The Cora Crawleys of the Gilded Age: “As fast as our honorable, hardworking men earn money their…

The Cora Crawleys of the Gilded Age: “As fast as our honorable, hardworking men earn money their daughters toss it across the ocean”

At Smithsonian Mag, Angela Serratore’s essay “How American Rich Kids Bought Their Way Into the British Elite” is full of amazing century-old gossip about the Gilded Age fad of marrying new-money American heiresses to titled British men in need of a cash infusion.

By 1895 (a year in which America sent nine daughters to the peerage), the formula had coalesced into a relatively simple process. Mothers and their daughters would visit London for the social season, relying upon friends and relatives who had already made British matches to make introductions to eligible young men. Depending on the fortunes of the girl in question, several offers would be fielded, and her parents, weighing social and financial investments and returns, would make a selection. So such marriages were basically transactional alliances. Even in 1874, the union of Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill — which would give the Western world both Winston Churchill and a great deal to talk about — would reflect the beginnings of the trend.

There’s all that Henry James stuff about American girls being especially lively: Jennie Churchill wrote, “They are better read, and have generally traveled before they make their appearance in the world… by the time [the American girl] is eighteen she is able to assert her views on most things and her independence in all.” But they didn’t always come out on top in this deal. Consuelo Vanderbilt was basically sold to a duke for a $2.5 million lump sum plus $100,000 per year, but her husband wasn’t feeling it:

After the wedding (it is rumored that in the carriage ride after the ceremony, Sunny coldly informed Consuelo of the lover waiting for him in England) he went about spending her dowry restoring the family seat to glory.

Serratore also drops this great tidbit about “Mary Leiter, a department-store heiress from Chicago, [who] used her father’s money to help her husband, George Curzon, become the viceroy of India.” Leiter was the specific inspiration for Cora Crawley’s character, and I’d watch the hell out of a series starring her too.