Favorite Fictional Characters, #387: Charles Carson

He butles

True confession to a guilty pleasure: I enjoyed Downton Abbey. The egalitarian democrat in me makes its peace with that by insisting the draw isn't the idle antics of the aristocratic Crawley clan but rather the dignity and humanity of the back-stairway serfs, toiling on behalf of their perfumed benefactors. Watching the maids and cooks and footmen struggle to find fulfilment, stability, and even love in the stratified social straight-jacket of post-Edwardian British society carries a certain vicarious, even voyeuristic thrill of solidarity. Seeing Anna and Bates and the rest show up every day to brush jackets and sweep fireplaces and cook puddings while the leisure lords play their game of thrones feels a bit too familiar a century later.

Oh, speaking of the Crawleys, who doesn't love Grandma McGonagall, Maggie Smith's acid-tongued Dowager Countess? She's worth the price of admission on her own.

But my favorite personage among the Downton assemblage is the head butler, Charles Carson (Mister Carson, if you please). Carson is laced up very tight, a monarchist and traditionalist in a changing world, routinely stunned and dismayed by the fraying of the social boundary between the upstairs and downstairs folk. He believes in orderly industry, in discretion and loyalty, in the stiffest of all upper lips. One can readily imagine a whole series of Monty Python sketches aimed at puncturing his puffed-up propriety.

And yet Carson is a kind man, even a loving one. He adores the Crawley masters, of course, but he has an avuncular fatherly regard for his charges, and a particular tenderness for his late-in-life soulmate Elsie Hughes. He goes to bat for his people when he suspects they are treated badly, and he has a deep sense of justice within the strictures of class realities. He is no liberal (unlike the unrealistic lefty leanings of the Crawley daughters), as one might imagine from a character who bears an uncanny resemblance to Warren G Harding. But he is a fair man, and a good one. And he is at your service.