Thread by @thetimes

Described as the “American Downton Abbey”, Julian Fellowes’s much-anticipated ten-part drama #TheGildedAge has finally arrived on the screen 📺
thetimes.co.uk/article/how-ac…

Taking place in NYC in the early 1880s, it tells a story about wealthy socialites battling for status.
🗽💰
Marian Brook, a young woman whose spendthrift father has left her penniless, moves into a Fifth Avenue townhouse with her two patrician aunts

The story features a number of historical characters and takes place against a backdrop of real events. Here, we separate the fact from the fiction 👇

⚠️Warning: spoilers may follow ⚠️

Which characters in #TheGildedAge really existed?
✅ Caroline Schermerhorn Astor who ruled over old NY society
✅ Ward McAllister a social arbiter who established NY’s “Four Hundred”
✅ George Russell’s mansion and his railway station plans are designed by the real Stanford White

Why was Stanford White notorious? 👀
White was murdered in 1906, at the age of 52, in scandalous circumstances. The facts uncovered were so unsavoury that it would still be shocking today. It remains to be seen if the storyline will take us all the way to his violent end

Are any of the fictional characters based on real people?
👉 Bertha Russell closely resembles Alva Vanderbilt, sometimes called the original American social climber.
👉 Peggy Scott seems to be at least loosely inspired by pioneering black journalists such as Ida B Wells-Barnett

Did the Vanderbilts and JP Morgan build their own opera house because they couldn’t get box seats at the Academy of Music? 🤔
Since Mrs Astor and her circle decided who would be given boxes, the socialites decided to build their own opera house controlled by their patronage

Were there really cut-throat financial battles over the railways and NY stations? 🚆
Vast fortunes were won and lost in the railroad wars, and the tycoons who controlled them were notoriously ruthless, accused of blackmail, fraud, theft and homicide to protect their interests

Is the racism that Peggy Scott experiences an accurate depiction of how black people in the north were treated 20 years after emancipation?
The racism Peggy encounters is pretty mild for the time. She meets plenty of enlightened white people which respect her abilities

What about the rules of courtship? Would Tom really ask Marian to spend the night with him?
Absolutely not. People had premarital sex in the 1880s but a young woman like Marian would have taken her sexual purity, and its relationship to her marital prospects, very seriously

Was social etiquette as rigidly codified as Agnes van Rhijn repeatedly tells her niece?
It was, and if anything the characters are all far too explicit about the rules, because the first rule of the social code was that you didn’t talk about the social code

#TheGildedAge continues on Sky Atlantic/Now on Tuesdays

Read the full story👇
thetimes.co.uk/article/how-ac…