Deepdive: Edith Crawley-Pelham, The Marquess of Hexham. 'Downton Abbey'.

June 06, 2021

Deepdive: Edith Crawley-Pelham, The Marquess of Hexham. 'Downton Abbey'.

With modern day TV being replete with shows having metaphors and hidden meanings, there is a reason why audiences still enjoy period dramas. It is always wonderful to see dapper gentlemen and dainty ladies look wonderful in their attire, smell lovely in their cologne and enjoy Epicurean opulence. But more than that, it is great to see integrity, loyalty and respect. Period dramas serve as time capsules to the audience to go back to an era when words meant something, love meant being with one person no matter what, and fashion meant being experimental and gutsy.

One period drama that ticks all the boxes in this regard is Julian Fellowes’ ‘Downton Abbey’ originally aired on ‘ITV’ and ‘PBS’ and now streaming on ‘Netflix’. The show is a unique blend of Epicureanism and sentimentalism focusing on the life of Lady Mary Crawley of Grantham and her quest for preserving the traditional estate of ‘Downton’ when Britain was heading towards modernism and the laws were taking a more liberal shape.

As the show focuses on Lady Mary, it also showcases the various incidences in the lives of the servants at ‘Downton’. When the audience watches the show, they start viewing every character in a certain way. While Lady Mary was cold and wary of vulnerability and Lady Sybil was the youngest and most cheerful sibling, the show characterizes the middle sibling, Lady Edith Crawley as rather desperate, cowardly and sad.

In one way, Edith is everything that Mary isn’t: vulnerable, approachable and honest in acknowledgement of her feelings. It is precisely for these reasons that everyone labelled her as sad or even too loud, hence making her seem like the kind of person who is maudlin in way of expressing things. The undertones to her character are many and there’s lots to learn from her. Edith is a good person who is genuinely compassionate and puts the needs of everyone else before her, which induces the ones around her to take her for granted and treat her like the ‘doormat’ she clearly wasn’t. This is similar to the fate of Anne Elliot in the first part of Jane Austen’s much loved and under-rated novel, ‘Persuasion’.

The fact that Edith was a middle child is a metaphor in itself. Edith is not as assertive as Mary, and not as helpful and adaptable as Sybil. She is a balance of the two, which puts her into the ‘almost’ category. While her kindness and candor attract men from the lower cadre, and make her desirable to them, her frankness as opposed to Mary’s indifference makes men from respectable families believe that she is just Mary’s sister. While Mary was respected as the oldest sibling, Sybil was pampered as the youngest sibling, the soft and feminine Edith was simply ignored as the middle sibling. Yet, Edith looked beyond animosity and stood for Mary every time.

Edith’s life was filled with people who did not think much of her, and made it a point to constantly express it in words and actions. Edith was loved because she was family and matters of familial love hardly involve a choice. She, like most women just wanted to get married and have a family and was heavily judged for the only reason that she was ready to marry anyone who showed her kindness. Considering anyone in Edith’s situation, would not the standards be automatically reduced?

Edith’s plight calls for mentioning soft femininity. She became a feminist later in the show when her grandmother, Violet Crawley, The Countess of Grantham told her to “stop whining and find something to do”. Edith was essentially one of the underdogs of the show who suffered for playing second fiddle to her ‘cold’ sister Mary who was actually just awful and miserable disguised as cold and who hated Edith’s guts to be everything that she could not be.

Edith’s character was rebellious without rebellion and spoke volumes of how being vocal about what you go through, the right to be disappointed with someone, or something as pure as feeling sorry for oneself at times should be normalized, because repressing feelings may be wise, but expressing them is always healthy and also wise.

Edith’s journey in outshining everyone else was similar to the drawing of ‘The Chariot’ card in the Tarot. Very difficult, where she even lost the one person who genuinely loved her and saw her for who she was and not what the projections of other people made her believe who she was, to the birth of her daughter Marigold to finally marrying Herbert (Bertie) Pelham, The Seventh Marquis of Hexham, her journey has been breath-taking to say the least.

She was far more able than her sisters, skilled in many pursuits, a good writer, a great driver, a feminist ahead of her time and despite her hardships, was a very good person who steered clear of bitterness when she had every reason to be so. She was a hard worker whose bad times had bad times and ultimately, she got the ending she deserved:

the ending where she was loved, enough and accepted for who she was.