It bothers me that I can’t look at this photograph without thinking of Downton Abbey.
This is a historical photograph of a WWI convalescent ward set up in the town hall of Oxford, England. Strangely, though, memories of the fictionalized ward that featured in the BBC series now furnish my yardstick for judging its verisimilitude.
Image from this source.
Downton Abbey has ruined us all!
After Sybil’s death, I thought of similar junctures in Dickens’ serialized novels, and the grip they had on the popular imagination. . . Sometimes the representation of a reality, especially a historical reality, can have overwhelming power, “stamping” one’s conception of the period forever. . . and when that happens, it’s cool. Susan