…So asks the Dowager Countess in an early episode of Downton Abbey. Any idea I may have had that it was only my own rather idiosyncratic family that was so amused at the time – not only by the question itself but by Maggie Smith’s impeccable deadpan delivery – that it remains to this day an oft used geflügeltes Wort, seems to have been misplaced; as demonstrated in the LRB clip below.
Rosemary Hill very nicely contextualizes the tentative nearing of the upper classes and the masses – by way of the pesky upper-middle-classes dabbling about in things called ‘jobs’! – at the beginnings of the last century. One may quibble, but there is much for the discerning viewer to take from the oft maligned Downton Abbey.
On the right is the puzzled question out of Staffordshire in Notes and Queries to which the convoluted reply is included in the video. (From the Internet Archive.)