Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays by the famous British novelist David Lodge is a classic work published by Harvard in 2004.
In this Lodge book, the author mentions a famous British society-watcher, Charles Masterman. In 1909, Masterman published his best-known study, The Condition of England, which tells us that England at that time experienced a greater inflow of migrants into London than in previous centuries taken together.
[Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman PC MP (24 October 1873 – 17 November 1927) was a British radical Liberal Party politician, intellectual and man of letters. He worked closely with such Liberal leaders as David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in designing social welfare projects, including the National Insurance Act 1911. During the First World War, he played a central role in the main government propaganda agency.]
We then notice that one recurrent topic in various movie versions of the E. M. Forster novel Howards End (1910, set in those years) is the “horrifying” trend where great mansions and stately estates (Howards End and Wickham Place, say, in the novel) are all being demolished and replaced by ugly “flats.”
There must be, one thinks, a direct link between all the massive migrations into London at the time and all the proliferating flats at the “expense” of beautiful and historical villas. (This “demolish” trend is also part of the story of the classic novel A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, 1934)
In the predecessor to Downton Abbey called Upstairs, Downstairs, the story ends in 1930 with a sign outside the great “house” at Eaton Place offering flats coming soon, as the demand for housing (think of San Francisco today) is so massive that sellers can make a fortune selling out to developers, move into one of the flats being created, and live off the sale for the rest of their lives and “duck” the higher “Lloyd George taxes.” (In Downton Abbey, the dowager played by Maggie Smith repeatedly lashes out at Prime Minister Lloyd George as a kind of financial traitor.)
We see from this simple example how students should learn to “jump” between books and movies and TV miniseries to get a stronger focus on what’s being depicted on screens and pages and not just “swim along” at the surface level without any “drilling down.”
Education is largely the struggle or habit where students learn to bring pattern and structure out of “chaos,” thus giving narratives some overall shape.
This reminds one of the opening lines of Beryl Markham’s 1942 Africa memoir:
“How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’ ”
from West with the Night by Beryl Markham
This is a similar impetus: to bring order out of memory or others’ memories in books and movies from various times and places.