What you need to know about the Gilded Age

One: It’s an American thing

“The Gilded Age” is a very American concept, first introduced by Mark Twain in a novel of that name published in 1873. For England, the last three decades of the nineteenth century were merely a continuation of the economic and social progress of Queen Victoria’s reign and while there are definitely parallels with the American experience, the ruling classes of England—whose wealth was based primarily on land—actually became poorer over this period as agricultural incomes fell due to competition from North America. France dubbed the period from the 1870s to the end of the century the “Belle Époque” (beautiful era), and all over Europe there was a flowering of art and technology at this time, but all eyes were on America when it came to soaring wealth and conspicuous consumption on a scale that made headlines across the Old World.

America, of course, had an easily defined turning point in its history with the Civil War, after which wealth creation moved decisively from the ruined South to the more industrialized northern states. The major cities of the north welcomed a massive influx of immigrants, who provided an endless, affordable source of labor and a class hungry to prove itself to its new home by working hard and buying goods to demonstrate its newfound economic power.

The country was also expanding rapidly westward. New immigrants were joined by adventurers from the older eastern states as those original colonies purchased or received enormous new territories. By the 1870s, frontier land was rapidly being settled and that meant more need for manpower and building materials and consumer goods and transportation to get it all there. It was a perfect boom market in which to make a truly large fortune.

Two: The railroads led the way

The best comparison for the growth experienced by the railroads in this era would probably be the dot-com boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. Men (it was always men) were coming apparently from nowhere and making the kind of stupendous money we’ve seen accumulated by the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—but instead of the information superhighway they were building their fortunes on the literal new highways created by the relatively new technology of steam rail. Other sectors—mining, manufacturing, retail (this was the era when department stores became the hot new way of shopping), and finance, for example—were booming, but the really big money was in the railroads because they simply had no competition when it came to moving goods fast. 

AA Denny locomotive, belonging to the Columbia and Puget Sound Railway, probably 1880

Image courtesy of: University of Washington, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Three: America had the money, but Europe had the style

When it came to displaying wealth, Americans were slow to develop their own distinctive style. Instead, they looked to the Old World for style and culture, particularly England and France. Newly super-rich Americans viewed frequent trips to Europe as a must, and from the 1870s onward the development of fast steam liners made the trip itself an attractive luxury, with the bonus possibility of meeting “the right sort of people” on board.

The new American money aristocracy was desperate for validation, so it began inventing its own conventions and rules based on the exclusiveness it saw in the top echelons of European society. It looked to two distinct social groups for inspiration—existing American old money society, usually descended from the original colonists, and the aristocracy of Europe, particularly England for manners and France for fashion, food, and architecture. The enormous mansions of the American money élite resembled French châteaux, while its women ordered their dresses from the House of Worth in Paris and traveled to the French capital for fittings.

An example of how French style inspired America’s Gilded Age architecture: The Marble House, Newport, Rhode Island

Image courtesy of: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Four: Speaking of fashion . . .

The Gilded Age spanned roughly three decades, so unsurprisingly there were some important developments in fashion. There are too many variations to discuss here, but in general you need to know the differences between the decades:

1870s dresses

Image courtesy of: Nicole.c.s.y93, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1870s: bustle dresses with LOTS of trimmings were the general rule of the 1870s—think flounces, swags, and bows. Toward the end of the 1870s, the bustle gave way to the Natural Form with longer, slimmer lines, even though there was still considerable emphasis on the back of the dress. For evening wear women wore long trains on their dresses, which were held up by loops for dancing.

1880s: the bustle came back in the early 1880s, and by the middle of the decade was much bigger than the 1870s version, becoming at its worst a sort of shelf on which, it was rumored, you could balance a tea tray. But by the end of the 1880s the bustle had disappeared, never to return.

From left to right - Early 1880s natural form, Late 1880s sleeves, mid-1880s bustle

Image courtesy of: Nicole.c.s.y93, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1890s: this was the decade of huge sleeves, or at least the upper part of the sleeve. To balance the look, skirts became simpler and the frills, swags, and overblown trimmings gradually disappeared from the lower half of the ensemble.

1880s dresses

Image courtesy of: Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The one constant throughout the Gilded Age was the tiny waist, emphasizing the chest and hips. For women who could afford fashionable clothes it was thus an extremely feminine era, despite the attempts of some women to introduce rational (i.e. comfortable) clothing.

To support all the finery, undergarments were complex and substantial. Of course there were corsets, although those weren’t as uncomfortable as we now believe except in the case of tight-lacing, a practice that was condemned by many contemporaries. Corsets fulfilled the same function as a bra, i.e. they supported the breasts—which, by the way, were only exposed by low necklines in the evening. On the whole, during the Gilded Age women were modestly dressed.

Five: American girls ruled

America’s Gilded Age rich may have aped Europe, but they ended up outdoing their role models. As the era progressed, increasing numbers of American girls were attracted to the major centers of European society by the prospect of finding themselves a European husband with a title—a move that would open the doors of American society at previously unobtainable levels. Naturally, impoverished European aristocrats flocked to the places where these American beauties could be found, even crossing the Atlantic in the hope of getting the best pick.

It wasn’t just the money, though. Ambitious American mothers did a thorough job of turning out daughters who were better groomed, better educated, and far better dressed than their European counterparts. Unlike the daughters of English aristocrats, these young ladies were used to being seen by their parents as a treasured asset rather than a liability, so they had far more confidence and liveliness than the average English lady and European men just loved them.

Edith Wharton in 1881. Her last novel, The Buccaneers, features a group of American husband-hunters in the 1870s.

Image courtesy of: Edward Harrison May, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Six: It was only a Gilded Age for some

In an era of little regulation and with a massive pool of immigrant labor, the Gilded Age was also one where the gap between rich and poor just kept growing. In America, the economic Panic of 1873 set off a long, hard recession for the masses. Economic unrest and the rise of trade unions became a factor in politics by the late 1870s, with radical movements such as socialism, Marxism, and anarchism gaining strength as the century aged.

What’s more, the ladies weren’t always impressed by their gilded cages, and some of those Gilded Age socialites turned their considerable powers of tenacity and determination, not to mention their influential social network and their money, toward politics. A great example is Alva Vanderbilt who, having conquered New York society, became a fierce advocate for women’s suffrage by the dawn of the 20th century. Another notable real-life heroine is Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross—and there were many women like her. In general, society women didn’t work, but it was acceptable for them to exercise their energy and well-educated brains in charity work, which exposed them to the realities of life and provided an excellent training ground for politics. History has tended to undervalue the contributions of these ladies, but interest in their achievements is growing.

Alva Vanderbilt in 1883

Image courtesy of: José Maria Mora, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Golden Moment...

In terms of preferment and prestige, power and property, pride and panache, their position was essentially unrivaled.

— David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, p.25

Up to the start of the 1880s, the British aristocracy was at the height of its glory. Its members were in pretty much every position of power that existed and its influence was unimaginably vast. Generations of careful marrying, combined with a system of inheritance that passed estates intact from father to son, meant that wealth had been accumulated and increased—buildings, works of art, land, jewelry, estates abroad, and, we presume, cold hard cash. Not to mention titles, which of course put their holders right at the top of the social pile, adding that bracing sense of superiority as the cherry on the top of the cake.

It must have been nice to be at the top. Taxation on landowners was pretty low, servants were plentiful, and civilization had advanced just far enough to make life more pleasant than it had ever been but not quite so far as to spoil the countryside. The gap between rich and poor had been enormous for decades, so that if you started out poor you had very little statistical chance of ending up as wealthy as the economic elite, however hard you worked. For the rich that meant fewer social climbers to contend with (until those dratted Americans came along) and the comforting feeling of being part of a cozy club.

But the 1880s are generally considered to mark the start of an era when that power and prestige began to be challenged, and over the next three generations the aristocracy would seriously lose its grip. Wars had a disproportionate effect on a class that, naturally, supplied many of the military leaders, and wars also had to be financed; the aristocracy would lose many of its tax advantages as well as the century drew to a close.

It was still a pretty good life compared to that of most of Britain’s inhabitants, of course. But the gap between the posh and wealthy and the plain and poor gradually narrowed over the next 70 years, reaching its lowest point in around 1950. The first few decades of the 20th century saw many of the huge country houses demolished, converted into use as schools or institutions, or ceded to the nation to be preserved as tourist attractions.

Regency vs Victorian

There’s something that’s puzzled me for a long time in reference to Lady Helena Investigates. In reviews and emails, readers have frequently called Lady Helena Investigates a “Regency” novel (and often then gone on to mention Georgette Heyer).

After a lot of thought it occurred to me that “Regency” has perhaps become reader shorthand for novels that feature lords and ladies, big country houses, and so on. OK—but if I read a novel that began Sussex, 1881, the Regency era wouldn’t spring to mind.

So I thought I’d give a quick Jane’s guide to the nineteenth century—which was a fascinating hundred years of huge social and technological change.

In 1800 most people lived in the countryside; although the (First) Industrial Revolution had begun and manufacturing work was drawing more and more people toward towns and cities, the economy (in the US and Europe*) was basically an agrarian one. Transportation was horse-drawn; if you didn’t have a horse, you walked.

From a reader’s point of view the first 15 years or so of the century are often referred to as the Napoleonic or Napoleonic War period, because the dominant news of the day was Napoleon 1st’s drive to conquer as much of the globe as possible. That’s when all those red-coated soldiers were stationed around England causing female hearts to flutter, as in Pride and Prejudice (and other Jane Austen books).

The Regency period overlaps a bit with the Napoleonic period; the actual historical Regency was from 1811 to 1820, when the future George IV was Prince Regent because George III suffered periods of insanity. A writer trying to capture the Regency era would talk about the ton when referring to high society, would clothe her heroines in gauzy gowns and just a petticoat and stockings underneath (please note, no underwear around her bottom—and daring women omitted the petticoat). Men would take snuff and fight duels and then everyone would go to a ball and perform dances based on English country dancing (in long lines or circles of dancers). America was busy fighting wars (with Spain and Britain mostly) and starting to expand its territory away from the Eastern seaboard.

You have to jump forward nearly two decades from the Regency period to get to the early Victorian. The bit in between saw the Prince Regent become George IV and lose his only daughter in childbirth (the baby also died). The Crown then passed to William IV, the uncle of Queen Victoria, who had ten illegitimate children by his mistress; unfortunately, all his legitimate children were stillborn or lived only a short time. 

So Victoria became queen in 1837, married Albert three years later and began to pop out princes and princesses, and the Victorian age was well under way. By that point the Age of Steam was well established; train and steamboat travel was still fairly novel but certainly a thing. If you read a novel set in that era the heroine would wear an off-the-shoulder evening gown, and outdoors she’d wear a bonnet and carry a shawl. In America they were settling the Midwest, forming large plantations in the South with slave labor, and by the 1850s digging gold and shooting at each other in the West. In Europe they were having revolutions. Fun times.

The early Victorian morphed into the mid-Victorian period; interestingly both America and England had a break point in 1861. In that year the American Civil War started and Prince Albert died, leaving Victoria a disconsolate widow who stayed in seclusion for much of the rest of her life. A mid-Victorian heroine would wear a crinoline, and by that point underwear was definitely necessary as skirts could easily be caught by a gust of wind. Railroads proliferated all over England. If you went to a ball you’d be dancing the waltz.

From the 1870s onward we enter MY period, the late Victorian. Women wore bustles and hats instead of crinolines and bonnets. Technology was booming and the economy was boom-and-busting. In the US this was the era of the rise of big business, the establishment of an extensive rail network, homesteading, cowboys, and mail order catalogues. The rich were getting richer and more extravagant. By this point women were thoroughly repressed into the “little wifie” so loved by Dickens (an early-to-mid-Victorian) and starting to kick against the bars of their cage—this was when feminism really started to get going.

You could send a telegraph across the Atlantic and travel across it in ease and style by ocean liner if you had enough money. If you were poor, you were probably trying to emigrate from Europe to America. If you were a native American, you were fighting a losing war in the western part of the United States. America was beginning to dominate as an industrial economy, but for the most part Americans looked to Europe for culture. London was the world’s greatest city in the opinion of everyone except the Parisians.

From around the 1880s to the end of the century and beyond, it was the Gilded Age in America: truly enormous fortunes, truly enormous houses, truly amazing dresses. Your American heroine, armed with her amazing dresses and oodles of cash, would be traveling to Europe to snag a titled husband. The English fought back with snobbery and rules of society that were probably more arcane than at any other time in history. The rich were idle, and the servant class was huge. It was an awesome time as long as you were rich.

Are you thinking Downton Abbey? Actually, the Downton story begins in the Edwardian era, so after the death of Queen Victoria (in 1901) and is not Victorian at all (except for the Dowager Countess who is there to represent the Victorian generation). But late Victorian to Edwardian was in some ways one long continuum in which the gap between rich and poor widened but life did become a bit easier for the poor due to political reforms, growing medical knowledge, greater literacy and so on. 

Social mobility was increasingly possible, and the middle classes grew in wealth and power during the whole Victorian/Edwardian period. For the upper classes there was a fifty-year-long summer of parties and balls and country house weekends and travel and hunting and more parties and balls—only to be brought to a crashing end by the First World War.

Phew. So to sum up: my books are set in the late Victorian; Lady Helena Investigates begins sixty years after the Regency period ended. Admittedly she lives in an eighteenth-century house in a slightly backward rural area whereas Nell belongs to the cutting edge of the American merchant class, so I’ll forgive the mistake! Also, Helena doesn’t talk much about her clothes because she doesn’t really care what she wears, so you don’t get that context.

What's for dinner?

As a writer of books set in the nineteenth century I’ve often found myself wondering what my characters should be eating. This has led me down all kinds of avenues of research and inquiry, frequently resulting in my becoming quite hungry! Or occasionally nauseated, because tastes have definitely changed in the last 140-150 years since the days of my books.

One of the most obvious changes has been the rise of vegetarianism and veganism into the mainstream. There were many Victorians who advocated a meat-free diet—in Britain the Vegetarian Society was formed in 1847 and the first American vegetarian cookbook was published in 1835. Yet the Western diet was primarily meat-based, and most Victorians would have been looking to get more meat protein into their diets, not less. Food absorbed a higher proportion of the ordinary household budget than it does today, and meat protein would have been comparatively more expensive for anyone who didn’t live in close proximity to a farm. So being able to eat plenty of meat was seen as an advantage by most people.

In addition, no nineteenth-century man or woman wanted to look thin. In 1878, a Chicago doctor called Thomas Duncan wrote the following in a book entitled How to be Plump:

“The importance of fat are [sic] physical, mental and moral. A child well nourished, fat and fair, grows rapidly and develops easily and finely; while a child thin in flesh (fat) grows feebly and develops poorly and with a struggle. A feeble girl or boy is almost certain to develop early and prematurely, and like premature fruit early and easily decays. The organs are poorly nourished, there is no fat in the abdomen and the form bends and contracts as in old age, while the fleshy body stands nobly erect and has a royal mien. In the lean, the functions are performed with difficulty; the digestion is feebly performed; friction is manifest everywhere and there is often explosions of the nervous system, i.e., spasm, neuralgia, or bursts of passion.

The lean are restless and irritable in mind, rarely contented, never quiet, they form the complaining element of society, and are unstable as a nation.”

In those days, therefore, following a diet was more about improving health than losing pounds. The ideal diet was rich in “nourishing” proteins, often with filling accompaniments like breads or puddings—useful if there wasn’t enough meat. Cooked vegetables and salads were served, but we should remember that for most people, vegetables—and some meats—had to be seasonal as there wasn’t the international supply chain we now know.

So how do we know what people were eating? My favorite reference books are the ones pictured above, both from the extensive series of Mrs. Beeton’s books that were published well into the twentieth century.

Isabella Beeton didn’t write most of them—in fact, having seen her first famous book published in 1861 it’s quite impossible that she wrote anything after 1865. In that year she died of childbed fever, aged only 28, after having given birth to four children, two of whom died in infancy, and enduring several miscarriages. The next year her husband sold the rights to her books and name to a London publisher, which went on to make a fortune out of books published under Mrs. Beeton’s name. They let the public believe she was still alive and dispensing advice and recipes!

I found one of the books locally and the other online, and they are a mine of information. They’re both from somewhere around the late 1870s or early 1880s, so absolutely spot on for the period I’m writing my series in. I could get lost in them, truly—they’re far more than recipe books, giving advice on the tasks of servants, foods in season, how to arrange the table for dinner parties and loads of other wonderful information. Even the copious advertising (about one-fifth of All About Cookery) is useful to me.

I’ll leave you with a taste of the 1880s by copying out the bill of fare for a June dinner for twelve guests:

First course—Green-pea soup; rice soup; salmon and lobster sauce; trout à la Genévése; whitebait.

Entrées—Lamb cutlets and cucumbers; fricasseed chicken; stewed veal and peas; lobster rissoles.

Second course—Roast quarter of lamb and spinach; filet de boeuf à la Jardinière; boiled fowls; braised shoulder of lamb; tongue; vegetables.

Third course—Goslings; ducklings; Nesselrode pudding; Charlotte à la Parisienne; gooseberry tartlets; strawberry cream; raspberry-and-currant tart; custards; dessert and ices.

In case you’re wondering, Nesselrode pudding is a frozen sweet pudding made with chestnuts. I had to go to the internet to discover that Charlotte à la Parisienne was renamed Charlotte Russe when its creator went to work for the Tsar. Mrs. Beeton (or whoever actually wrote the recipe) seems to assume people know it’s the same thing . . .

One day I’ll make Charlotte Russe, which is a confection of sponge fingers, strawberries and cream. Hungry yet?

Technology in Nell's world

You often hear people nowadays talking about how fast technology is moving, but in the nineteenth century it moved just as quickly or, in a more fundamental sense, much faster. Most of today’s new technologies are incremental; mobile phones, for example, have been around since the 1970s, and have spent the last 50 years simply getting smaller and more sophisticated, merging with computer technologies to become the smartphone in the early 90s via the Personal Digital Assistant (who remembers PDAs?)

The inventions of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, were life-changing. The train, the camera, the sewing machine, the telegraph, the revolver, the telephone, the stock ticker (pictured), moving pictures, automobiles, gaslight, electric light, elevators, escalators, zippers—these nineteenth-century developments transformed people’s lives in ways twenty-first-century people would find hard to imagine.

The pace of change increased rapidly in the late nineteenth century, moving the United States and many European countries from an agriculture-based society to the industry-based society we know today. We take international travel, easy communications, sophisticated medicine, large corporations, and abundant year-round food for granted, but none of these facilities existed in 1800.

Photo credit H. Zimmer - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3961718