The Gilded Age and ALL THAT GLITTERS
How the Gilded Age Shaped History and Why Everything on ALL THAT GLITTERS is PURE GOLD.
Go beyond the superficial and the gilding to reveal what is real—the structure of history and language and nature . . . and of humanity itself.
We all are familiar with the old saying ‘all that glitters is not gold’, and since I’m a student of the Gilded Age, it’s a phrase that has special significance to me—and it gave this publication, ALL THAT GLITTERS, its name.
You see, it was Mark Twain who coined the phrase ‘Gilded Age’ in his 1873 book, The Gilded Age—A Tale of Today. These days—after a hundred years of movies and television depicting grand balls in Newport and lives of the vastly wealthy—we tend to confuse ‘gilded age’ with ‘golden age’.
That’s not what Twain meant by his unforgettable phrase, though.
He did not mean it as a compliment.
‘Gilding’ is a process by which a minutely thin layer of real gold is overlaid atop some much-more-common base material—plaster, metal, or wood. If you scratch away the gilding with a fingernail, you quickly see that . . . well, all that glitters is most definitely not gold.
But what is underneath is the structure that makes that little bit of gold possible.
So when I first got interested in the Gilded Age, I found myself unmoved by the stories of Morgans and Vanderbilts, Astors and Jeromes. Everything I read and watched seemed like so much celebrity worship. The people worth celebrating are not celebrities, then or now. They are the everyday people—from the poor to the working class to the middle classes—the mass of men and women who live more by their wits than their wallets.
They are the structure of society, then and now.
How did such people in the Gilded Age think? How did they live their lives? What were their hopes and dreams, loves and losses, successes and failure? As I dug deeper, I found these people to be not only far more interesting than the one-tenth-of-one-percent, but also more instructive. Across more than a century, they still have much to teach us—because our current age has some very eerie similarities to the world of the late 19th century.
(This is not to say that the ‘gilt’ part of the Gilded Age doesn’t have its place. It does, and it will have a place here—but only in proportion to the much greater mass of what lies beneath.)
In this curated collection of content, no matter what the topic, I promise you that you won’t find the superficial, the glittering surface that already attracts so much attention.
I promise instead that you and I will scratch away the gilding to reveal what is real—the structure of history and language and nature . . . and of humanity itself.
To my mind, that’s where the beauty of life is to be found, even if sometimes brutal.
I hope that’s what you’ve been looking for—because that’s what you’ll find here. I’m delighted that you’ve read this far, and welcome to ROBERT BRIGHTON’S ALL THAT GLITTERS.
