I would have left this as unconsidered fluff (bad behavior in high life; social system unchallenged; narration by insider pretending to be outsider), but I think I picked it up because someone compared it to , and there are coy internal cues that we're meant to compare it to Trollope.
It doesn't compare. It's true that most of Trollope's popular novels circle the expensive problems of the land-inheriting class, and the social and moral dilemmas of their sisters and daughters. It's certainly true that Trollope didn't expect England's class system to change, and that he didn't expect sainthood of anyone. But Trollope paid just as much attention to the interior life of his poor characters as his rich ones; I am thinking of two Reverends, one the undesirable Slope and one painfully moral, painfully poor one. Fellowes doesn't. Also, his characters seem to have only emotional crises, not emotional and moral ones; I suppose I can't rule out a diminution in moral feeling among the rich of England, but has characters with moral crises. Perhaps her characters aren't rich enough to be above these things.
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So wrote clew in Fiction (21st c.).