The Gilded Age

Fairyland for adults

Readers should know that I rarely watch TV. Most of it is utter rubbish. So, my latest guilty indulgence is watching The Gilded Age, on Sky Atlantic. (It came with our internet package, along with Netflix which I detest.)

If you are looking for some entertainment over the twelve days of Christmas, you could do worse than watch The Gilded Age. That’s all I am saying. Top toff Julian Fellowes brings Downton Abbey to the US, sort of.

As The Gilded Age is set in the United States in the 1880s it offers a more diverse cast than Lady Mary and the rest of them. There is an African-American story line, as well as the usual upstairs-downstairs intrigue. My knowledge of that era in the US is limited so I am not going to drone on about its historical accuracy or inaccuracy. I watch it to escape to an adult fairyland, for that is what it looks like. Nothing explodes and there is no swearing so, so far so good.

First, the costumes are spectacular. They are almost too bright but not quite as showy, gaudy and historically inaccurate as Bridgerton. Sorry – I said I wouldn’t go down that road. The hats alone must have cost a small fortune to make. In fact the entire series must have cost Vanderbilt type wealth to produce.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I didn’t watch the first series and am only on episode four of the second series, but I am figuring out who is who and what is what. The matriarchs, new money and old money are plotting the marriage market; the men of business are trying to crush fledgling unions. Some servants move up and some new money moves down.

I am not sure it was intentional but there is nod to my great favourite film The Age of Innocence, set at the same time. One of the major plot lines of the Gilded Age is the rivalry between new money and the development of the Metropolitan Opera House over the senior Academy of Music, adored by the established families of Old New York.

Readers of the Age of Innocence will remember that the first few pages are taken up with this great rivalry, and the opera singer mentioned, Christine Nilsson also makes an appearance in the series, singing the garden scene.

Edith Wharton, opening the Age of Innocence;

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances “above the Forties,” of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient “Brown coupe.”

It cannot have been an accident by Fellowes that the opening credits include the opening of a rose which also features in the film the Age of Innocence.

So that’s another one for your list. If you enjoy looking at a time when people didn’t just fall out of the house wearing leggings and a hoody and instead made an effort when dressing, this series is for you. If you appreciate dialogue that isn’t laden with profanity you will enjoy this series. If you like intrigue and cunning beneath the fantastic hats, then the Gilded Age will appeal to your sensibilities. Enjoy.