Matthew's Legs and Thomas's Hand: Watching Downton Abbey as a First World War Historian

From its first series in 2010, the ITV television drama Downton Abbey laid claim to representing early twentieth-century British society with great historical accuracy while being lambasted by critics for presenting a sanitized version of modern British social history. This article looks at how the programme was drawn, over the course of its broadcast between 2010 and 2015, into a wider discussion of the representation and commemoration of the First World War and debates about accuracy and authenticity in fictional depictions of the war which date back at least to 1915. Locating the discussion in the historiography of the cultural commemoration of the war in Britain, it will examine three particular military medical storylines - Matthew’s paralysis, Thomas’s self-mutilation of his hand, and the servants’ reactions to Archie’s psychological trauma - to examine how the drama reflects both the historic reality of the war’s impact and the myths of war experience which have developed within British culture over the past century. In doing so, it will argue that Downton demonstrates both the advantages and drawbacks of invoking historical accuracy and authenticity to locate representations within historic narratives of the First World War in Britain.