I like Downton Abbey as entertainment, but it's a whitewash as history (a few spoilers). [View all]

[True Blue Door]

The compassionate, fair-minded, mutually respectful relationship between the noble Crawley family of Downton Abbey and their house servants is pure fiction, and a retconning of modern values to a time when they hadn't really penetrated the British aristocracy (assuming they ever have). The job of house servants in a lordly estate was to be invisible, and the more high-falutin' the estate, the more stick-up-the-butt prim and obsequious the servants had to be to get and keep their jobs.

In the show, butlers and maids are free to act like human beings while doing their jobs - to look directly at the Lords and Ladies while taking instructions or inquiring about something, and to stand comfortably while acting as waiters. That's not how it was. They had to basically be human statues while waiting on the Lords and Ladies, eyes unfocused and still, standing and walking and serving with utmost military precision, no movement wasted and all superfluous sounds avoided. Their job was to be the human equivalent of robots, and to the maximum extent possible avoid making anyone aware of their existence. And they were treated accordingly if they ever broke form - not as people doing a job, but as machines that were no longer useful. They would be cast aside without a second thought, and be unable to get a job anywhere else as servants to the aristocracy.

The rage that fueled British class warfare was real and 100% justified. Aristocrats were beyond-the-pale arrogant and callous toward their servants, in ways that make the most psychotic Wall St. corporate executive seem like a hippie. People sought jobs as house servants because it afforded them food, shelter, and some above-average spending money - and because it was cleaner and safer than working in a factory. But there was no kindly Lord inquiring about your health and family life - just some entitled jackass glaring in fury because his butler with a broken arm hadn't buttered his toast properly.

The social wall between the aristocrats and the servants of an estate was absolute, and fraternization of any kind apart from maybe Christmas was considered an outrageous breach of decorum and natural order. A "good" employer was one who paid slightly better and didn't fire people at the drop of a hat, but characters like Lord Crawley simply did not exist, and a Lady of the estate marrying her Irish chaffeur? Please. The Lord wouldn't just fire him - he would have him arrested on a fake charge and shipped off to some labor camp.

Communism didn't arise out of a bunch of intellectual theorists musing about economics - it came about because the aristocracies were straight-up evil and brutal, even in the relatively fair-minded culture of Britain.