Yesterday I posted about my
discovery of the veiled allusion to Benjamin Disraeli’s 1842 novel Coningsby in the Jewish subplot in Season
Five of Downton Abbey --- Rose’s
romance with, and marriage to, Atticus Aldridge, heir to the Sinderby (aka
Rothschild/Sidonia) fortune. Little did I imagine that with a little more digging,
I’d be able to connect the dots between that allusion by the clever Fellowes,
and some real life Highclere Castle history, as the following Amazon.com book blurb
reveals:
“Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the
real-life inspiration and setting for…Downton
Abbey, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the
5th Countess of Carnarvon. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the
archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the
current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on
the brink of war. Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart, Lady Cora
Crawley, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de ROTHSCHILD,
who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial
link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon's ancestral home.
Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War
I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman…..”
In that same vein, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/22/the-aristocrats
adds this:
“…Widely believed to be
the illegitimate daughter of industrialist Alfred de Rothschild and his French
mistress, Marie Wombwell, Almina married George Herbert, the fifth Earl of
Carnarvon, in 1895, when she was just nineteen. In Lady Carnarvon’s telling, it
was a felicitous match romantically and financially. Dubbed “the Pocket Venus,”
diminutive Almina was a renowned beauty, reportedly besotted with her new
husband, a budding Egyptologist. More important, perhaps, Almina brought to her
marriage the cash desperately needed to run Highclere. Lady Carnarvon’s book
focuses on the tumultuous years of World War I, when Almina converted her
palatial estate into a convalescent hospital for wounded officers, and ends
rather abruptly in 1924, shortly after the Earl’s untimely death. Downton
Abbey fans will note the striking parallels between Almina’s life and that
of her fictional counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley. This is hardly an accident:
Lady Carnarvon and her husband, the eighth Earl of Carnarvon, affectionately
known as Geordie, have been friends with Downton Abbey creator Julian
Fellowes for more than a decade. Though Lady Carnarvon calls Fellowes a
“genius,” she’s too involved with the show to call herself a fan. “It’s too
much of a bloody muddle,” she says.”
So is Julian Fellowes “telling”
us that Cora is an illegitimate heiress of her family’s fortune?
And….just to tie the knot
even tighter to Disraeli’s Coningsby, check
out this factoid, courtesy of http://www.manfredlehmann.com/sieg231.html :
“Disraeli was an intimate
friend—both financially, socially and politically—of the Rothschilds. In fact,
he once considered marrying a Rothschild daughter and only shrank back because
it would undermine his career. He was hounded enough as a Jew, and could not
"afford" to identify himself openly with the Jewish religion. He was
attracted to Baron Lionel de Rothschild, in part because like himself, a
Rothschild was an "outsider" in English society.”
You guessed it—Lionel de
Rothschild was the FATHER of Alfred de Rothschild, and therefore was the grandfather
of Almina. And…a final irony: Alfred was born in 1842, the very same year that
Disraeli wrote Coningsby!
And I’ll conclude with a
tangential tile of the complicated mosaic underlying Fellowes’s incorporation
of this Disraeli-Rothschild subtext into Downton
Abbey:
“One of the first girls I
went out with was a Jewish girl,” Fellowes said. “It was sort of my first
experience of not being desirable. She belonged to one of the great Jewish
families. I won’t name them. They certainly didn’t want a Catholic in the
family.”
So, I hope your enjoyment
of DT is enhanced by having this glimpse of the huge iceberg of “juicy” (if you’ll
forgive my pun) allusion hidden beneath its Season Five Jewish subtext!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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