The series from 1995. I had seen it as a schoolchild when it came out but now I see it with new eyes. Rather than the romance that we're meant to be focusing on when watching it, I couldn't help but concentrate on the behaviour of the lower classes towards the upper. Mr Darcy is the richest character in it, he has a stately home with huge grounds, and an income of £10K a year (equivalent to around £1 million a year now). He appears to get his income by being a landlord, renting out properties on his estate.
Mr Darcy doesn't appear to work, he's never even been in the army like may rich men did then. He doesn't even go to the trouble of managing his own estate, but has a steward to do that. He does nothing but go to balls, have dinner and sit around with his friends.
So basically he is a typical upper-class scrounger. He lives off the hard work of others, raking in rents, and gets a very luxurious lifestyle by doing this. And yet, the lower classes, the people who do all his work for him and pay him the money he lives off, have to show him great respect instead of vice versa. Every time a lower class person such as a servant appears in his presence, they have to bow and curtsey to him and call him My Lord. Even though their hard work is what keeps him alive.
And he is so snobby towards those below him, even towards other landed gentry who are a bit poorer than him. And it's so similar to rich people today. I just wonder what goes on in the head of someone like that. Other people do everything for you but you think you're better than them. How does that even compute in someone's mind?
It's so crazy that this is still going on in the 21st century, especially with the royals. Prince William is a shitty landlord who owns 600 rental properties that poor people live in, he lets them go to rack and ruin so the families live in mould and damp and struggle to pay their rent so William can live in luxury, yet instead of being grateful he expects people to curtsey to him and call him Sir wherever he goes.
The royal family have four palaces as well as multiple other homes, Buckingham Palace alone has 775 rooms. There are nearly one million unoccupied homes in the UK. Of these, over 265K are long-term unoccupied, mostly owned by rich individuals and rich corporations. There are also 280K second homes in the UK. Meanwhile there are over 354K homeless people in the UK. Not to mention millions more struggling to pay rent to landlords. All of these homeless people could be housed with room to spare, and many more could be freed from the burden of rent.
Why is the most respect and deference given to those who hoard this wealth so that others go without, who feather their own nests at the expense of everyone else? We are long overdue for a revolution.
yeah, Downton Abbey is a bit more "radical" in that the house domestic staff have names and are supplied with motivations, histories, dreams, etc. those Edwardian era stories contain the tension between the decaying estate system of "gentlemen" and the emerging professionals using skills and education to modernize the world. that's their lib framing of course, because the show runner for Downton is a lib dork.
by contrast, the Austen adaptations do not seem to give even the slightest fuck about servants, who seem to be exist more like background furniture. some adaptations are better than others, where you see people performing the maintenance of the house and grounds, instead of making them truly invisible. more recent adaptations have some of them with speaking parts and some level of familiarity with their "employers", but they are clearly more like an extension of the household family, and not people with their own agency.
what amuses me about all of this is how modern series taking place today, if not a workplace drama, will sometimes have characters that live the same "gentleman" lifestyle of idle wealth / passive income by never having them with any sort of job that requires them to work. like maybe they own a business that doesn't need them to ever do anything, or they "make money with computers" or some other placeholder. or they have a part-time job as an yoga instructor but somehow live in a massive apartment in midtown Manhattan. shit that literally does not compute.
in this way, those earlier period pieces are more honest and explicit in addressing material conditions (and the gender politics of "good breeding") of the characters, which makes me feel less insulted when watching them, even if I do consider most of the characters to be pointless and deserving of a firing squad.
also, I admit to enjoying clever turns of phrase, the villains receiving their comeuppance, people using the word "obstreperous" unironically, and the characters that I am 100% ideologically opposed to, but are hilarious all the same.
like the dowager countess (played by Maggie Smith) from Downton. people who are so wittily transparent in their disdain for equity, liberation, etc that I sort of respect them for their honesty.
The only reason I know the Bennet's maid was named Hill is because Mrs Bennet was always screeching "Hill! Hiiiiiiiilllll!" Whenever she wanted something.
I was thinking about this while watching "The Couple Next Door". The woman is, in fact, a part time yoga instructor (lol) and the husband a low-grade policeman but they can somehow afford what is quite honestly a lavish house by today's standards, very spacious and new.