“History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” The quotation, often given wrongly as “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes,” comes from chapter 47 of The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Published in 1873, this seldom-read novel gave its name to an epoch of American history. The current popularity of HBO’s television series of the same title prompts the question: Are we living in a new Gilded Age?
As columnist Peggy Noonan noted last week in The Wall Street Journal, HBO’s series has struck a chord. It is not just that it captures “the clang, clash, and fire of industrial America being born and high society being invented.” It’s that it offers a vision of an American elite apparently free of our modern neuroses.
Rather than “the freakish glamour of the Met Gala,” Noonan observed, the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, gives viewers a costume parade that is “secure in the values it asserts, confident in its definitions.” The talented cast—Christine Baranski as the snobbish Agnes van Rhijn, Carrie Coon as the scheming Bertha Russell—make the best of scripts that sometimes sound like episodes of Downton Abbey translated into American English by ChatGPT.
What Noonan overlooked, though, was that The Gilded Age also serves as a mirror in which we can recognize many aspects of our own time. That is of course Fellowes’ intention, which is why the series is riddled with anachronisms—especially in its treatment of racial issues. I would love to believe in the friendship between the white central character, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) and the black would-be writer Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), but it’s a heavy lift.
Which is why, if you’re really interested in what happens to a society as it goes through a wild economic transformation comparable with ours today, it’s more illuminating to read Twain and Warner than to watch HBO’s period drama.
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Author: Niall Ferguson
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