.
There is plenty of material on the internet about the life of servents in England. A big one that came out was Below Stairs by Margaret Powell in 1968, and it’s said that Downton and Upstairs was based, in part, on that book.
She started domestic service at 15 at about 1922, and she details the hard work, minor and major indignities of being a servent, and the sheer drudgery of it. I’ve never seen Downton and Upstairs truly show the lot of a servent the way she does.
Thanks for that link, Did not know about that book; I’ll check it out.
Both sides of my family had servants, although neither was what might be considered upper class. And the way that the folks in service were treated was very different.
My Dad’s side of the family (rather better off), had nannies, and 3-4 other staff at the “parlor-maid” “cook” and “gardener” sorts of levels. The staff were, as much as possible, treated like family. Young single women were given time off to see their beaux, and if things progressed and they got married, the family was happy to see it, gave them a little cash gift, and stayed in touch. The kids, including my Dad, sometimes went to the seaside and other holiday spots to stay with former servants and their families for a few days. I always got the impression that both family and the people in service were quite happy with the arrangement, and the treatment all round.
My mother’s side of the family had Maudie Nichols. Maudie was the maid-of-all-trades for my great-grandmother, a terrifying old lady born in 1869, who lived to the grand old age of 99, dying when I was fourteen years old. Maudie was probably about the same age as Margaret Powell (I’ve always thought her roughly contemporaneous with “Rose” of Upstairs Downstairs). She was a tiny, lively little woman who loved children, and who functioned as the love agent in a family that didn’t believe in showing much of it. My mother and uncle loved her. I loved her. She loved us. She taught me to knit. She helped me learn to sew. She loved to garden, and she worked six or seven days a week in what was pretty much indentured servitude, doing every job, including the most unpleasant imaginable, for my great grandmother until she died.
She was allowed very little time off, from her early years of service forward. Suitors were discouraged, so she never had any, or if she did, they were seen off pretty quickly, and her chance of marriage and of a life of her own went with them. She was not allowed to have her own newspaper, and because she loved to do the “football pool,” and also “spot the ball” every weekend, she was reduced to buying the Daily Express (or whatever it was) and hiding it under her coat, on her way back home from church every Sunday. She was poorly treated, and after Great Granny died, my grandmother, out of a sense of duty, but not much love, repaid Maudie by placing her in a rather substandard nursing home where (I’ve always been grateful) she died shortly after.
I loved her very much. And she deserved so much better than she got.
I once dated a girl whose family had a servant. She might have been just the cook; I never found out. But when I went to visit for a week, she served dinner. I had no idea how to react.
You mean not everyone has servants?
Lol. I didn’t even know people had them anymore.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I knew people had nannies, and that au pairs existed.