For the most part, once-famous family names and the sources of their vast wealth have dissolved into the tarnished murk of history – Work (Wall Street), or Leiter (commerce and real estate) or Jerome (Finance) are only known to their descendants and a few history nerds. I’ve investigated a few American heiresses and the British aristocrats who benefited from their family’s largesse before, and have a passing familiarity with the landscape ( Here and Here) Today, most of those “ dollar princesses ” have been forgotten. John Singer Sargent – Duke of Marlborough & Consuelo Vanderbilt 1905 it's an amazing time.Ĭelebrating Gilded Age gives me an excuse to visit an eccentric American/Anglo connection very different from the one that bought British titles and saved ancient family piles from rack and ruin with infusions of massive amounts of nouveau riche American cash. I hope it encourages you to dig around on your own. It will be a blast to see where Julian goes with it. The French statesman George Clemenceau observed that, “America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” In the late 19th and early 20th century, many highly pedigreed British families may have agreed with Clemenceau’s assessment but held their noses and took the new, before-the-ink-was-dry money for their titles. Set in the Newport and New York of the 1870s and 80s, it’s a cakewalk through the America that gave us Cora of Downton Abbey - an America of newly minted, Anglo-mad heiresses that have been beckoning to Lord Fellowes since he started down the Downton Abbey road over a dozen years ago - compelling him to investigate their spawning ground and spin his addictive, gilded-thread story webs. After 5 years of a teasing and tantalizing pregnancy, Julian Fellowes is finally birthing/filming his Gilded Age series this year for HBO.
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