Gilded prostitution

‘An English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady, her age and looks are immaterial…’ This desperate advertisement in the Daily Telegraph in 1901 was a barometer of the impoverishment of many British aristocrats following the Long Depression of 1873–80; dependent on agriculture, the landed gentry continued to reel from those seven consecutive failed harvests.

<br> Meanwhile, America’s prairies and railroads had never produced so much wheat, cattle, oil or wealth. Not only that, there was a sizeable number of extremely rich, sassy girls, whose mothers, several of them ex-chambermaids, viewed a European title as a path out of social ostracism in New York — the ‘one place to be’ for anyone with social aspirations. As Anne de Courcy puts it in this hugely entertaining chronicle of cash for coronets, ‘the simplest way for a family to elevate itself into the top level of New York society was through the strategic marriage of a daughter’. In the calculation of the New York World: ‘a real live count’ was a sure passport ‘into the innermost of the inner circles’. Immaterial to the determined Yankee mother was the count’s age or looks. Between 1870 and 1914, 454 American girls married titled Europeans, 102 British aristocrats, six dukes. ‘It was,’ writes de Courcy, ‘a real invasion.’

Like most invasions, it began as a tale of exclusion. The self-appointed Cerberus of American high society was Caroline Astor, married to a man who was a) descended from a German fur trader, and b) had a middle name ‘Backhouse’ that was one word for a privy. She was assisted in her vetting by a shimmeringly snobbish amanuensis called Ward McAllister, who had read some books on heraldry and precedence, and whose adapted tosh became canon law. ‘If you are stout, never wear a conspicuous watch chain; if you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend the dinner.’