The Gilded Age, "The Gilded Age," and Historical Verisimilitude

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There’s an interesting “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker about a guy named Keith Taillon, who knows a lot about 19th-century New York City, and his disappointment in the new HBO series “The Gilded Age” for its lack of verisimilitude, which we might also call its historical inaccuracies. Central Park, for example, is often shown in the background, down the street that the two main families live on, and it looks a bit like it looks today, if you’re approaching from the east, on Sixty-Something Street, in summer, with green trees in the nearish distance. Sometimes the characters walk or ride in the Park, and again, it’s familiarly pleasant and verdant there.

According to Taillon, however, in the 1880’s, when the show is set, the trees would have been few, stark, new, and the whole Park would have been pretty bleak. Even more importantly, maybe, the old-money and new-money families would never have lived across the street from one another in competing mansions. The old rich, Taillon says, not only saw the East Sixties as a raw hinterland but also lived with a certain show of modesty, disdaining excessive display as tacky.

I was already interested in these issues, because it’s struck me how non-disgusting the series makes the city feel. I think that in real life, even uptown, the amount of horseshit on the streets and sewage in the gutters would make the likes of us, if we were transported back, gag. Also, both coal and wood heating were incredibly polluting, visibly so. The cold of winter and the heat and humidity of summer were horrible. In the show’s “downstairs” sequences, none of the ceaseless physical toil and danger of injury, part and parcel of 1880’s housekeeping, is on display. In real life, constant washing of laundry in big vats of scalding water created frequent opportunities for terrible injury, even death.

In the show, the servants mainly sit around reflecting on the doings upstairs. So far, there’s almost no labor, none of the day-to-day effects of rapid industrialization that made the period, and the city, what it was. It’s as if Mark Twain’s novel title “The Gilded Age,” far from a vitriolic riff on the term “golden age”—intended to skewer the superficiality and sheer cheapness of a period rife with grotesque degrees of exploitation—were really no more than an indulgently humorous label for a style conflict within the upper classes.

The conservative characters are unfairly prejudiced against change. Their prejudice isn’t even an ideology but only a manner, rooted mainly in personal traumas and failings, not in a fight to defend massive, ill-gotten gain against the next generations of brigands who would plunder it and replace them. Even when we do see examples of the period’s political and financial corruption, they seem kind of par for the course. It’s hard to gasp at the horror of bygone ways that really seem plenty 21st-Century, and if that’s supposed to be the point, then why do we keep being given the general sense that if the old-school types would only wake up to change, liberation is coming?

Overt racism, too, comes off as nothing but unfortunate degrees of prissy ignorance. Few of the main characters even have that. An example of Diangelo-esque nice-white-person racism is immediately perceived as such by its perpetrator, owned, and apologized for, more than a century before antiracism training.

So the show has helped me consider how much verisimilitude or historical accuracy a period piece is really supposed to have. For that matter, how much realism a novel written at the time, by Wharton or Twain or Tarkington, say, is supposed to have. For that matter, narrative nonfiction about the past.

As always, I write here as a practitioner, not a critic. The realism question can’t be answered by resort to any standard. No period piece can be truly correct, so it all depends on what kind of show you prefer. I get it: endless close-ups on huge, steaming piles of shit would be distracting. Still, I’d prefer a show that gave us a better sense of such textures, along with the real, grim, early Central Park, which is simply more interesting—both visually and historically—than anything “The Gilded Age” wants to do. When you give up on the more cinematically or narratively interesting choice, you’re usually also giving up the more historically interesting choice.

More visually and historically interesting, too, are the real social and political realities that this series hasn’t the time or energy to figure out how to dramatize, from the rival rich families’ not living in the same neighborhoods to the rising conflict between labor and capital. The one place where the series makes the more interesting choice—featuring the black bourgeoisie of Brooklyn—is cool. It also seems to have exhausted the creators’ imaginations.

So while I share Keith Taillon’s disappointment, for me the issue can’t really come down to getting things right, to accuracy. A show that gave us the real 1880’s Central Park, for example, but with the same script, and the same all-over-the-place approach to acting “in period”—I except Cynthia Nixon and Carrie Coon—wouldn’t do it for me. By the same token, I’d easily accept and even enjoy all kinds of wild license, if the world that was thereby created felt strange and real and original.

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Further Reading

New Yorker piece on Keith Taillon.

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

The Gospel of Wealth, by Andrew Carnegie

Article on the Homestead Strike, with primary sources. This should be a series—more on that someday.

The Golden Bowl, by Henry James

The Fifth Queen, by Ford Maddox Ford. Pretty much everything in this brief historical novel trilogy, centered on Katherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, is made up. It’s also the best thing on the period I’ve ever read.

There’s zero historical accuracy in “The Crown,” on Netflix, and “Rome,” on HBO; both are great.

What’s the historical-accuracy quotient in the documentary “Get Back”?