Poster for the movie Pride and Prejudice
At the beginning of the movie "Pride and Prejudice", the mountains are full of mountains, the shadows of trees, the texture is like the morning light of oil paintings, like a puzzle that cannot be solved, it turns into a halo of ring after ring, enveloping birdsong, flowers and people who will wake up. With her book in her hand, Elizabeth walked out of the wilderness, through the meadow, and back to her mansion by the river. This slowly unfolding scroll depicts the traditional life of an English country house, telling the exquisite and restrained taste of life.
The British drama "Downton Abbey" once again showed the audience the unique charm of the British country house. The whole play resembles an elegant, somber Long English narrative poem that begins in 1912 and ends in the mid-1920s, represented by the Earl of Grantham's family, reflecting the lives of nobles and servants, masters and guests. Downton Abbey seems to be an all-encompassing stage, and in the crowd of people on the upper and lower stages, you can see the people you have loved, the people you have hated, the people you have helped, the people you have hurt, and you yourself.
The book "The Long Weekend: Life in a Country House in England" was soon named the Daily Telegraph's annual recommended book and among the Best Sellers of the Sunday Times and The New York Times. Born in Derby, England in 1954, the author, Adrian Tenswood, is a Senior Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Buckingham and a Visiting Fellow in Heritage and History at the University of Bassbad, and has lectured at oxford universities, the University of California, Berkeley, and other universities. As a consultant expert, he has worked with the British National Trust for more than 30 years and is the author of more than 10 works on social history and architectural history, many of which are best-selling and long-selling. Prior to the release of The Long Weekend, he was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Award at the Nonfiction Book Award for his book The Werny Family. In 2013, he was awarded the Order of the Order of the British Empire for his long-standing contribution to his legacy.
In order to write "The Long Weekend", he spent many years visiting and researching country houses, consulting nearly a thousand memoirs and unpublished letters and diaries, obtaining testimony from silver-haired old counts, widowed heiresseses, and well-informed butlers, and then simplifying the complexity, and tailoring these first-hand historical materials, and finally bringing readers a reading experience of "sitting in the library of a country house, sitting in a comfortable armchair" (Amazon.com Reader Review). Taking into account both academic interest and reading interest, and taking the initiative to think for the sake of the reader, this may also be one of the reasons why Tennesswood's works are appreciated by the common customs.
The Long Weekend: Life in a Country House in England
Adrian? by Tanis Wood
Translated by Yang Shengxiang
Published by China Workers Publishing House
Country houses are watchmen through time
Britain's country houses, like the history of Britain, are not alarming on the surface, and the undercurrents are surging inside, converging the dual factors of change and change.
From its unchanging point of view, the country house, as a historical scene, a physical space, provides anchored coordinates for the passage of time.
Britain's history has always been known for its moderation and gradualness, with few violent revolutions and radical reforms, which allowed the landed nobility and their places of life and social ways to survive steadily. For hundreds of years, British high society has maintained the tradition of the feudal era, taking pride in owning real estate and taking pride in having villas. Many of the country houses are truly monuments and a microcosm of British history. Arlington Castle, left by the rebellious Wyatt family, is now surrounded by green vines and picturesque; Herver Castle, left by the beheaded Anne Boleyn, is still surrounded by a moat and haunted; it seems that every castle has hidden medieval painted cross screens and Georgian walnut furniture... The ruins of antiquity, which are in fact unlivable, constitute the most attractive qualities of The English country house – its ability to give people a sense of stability and continuity, the ability to provide shelter for people, and the role of a static center in the vortex of cultural and social change.
A survey in 1911 showed that most of the kingdom's nobles owned, rented or lived in at least one country house. Before the outbreak of world war, it was difficult to find a British government official who did not have a country house. Until the outbreak of World War II, two-thirds of Prime Minister Chamberlain's cabinet still owned country houses. In the days between the two world wars, almost all the children of King George V were given their own country houses. In an era when the Industrial Revolution was booming, science and technology were advancing by leaps and bounds, and the old order was ruthlessly destroyed by two world wars, the country house had become a treasure trove of memories of the glorious history of the British Empire, so much so that the Victorian architect Blomfield was only willing to look for inspiration from the old country house, declaring: "As an Englishman proud of my country, I loathe and despise cosmopolitanism." "The older the better," was the philosophy of pastor and squash star Michael Jones when he restored his ancestral home, Woodland Manor.
It is true that Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, giving birth to the earliest modern cities and large machine manufacturing, but the real Britain is in the countryside, and the real British are the countrymen. A typical English gentleman must have loved old houses and pastoral songs. A leisurely afternoon tea, an intense hunt, a lavishly dressed dinner party, a brightly lit dance party... The British aristocracy believed that this elegant, orthodox, Mannerist, orderly life would never end.
Stills from the movie Pride and Prejudice
Country houses are witnesses to the changing times
However, everything backfired.
From the perspective of its change, the 20th century, especially the days between the two world wars, was another era of rapid change. The country house, with its spatial immovability, just witnessed the change of things in time.
Externally, Germany, eager to recast the world order, has long been on the same footing as the old hegemon, Britain. Finally, in 1914, World War I broke out, and the singing larks on the branches were driven to the sky by the rumbling cannon. In the second season of Downton Abbey, set in World War I, the manor was transformed into a wartime hospital, and several of the family's sons were called to join the army. Unfortunately, the descendants of these feudal knights are about to usher in not medals and honors, but a murderous catastrophe. The Long Weekend begins with the death of Harry, heir to Stodhead Manor, whose death is a true portrayal of the death of the English nobility.
Internally, in 1911, just a year before the story of Downton Abbey began, the British Parliament passed a bill that stripped the House of Lords of the power to veto the Bills of the House of Commons and consolidated the principle of the supremacy of the House of Commons. Since the three parliamentary reforms of the 19th century, the political power of the aristocracy has shrunk, and this time it has been completely weakened. Not only that, but the passage of the Inheritance Tax Bill has also caused great economic damage to the family family. In the future, the children of the nobility will sometimes frown when inheriting the ancestral house because of the high inheritance tax.
Therefore, on the one hand, it was the fierce war that stained the blood of a large number of princes and grandchildren, accelerated the decline of the landed nobility, and made country houses such as Stobide no successor. On the other hand, it is the growing bourgeois upstarts who are seizing power, the American tycoons who have crossed the ocean and spent money, and the Labor Party, which represents the interests of the working class, on the stage of history. After the war, Britain ushered in a reshuffle of the class pattern, which was intuitively reflected in the frequent changes of owners of country houses.
The Great Chamber at Killeen Castle, with some of britain's most elaborate Elizabethan upholstery, is now sold to wealthy American merchants. Middleton Manor welcomed a new hostess— Cheryl, a hollywood star who played the blind flower girl in Chaplin's film City Lights, who had just finished her last short-lived marriage.
A generation of newcomers replaced the old, and new upholstery and social etiquette accompanied the newcomers were introduced to the old British country houses. The architect Luctians disliked the newly married Cheryl in England, believing her to be "an ordinary little woman without a brain, who did not know what the Englishman's home should look like." Luctians' son, Robert, also an architect, also found Cerrell troubled and complained about her insistence on opening cocktail bars and Modern Hollywood-style restaurants on the estate. However, the new elements are not necessarily useless. The most beautiful renovation of Middleton Manor was the Virginia-supervised bathroom, which was later described as "a remarkable example of the bathtub mania between the two world wars", opening up the precedent of a new villa.
New technologies of the electrification era, such as electric lights, telephones, and telegraphs, have also inexorably broken into country houses. How to sustain oneself in the conflict between the old system and the new is a major problem facing the land aristocracy. In Downton Abbey, the traditional Earl family has countless interesting frictions with new technologies. Before each episode of Downton Abbey begins, there are shots of kerosene lamps lit. When the lights came in, the kitchen maid Daisy was afraid to turn on the lights. When the manor had just installed the telephone, the old countess, who could not play with new things, sighed helplessly: "Is this a means of communication, or a torture device?" And in The Long Weekend, it was the swift telegram that allowed Harry's parents to receive the bad news of their son's death in the Middle East "just in time" on Christmas Eve, when they were supposed to be reunited.
Downton Abbey three sisters
Young people in high society have embraced the new era. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, insisted after receiving Belvedere Castle that he needed the modern conveniences he had enjoyed during his visit to the United States, which meant built-in cabinets, central heating and ample bathrooms. The Duke of York, later George VI, initially did not like to be given to his villa, the White Lodge, because of its inadequate central heating system and poor electrical lighting. The nobles still used convoys, but the carriages had given way to trendy Rolls-Royce cars, although they still housed Georgian brandy glasses. George V never flew in his lifetime, but the morning after his death, his son, the Prince of Wales, flew from Sandringham to London as the new King Edward VIII, becoming the first British monarch to fly a plane himself.
The fusion of social history and public historiography
The rise of social history as a science of manifestation began in the 1950s. In France, representatives of the second generation of almanac historiography such as Braudel focused on pre-modern European society. In Britain, Thompson and Hobsbawm used Marx's methodology to study market society, industrialization, and workers' lives. In the United States, Bendix and Tilly found a new fulcrum for examining society, starting from the theory of modernization. In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of social criticism and social reform swept across Europe and the United States, further contributing to the "social history turn" of historical science. This ethos of history had a profound impact on a new generation of historians such as Tennesswood who grew up in the postwar period.
If social history takes the lead in listing the structure, process, and movement of society as a brand new object of historical research, then public historiography has pioneered the inclusion of the public in the service object of historical research, and openly raised the banner of "benefiting the public", the former expanding the scope of traditional historiography, and the latter expanding the audience of traditional historiography. Not only that, the study of social history, which attaches importance to daily life and is close to the interests of the public, naturally fits the aesthetic appeal of public historiography, making the aggregation of the two more and more exciting in the future.
From this direction, "The Long Weekend" is written by experts in the field of social history, choosing the country house and villa life between the two world wars as the entry point, refracting the macroscopic with micro, illuminating the collective mentality from the individual consciousness, and artistically taking into account the scholarship of social history and the interest of public historiography, which is a valuable attempt by historians to return to the public sphere, and it is also a successful experiment in which the two branches of history work together today. It is the honor and mission of historians to study society and the people, to do it for them, and to be happy with it.
(The author is Distinguished Associate Professor, School of History and Culture, Shaanxi Normal University)
Author: Yang Shengxiang
Editor: Zhou Yiqian