Customer Reviews

Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The author does an engaging job of letting the facts shine through in Gilded. In lively and unpretentious prose, she presents outrageous behavior with deliciously wry understatement. I hope other academics take note. I've read several popular histories recently that featured great material dulled down by excrutiating "academese" and intrusive commentary. (They seem to be close-captioning their work for the insight-impaired.) Dunlop lets her cleverness come through in her selection of characters and scandals that represent a time gone by -- yet seem all too familiar.

When I picked up this book, I expected it to be a chronicle of the decadence and debauchery of turn-of-the-century New York ('Scandal and Sensation' are in the subtitle, after all). As I read along, it became clear that the author had a specific thesis in mind, and that the book was more a study of class/sexual/social relations during this economically volatile era than a scandal sheet. Fine. But as a study, I found the evidence to be slim. What she presents as support for her theory (newspaper accounts) is questionable. Imagine future generations trying to figure us out based on what the New York Post says!

Still... Looking at it as a compiliation of social atrocities committed by the affluent in the face of the poor, it's pretty outrageous. I enjoyed the dozens upon dozens of anecdotes, and Dunlop's style is very engaging. Even the footnotes were enjoyable! While I wasn't satisfied with her attempt to neatly tie together all the chapters at the end of the book, I was satisified that I had gotten a better understanding of a decadent, turbulent, and fascinating society.

I am not much of a history buff, but I thought that I would give "Gilded City" a read. It is subtitled "Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York" and delivers on that promise.

The various stories portray Americans of that time as confused, misguided and self-centered in their disregard for the poor and unempowered (including animals) around them. It deals with warped senses of money, ..., power and charity. Even the newspapers seem to lack objectivity and sanity.

Dunlop's book is well-footnoted and the sources are surprisingly robust. I see that some reviewers have taken her to task for her accuracy. Since, I am no scholar of these times, I cannot make a statement as to the accuracy, but I can say that I found the book to be engaging.

This isn't the boring, lifeless history we learn in school. It presents the flesh and psychology of the times and makes me wonder what other nations, other people were like at that time.

It is an interesting companion to works by Edith Wharton, which hint at the sad and dysfunctional society that pervaded turn-of-the-century America. I wish that this type of history would have been made available to me when I was younger.

My only reservation is that every story in this book casts a negative shadow on US society. You might want to balance this with a book that has a more positive view of these times. I would actually give this 3.5 stars.

M. H. Dunlop's Gilded City began slowly for me as I got used to her style but then nothing could stop me. This book is full of salacious gossip and horrifying scandal. The behavior of the rich would be laughable if it was not at the expense of the poor. If Ms. Dunlop does not exactly take a position, she does create one by her selection of material. She truly makes the disparity between rich and poor come alive in a way that is shocking and true. The sources are limited to newspaper accounts and this is not a truly historical survey of the decade but it does achieve what it sets out to do. It creates for the reader a glimpse of the social world at this time as seen by the readers of the newspaper and the members of society trying to get in the newspapers. A fun, frightening read.

Ms. Dunlop is a woman of strong opinions,and the book would have been better if she did not hit you over the head with them at every turn. The foolish Bradley Martins, ludicrous Seelys, and other social headliners of the time are as absurd now as they--assuredly--were then. Conspicuous consumption, then as now, was seen as the right of the rich, and beneficial to the poor. It was and is an untenable philosophy. Ms. Dunlop states that American role models shifted from the very rich to theatre and sports stars shortly after this period. If she wished to claim that this was a result of the conspicuous stupidity of certain rich persons, she fails utterly to make her point. This is a frequently annoying book. It should annoy because of the presumption of the long-gone protagonists, but frequently does so because of the writer's strident and didactic style.

The introductory chapter could be tactfully described as in need of editing. It was so incoherent that I nearly put the book down. Nevertheless there is some useful information in this book, but I would recommend others as better written and a more complete portrait of the era.

I purchased Ms. Dunlap's book with great anticipation but could not get past the first chapter which was full of half-truths and distortions. In attempting to make the Bradley Martins the poster children of cupidity and avarice she has jumped on top of a century of misstatements in order to establish her superiority over these supposed fools. Two examples will suffice. She has the Martins joining the church days ahead of their daughter's wedding supposedly after never being churchgoers. The Presbyterian church where they were extremely active would be surprised at such an assertion, and the author should know that the Church of England was the faith of choice of their soon-to-be son-in-law, the Earl of Craven - thus their daughter's acceptance of his church just before their marriage. Second, she asserts that the bride didn't even know her own bridesmaids but that they were chosen by her mother for social reasons. Her life-long friends and cousins who served as her bridesmaids would be shocked indeed. She even misstates the number of guests at the Bradley Martin Ball of 1897 - when the list of attendees was published in several contemporary newspapers. Next time this author wants to make fun of someone, let her at least get her facts straight.

Dunlop is a great storyteller and a shrewd critic of culture. The material in Gilded City, excavated for the first time in a century, entirely changes our view of the "genteel" 1890s in New York. I especially cherished the chapter on Tip the elephant, and also the story of the man who, though broke, purchased one ton of pie for an imaginary army.

A few weeks after I finished this book, I picked it up off of the shelf thinking I might like to read it -- and realized when I opened it, that I had already read it. There just had not been enough substance to impress itself upon me. That is really a shame because the time period is a fascinating one and Dr. Dunlop obviously knows her stuff.

The problem seems to be the format. Each of the chapters is presented as a set piece. Although there are themes that hold them together, there is no real development from beginning to end of the book. Adding to this fragmented approach are the notes that follow each chapter rather than coming at the end of the book. One is left with the impression that Dr. Dunlop has compiled some of her favorite, perhaps most popular lecturers and repackaged them as a book. No doubt she is a good lecturer and respected in academia. Having skills in the classroom, however, does not necessarily translate into being a good author.

With a few line drawings and etchings -- no photographs -- these are slim pickings indeed.

I enjoyed some of this book, but I got the impression that the author had a lot to tell, but didn't know how to go about it. The anecdotes were mostly interesting, but disorganized, and the cruelty to animals section was awful. The only thing connecting all of the chapters was the time period. I didn't expect to find that scandal is so often boring.

Edith Wharton's novels, various episodes of PBS's The American Experience, etc., captured much more of the time than M.H. Dunlop did in her book.

While giving plenty of references, the content offers very little insight as to how the Panic of 1893 and its aftermath affected the middle class as well. We merely get a few examples of the extreme excesses of the very rich and not enough of the incredible suffering of the extremely poor.

Many of the scandals are well-known (e.g., Stanford White). And the depressing cluelessness and shallowness of the very wealthy (or those who wanted to be in that social strata) can easily be found in Wharton's "The House of Mirth" and "The Age of Innocence".

As for the extremely poor, Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" illustrated the lives of those who lived in the slums and tenements of New York much more vividly.

I felt that I was reading the bony carcass of what could have been a great book. It also felt like Dunlop was "assigned" the book, detested the subject and wrote the worst of everything in order to create an "objective" opinion of the times. More often than not, the book gave me a headache from the hammer Dunlop seemed to have been wielding over my head.

I love non-fiction, but felt that I have a better understanding of the period from recollections of dearly departed relatives, and the works of non-fiction (and fiction) of other authors. I was sorely disappointed.