…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.
Notes and Queries 1879-11-29: Vol 12 Issue 309
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.)
Should one not be adequately informed, by virtue of professional or personal interest, in the social and cultural history of Victorian England (and the Georgian that preceded it), one could be forgiven for not easily placing the name Pugin (says she absolving herself!). That is, to be precise: Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin[a] (/ˈpjuːdʒɪn/PEW-jin; 1 March 1812 – 14 September 1852). And so pasted from Wikipedia; for, having come to the end of a fabulous biography, I now realise I have been saying – in my head anyway – quite correctly (by chance!) the first syllable but consistently mispronouncing the last syllable with a hard ‘g’. And for reasons I can’t say, for there is that rule dependent upon the following vowel and in days gone I certainly had a penchant for an icy gin and tonic of a summer evening. Too long a stay in Germany perhaps, where the g of Germany and gin is confined to words derived from other languages – like, for instance, ‘Germany’ and ‘gin’!
As mentioned previously, in a weaker moment last year I relented and, despite my modest budget, subscribed to the London Review of Books. The reading of a random piece here and there or a rare purchase at a Hauptbahnhof en route from here to there had become a bit tiresome. And I haven’t regretted doing so; even when some articles tend to veer too left of my (fading) scope of vision. While sometimes delivery has been tardy (unfortunately a digital only sub. is not offered so it is always the case that I have an online version for a significant time before the hard copy turns up) and this year has seen a hefty price hike, I am sticking with it for the moment. During the year gone I have discovered some really excellent pieces of writing – from people known to me and not, about subject matter with which I am familiar and that which I’m not.
Rosemary Hill is an example of such an ‘unknown’ (to me) with whom I have been glad to become acquainted. As it transpires, Hill is not only a regular contributor to LRB, but a widely respected writer and cultural historian. Early in the year gone, I was impressed by a ‘Diary’ piece in which Hill, inspired by the 1921 census becoming available and an interest in discovering her father as the baby he then was and the family that surrounded him, explores her familial roots in South London and in doing so vividly illustrates the conditions under which the ‘working-classes’ lived at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Then later I listened to a series of podcasts hosted by Rosemary Hill on Romantic Britain coinciding with her new book Time’s Witness (I await the paperback – remember, the modest…meager budget – ordered and due in a couple of weeks) which led to the discovery of her 2008 Wolfson History Prize winning book God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007), of which an immaculate paperback copy fell into my hands.
