Match made in gold and aristocracy
Minnie Paget was rumoured to have spent $ 6 million entertaining the Prince of Wales; when the wealthy Vanderbilt family came knocking at her door, every penny would pay its way. Julie Ferry’s The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau tells of Paget and other unofficial marriage brokers for America’s Gilded Era nouveau riche.
Ferry introduces Minnie and her peers, the first American heiresses married into Britain’s impoverished aristocracy. They then used their wealth and connections to broker marriages for their compatriots.
It pivots around 1895, the year Anglo- American society marriages peaked, following families who sought them and the women who covertly brokered them. Ferry traces Paget’s transatlantic machinations to match the next generation of US money with UKtitles.
It’s the cloth Downton Abbey’s Lady Grantham or Edith Wharton’s characters in The Buccaneers and The House of Mirth are cut from and has real- life counterparts in the likes of Jennie Churchill ( mother of Winston), Maud Cunard and Lady Nancy Astor.
The United States, particularly New York, was awash in the profits of the post- Civil War plutocrats. Grandfathers Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like had made their fortunes, yet their newly wealthy heirs were socially excluded by New York’s old money. They wanted to cement their respectability and place in society. They chose to traffic their daughters - and stupendous dowries - across the Atlantic, to cleft themselves to the oldest money around and bypass the gatekeepers of New York society.
Awaiting them were young British aristocratic heirs, in penury because of the cost of maintaining the stately pile, extended families and unproductive estates. Dukes with “high overheads and hard hearts” looked to forge alliances with transatlantic fortunes.
Ferry’s research involves personal accounts from the brokers, ambitious mothers and their eligible debutante daughters. But she acknowledges that the era’s preoccupation, on both sides of the Atlantic, with keeping up appearances and the covert nature of the business made her job difficult.
And it was a business, although hard evidence of material transactions proved elusive. It seems certain that by making Anglo- American introductions, these women also made independent incomes. Grateful parents of marriageable daughters might pay a season’s bills or give them a bauble or two.
Ferry’s book is a natural companion to Sian Evans’ Queen Bees ( 2016), about Britain’s society hostesses between the wars or Anne Sebba’s
Flappers ( 2013), the next generation of Anglo- American aristocracy’s influential daughters.
They portray a world of eye- watering privilege and material means but, like the other books, Ferry’s is an engaging insight into how a group of privileged women discouraged from asserting themselves professionally by the social mores of their era, pursued influence and power.