Historians Fact-Check The Gilded Age

The late 19th century was a time fizzling with chaos and uncertainty. There were incredible scientific discoveries and highly innovative scams, new strains of American mysticism and financial crashes of a frequency consistent with an economy still working out its relationship to the gold standard. In England, people were trying to breed extremely large cattle and show cats, with mixed success, and in Paris, a popular activity was visiting the morgue to look at famous corpses. You see early iterations of things we take for granted in modern culture — mass media! Ready-to-wear clothing! — and some incredibly weird shit that never happened again.

Some of this is present in HBO’s The Gilded Age, set in 1882 New York and created by Julian Fellowes, Baron of West Stafford, also the creator of Downton Abbey. Fellowes is a thorough researcher; the plot intersects with lesser-known events in New York history, like an internecine battle among the city’s elites over which opera house to attend and the tennis victories of one Dick Sears. The hats are insane with a high degree of fidelity. The plot toggles between profound silliness and melodrama — a double-agent chef tries to make the soup taste nasty, but thankfully is caught; the Russell heir enters his slutty architect era; a beautiful scammer absconds with the van Rhijn fortune. I enjoy bouncing it off my brain like raindrops on Teflon.

Still, something feels off, if not in the details, then the vibe. As a fan of American author Henry James, it’s strange seeing an era that produced literature so rich with ambivalence and irony recast in the sunny moral clarity of a Masterpiece Theater–adjacent production. Good guys oppose bad guys, relations between the wealthy and servant classes are mostly frictionless, and characters rarely experience genuine desperation — which is to say, the show avoids poor people. This season (spoiler!) ends on a happy note, which in The Gilded Age means Cynthia Nixon jubilantly announces “nothing needs to change!” With the announcement of a third season poised to further blur the lines between historical fiction and reality, I spoke to six historians of the era to get their take on some of the show’s plotlines and themes.

In addition to losing the family fortune, mustachioed failson Oscar van Rhijn spends the show’s second season deciding how to proceed with friend and lover John Adams. “The lines between homosocial relationships and sexual relationships among men were fuzzier during that period,” says Kevin P. Murphy, a professor at the University of Minnesota. “The concept of homosexuality as we know it was in its formation.” Scientists and scholars in Europe had just begun developing theories of sexuality, and “American medical professionals started to follow that lead and write about what they most often called ‘sexual perversion’ right around the time The Gilded Age is set. That medical conceptualization was starting to become known among usually elite reading publics.”

In one conversation, Oscar says he intends to marry a woman while Adams plans to remain a bachelor. “It’s obviously not at all atypical for men, even if they were primarily attracted to other men, to marry and have children for all kinds of reasons — respectability, money,” Murphy says. Remaining an unmarried man would also not be unusual at the time; in fact, the coming decades might narrow Adams’s options rather than expand them. “There might be speculation and gossip about his bachelorhood. Some of the men I’ve studied, that was absolutely the case — especially as the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality take hold,” says Murphy. “So even what seems to be a kind of modern trajectory for the John Adams character might actually lead to a place where his identity gets questioned and criticized.”

In a scene early in the season, Oscar’s drinking in a dusty, sepia-tinged bar and shares a glance with a working-class man — that sadness in his eyes you only see in Eastern European gay porn. They talk, and later, we learn the man lured Oscar into an alley and mugged him. According to Murphy, bars for same-sex flirtation existed “as early as the 1880s. There were bars and clubs and pubs in downtown New York, especially on the Bowery, where men who were interested sex with men connected. There’s a social urban history that in many ways precedes this medical history.”

In contrast to his established role in upper-class society, characters like Oscar would be more peripheral downtown. “Oftentimes there were working-class men at the center of this culture, and wealthier upper-class and upper-middle class men and women would come downtown and enter into it,” Murphy says. “One of the hallmarks of what historian George Chauncey has called ‘the gay world’ is that it involves cross-class relationships.” What’s missing from The Gilded Age is a fuller view of that world. “Certainly there are reports that men who were identified as fairies or effeminate would be targeted and robbed and assaulted,” Murphy says. “But also, there was pleasure and fun and a kind of cultural exuberance” that the series fails to capture.

Following a stint at her parents’ home in Brooklyn, Peggy Scott comes into her own as a journalist at Black newspaper the New York Globe while moving back into the van Rhijn household to resume work as Agnes’s secretary. The idea that Peggy would live in the van Rhijn household is “not rare for Black women, particularly domestic workers,” says LaShawn Harris, an associate professor at Michigan State University. In her activities outside the house, she exhibits a greater degree of autonomy than many other female characters on the show — writing for the Globe, traveling to the Tuskegee Institute with a male colleague, supporting a campaign to save Black schools from defunding by the city’s Board of Education. For Harris, this rings true: “Peggy definitely understands the social mores of being a Black woman who’s single. It allows her parents to have less of a say over her career choices and where she lives.”

“There’s this distinction to be made between married and not-married women,” adds Carla Peterson, a professor emerita at the University of Maryland and the author of Black Gotham (cited by Fellowes as a reference point for the show). A married woman “shouldn’t get a job. If she has a job and makes money, the bank account belongs to him, the children belong to him, everything belongs to him, et cetera. The single woman has a lot more options,” she says. Although Peggy’s career trajectory wasn’t common for the time, “you do find autonomous women like that, and they do make it into the history books … And I think that Fellowes did a pretty good job in representing Peggy as one of them.”

In the second season, we see more of the upper- and middle-class Black community Peggy belongs to in Brooklyn. There are scenes at her father’s pharmacy, the dress shop of teacher and organizer Sarah Garnet, and a small and relatively sedate rooftop party to celebrate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Peterson says The Gilded Age misses a sense of fun or pleasure for the population, citing historical records of bicycle trips to the beach in Sea Cliff, literary societies, music clubs, debutante balls with fresh flowers and oysters and women in diamonds and black silk. “In The Gilded Age, you see white people are devoted to pleasure, and African Americans are supposed to be devoted to the race,” she says, a perspective which misses the vibrancy of Black social life and the breadth of activities available to a person like Peggy.

It’s also worth noting that Peggy’s social milieu isn’t representative of Black life in New York as a whole. “The vast majority of working-class people don’t live in that area,” says Harris. “Most of them live in lower Manhattan in the San Juan district and the Tenderloin, what we would call different parts of Soho now. Black women are maids, they’re cooks, they’re laundryists, they’re engaging in the informal economy.”

A small crowd of workers in gray work-worn shirts wield sticks, bricks, and pitchforks while facing a line of soldiers who ready their rifles before — at the very last moment! — Russell calls a halt. (“How could I? These men have families!”) The scene is “fanciful in pretty much every respect,” according to Rudi Batzell, an assistant professor at Lake Forest College. “Rarely were encounters between workers and employers so neatly staged. Rather than well-organized and -defined ‘armies’ on either side, far more typical would be much more chaotic shoves, scuffles, street fights, and random shots with a very messy array of actors with diverse interests and allegiances.”

And “it’s too small,” says Rosanne Currarino, associate professor at Queen’s University and the co-editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Both Currarino and Nancy Unger, a professor at Santa Clara University, connect the scene to the Homestead Strike of 1892 at a Carnegie steel mill in Pennsylvania, which involved over 3,000 workers as well as their families. At a Pittsburgh railroad strike in 1877, “shopkeepers show up, other artisan workers close their shops and come into the street. You and I would go into the street. It’s a big deal. It’s not just the railroad guys; the community is also there.” That kind of crowd would be typical for other strikes as well — “it’s not 50 guys standing in a row.”

The strike is preceded by a scene in which George Russell visits the home of labor leader Henderson. Currarino was struck by the décor — Henderson has glass lamps, embroidered samplers, and little decorative knickknacks on the mantelpiece. It’s “quite nicely furnished,” she says. “For the American Federation of Labor (AFL), this is really important — they talk very much about how workers need high wages so that they can enjoy the fruits of their labor. They should be able to buy parlor pianos and nice shirts and pretty doilies and whatever. This is union leader Samuel Gompers’s big thing: Labor wants more; we should have more of the things that make up a good life.”

“These are kind of aspirational furnishings,” she adds. “He’s not poor. He’s relatively well-off, considering, but precarious.”

The van Rhijns and Russells employ massive staffs of footmen, butlers, underbutlers, ladies’ maids, and chefs. Although they’re the primary representation of working people in the show, “the servant class is doing so much better than the working poor” during the Gilded Age, says Unger. The house staff aren’t representative of the majority of poor and working-class New Yorkers, and Unger wishes there were some depiction of the factories or tenements where they lived and worked. When the van Rhijn fortune briefly evaporates (only to reappear an episode later via deus ex secret textile fortune), the prospect of the family’s staff losing their jobs represented an existential threat. “It’s really easy to slide,” says Currarino. “Especially if you’re kind of marginal. You don’t own any property, especially if you’re a woman on your own. How do you get another job? Who’s going to vouch for you?”

Although domestic workers had some protection from precarity — at least in the form of food and lodging — wages tended to be low. “Elites complain endlessly about the servant problem. ‘There’s just not enough. How do you get a good servant?’” Currarino says. “What they really mean is that there’s not enough servants to hire at that wage.”

After learning that Emily Warren Roebling, the wife of Washington Roebling, was primarily responsible for completing the Brooklyn Bridge (this really happened!), Larry Russell credits her explicitly as completing the project at a party honoring the trustees on the day of the bridge’s opening. “That struck me as, Oh, come on. That’s a modern thing,” says Unger. “There are certain things that might have been said privately, but not in a public way like that. That would be disrespectful to her husband and to all the other men involved in that project. It’s not just about giving women credit; it’s that giving women credit takes away credit from the men.”

The most gripping plotline in a season that involves the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge (“More than 20 men have died in its construction! Would you rather it had never been built?” George Russell demands of a union leader) was van Rhijn footman Jack repairing his faulty alarm clock, then wading through one bureaucratic holdup per 60-minute episode to patent his new invention. To Unger, the storyline reflects that “this really was an amazing age of technology and discovery. This country goes from a rural agrarian nation to this urban industrial giant practically overnight.” What about showing every step of Jack’s induction into the Uhrmacher Verein der Stadt New York? “I really like that it’s not just like, Oh, [new technology] is just there. Somebody thinks about it and makes it happen.”

Is it Southern? Transatlantic? “I have no idea,” says Unger. “Normally I can pontificate on things I don’t know anything about, but that one’s way too far even for me.” Counters Murphy: “I think it’s really well-pitched for this show. He understands The Gilded Age as a kind of camp melodrama.”

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