Downton Abbey-the House and Englishness

Downton Abbey , a British TV drama that is immensely popular at home, has fascinated a large number of viewers worldwide. In this paper, I would like to stress the function of ‘Downton Abbey’as an estate. In a glance, the system that maintained the society within the estate seemed to last forever. However, the arrival of the Edwardian Era, whether to the upper or to the lower class of the house, was unavoidable. The point is whether the estate ‘Downton Abbey’ was able to embrace the new values that dominated the whole society at the early Edwardian Era and whether the house successfully changed itself for the future. Those concerns suggest the fate of English society then was at crisis. In this paper, the function and representation of ‘Downton Abbey’ is mainly focused, with a discussion of ‘Englishness’, which is also an important theme to this paper