414 pages, Workman Publishing Company, ISBN-13: 978-0761171959
I absolutely love the Gilded Age, but I don’t really know why; there’s so little to recommend it on a personal or professional level, but…there it is. So whenever I come across a book on this era I naturally snatch it up – like this one, To Marry an English Lord: Tales of Wealth and Marriage, Sex and Snobbery in the Gilded Age by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace which, as the cover blurb tells us, was the inspiration for Downton Abbey. This was a chatty book that was organized rather strangely: you start a chapter or a section reading some fascinating story about this American heiress or that English grandee and, upon turning the page, run smack into some photo essay telling a completely different story.
Not that these many photos and sidebars weren’t useful; indeed, they include detailed information about Victorian and Edwardian high society, such as which fashions were all the rage, how calling cards worked, how wealthy women could easily conduct little extramarital affairs on the side – you name it and it’s all here in all of its high-class debauched glory. I thought that the two authors were rather like a couple of Old Maids discussing the goings on of the Well-to-Do over their backyard fence, sharing copies of People Magazine to illustrate whatever strumpet they were dissing. Oh, they were all going to hell in a handbasket, no doubt, but they would do so with elegance and style, make no mistake.
This may be the best thing about the book, but it would have been even better if the format was different – say, as a coffee table book, where the pictures would have been given more justice. Furthermore, the book is repetitive in the extreme: once we get past the well-known Buccaneers who crossed the Atlantic to harpoon their own Great White Lord – y’know, Jennie Jerome, Consuelo Vanderbilt and such – we read about their erstwhile cousins who came afterwards and damned if I could differentiate between the lot. And it’s not just that the women’s stories were all similar; the authors actually recap the same stories two, three and even four times in subsequent chapters. I mean, enough, already.
Oh, and mustn’t forget all of those lists, especially the last which details each heiress with her father, husband and manor house – again with the repetition! I get trying to enlighten the reader, but it looks like the authors substituted quantity for quality and just loaded one down with facts and figures. Not a bad book, don’t get me wrong, but gossipy and rather unserious, a kind of cross between a dynamic history book and a high-society gossip rag. To Marry an English Lord is a detailed Who’s Who chronicling the lives of the many young, rich American women who relocated to Britain in search of husbands with fancy titles and the men who married them for their money. Really, these high-class low-lifes deserved one another.