6 January 2013
Mack
Hall
The Downtown Abbey
Typewriter and Dog
The
popular Sunday-night emo-wallow Downton
Abbey is predictable in plot but surprisingly strong in character
development. One first-season episode,
for instance, features a housemaid, Gwen, who does not intend to remain a
housemaid, and who secretly buys a typewriter and takes a correspondence course
so she can try for a better job as a secretary.
The
typewriter, which enjoyed a run of about a century, is a machine which resulted
from technological change and which in its turn advanced cultural change. A product of the industrial revolution, the
process of mechanical writing sped up communications and the storage and access
of information – a typist layering up to five sheets of carbon paper and typing
paper could produce an original document and five accurate copies simultaneously. Had Bartleby the Scrivener access to a
typewriter he might not have succumbed to depression.
For
reasons that remain obscure, the use of typewriters converted the historic male
role of secretary to a woman’s job, and in the 1980s many young men were
reluctant to learn about computers because of testosterone-withering keyboards
– “typing’s a girl thing!”
Plain
paper – in this country, 8 ½ inches by 11 inches – has shifted in name from letter
paper to typing paper to copy paper to computer paper, following the pen, the
typewriter, the photocopier, and the computer into a world barely recognizable
to Bartleby and Gwen.
Gwen
in Downton Abbey wants to make a
better world for herself. Although the
great houses and their squads of servants would begin fading into tourist sites
and council housing after World War I, probably no one in 1912 could have
anticipated such a rapid end. Gwen only
knows that she wants to work in an office and thus enjoy more control of her own
life. Her Imperial Model A typewriter,
manufactured in Leicester from 1908-1915, is for her a symbol of emancipation. As such, it is an object of suspicion to the
less-ambitious among her fellow servants.
Gwen
mentions having saved for the machine; given her low wages and the high cost of
new technology, her typewriter was probably most of a year’s income. Gwen had to earn her way and pay for her
learning by herself; there were no community colleges and no encouragement.
For
men, the typewriter became a symbol of the square-jawed writer and poet,
smoking cigarettes, sloshing whiskey, and beating out novels and poetry in
garrets on the Left Bank of the Seine. One
imagines Ernest Hemingway posing for a publicity photograph standing
thoughtfully on a railway line, his trusty old typewriter slung over his back.
C.
S. Lewis, however, advised young writers never to employ a typewriter,
maintaining that the mechanics of it disrupted one’s flow of thought. Lewis preferred a steel pen and bottle of ink
all his life.
For
the beatniks, the typewriter, according to the creepy and self-obsessed Allen
Ginsburg, was holy, a sacred adjunct to creativity. The thesis is unproven since Ginsburg never
found anything more fascinating to write about than himself. In this he prefigured great numbers of
self-absorbed narcissists eternally admiring themselves in little boxes of
endless tautology.
For
revolutionaries, the typewriter was a way of rapidly generating and publishing
manifestos. Tina Modotti, a cute, fascinating,
and treacherous Red, made a famous photograph of her lover Julio Antonio Mella's typewriter, though as a Stalinist operative she
may have been one of the causes of his unsolved murder.
Once
the revolutionaries were successful, they in their turned banned the
typewriter. In most Communist states
typewriters had to be registered, and in at least one workers’ paradise,
Romania, the possession of an unregistered typewriter was a death penalty
offense into the 1980s.
Gwen’s
Imperial Typewriter is usable today, a century after it was constructed; none
of the electronic gadgets the reader uses today will exist within five years. Lord Grantham, the worthy Mr. Carson, and
Gwen may yet have something to teach us about lasting values.
What
Lord Grantham, Mr. Carson, and Gwen perhaps will not tell us is why, at the opening
of each episode of Downton Abbey, the
viewer is mistreated to a very large view of the west end of an eastbound
dog. Perhaps the producers of the show
are telling us what they think of us?
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