Morland Dynasty series, 18th century

The long running Morland Dynasty series begins during the War of the Roses through the 1930s, but here are the books set during the 18th century for the interested to check out:

1720: political intrigue besets the kingdom as the Stuarts try to claim the throne occupied by the Hanoverians and the Morlands have to use all their wiles to keep their fortunes intact.

Jeremy Morland, sole heir to his father's will, has no option but to marry to cold-hearted Lady Mary to secure Hanoverian protection and safeguard his inheritance.

Then the rebellion of '45 and the bloody massacre at Culloden thrust his daughter Jemima into the spotlight as the saviour of the family. Independent, single-minded, and a rare beauty, Jemima is a capable caretaker of the Morland heritage.

Although Morland Place and its lands suffer from the excesses of her dissolute husband, Jemima's quiet courage earns her an abiding love and loyalty...

1772: Althought George III reigns over a peaceful England, his colonies in the Americas are claiming independence and a tide of revolutionary fervour is gripping France.

Allen Morland and his beloved wife Jemimas work unstintingly to bring Morland Palace back to its former glory. Their seven children often bring them heartache, but they are sustained by their love of each other.

The Mordland adventurer, Charles, emingrates to Maryland in persuit of the heiress Eugenie, but finds himself in the midst of the American claim for indepdence.

Meanwhile, Henry, the family's bastard offshoot, pursues pleasure relentlessly but pennilessly until he finds a niche for himself in the fashionable Parisian salons, whilst outside revolution creeps closer...

1788: the bloody revolution in France causes upheaval in the Morland family.

Henri-Marie Fitzjames Stuart, bastard offshoot of the Morland family, strives to protect his daughter, Heloise, his mistress, Marie-France, and their son Morland.

To this end, he binds Heloise to a loveless marriage with a Revolutionary, and allies himself with the great Danton. But in the bloodbath of the guillotine and the fall of Danton, Henri-Marie loses his head and Heloise flees to England.

She is welcomed with open arms by the family, and in Yorkshire Jemima proudly witnesses three marriages amongst her turbulent brood.

At least three may be an heir to Morland Place, but the seeds of disaster have already been sown.

1795: the shadow of Bonaparte has fallen across Europe and touches each member of the far-flung Morland family.

As the century draws to a close, Jemima Morland wearily ackowledges that her life is also nearing its end, but she has scant peace as her unpredictable children behave ever more incomprehensibly: James's marriage to Mary Ann is closer to falling apart; Lucy's marriage de convenance is in the balance - her affair with Lieutenant Watson is an open scandal.

Mary bears a daughter on board her husband's ship during the battle of the Nile; and William supports a mistress whose marriage cannot be dissolved.

Jemima's death appears to unite the family but, as ever with the Morlands, the future holds more peril than hope.

The "Dollar Princesses"

As highlighted in my previous post on the book "The American Duchess", the "Dollar Princesses", as they were called, were wealthy American heiresses who married into British aristocracy in order to help keep their country mansions afloat (in those days, there was no National Trust). Here's a great book I found about several of the best known of these that's definitely worth reading if you're interested:

Royal Blood podcast, episode 116

Dollar Princesses

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, fifty years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world - the New World, to be precise. From 1874 - the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known 'Dollar Princess', married Randolph Churchill - to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage, bringing with them all the fabulous wealth, glamour and sophistication of the Gilded Age.

Anne de Courcy sets the stories of these young women and their families in the context of their times. Based on extensive first-hand research, drawing on diaries, memoirs and letters, this richly entertaining group biography reveals what they thought of their new lives in England - and what England thought of them.

On 6 November 1895 Consuelo Vanderbilt married Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. Though the preceding months had included spurned loves, unexpected deaths, scandal and illicit affairs, the wedding was the crowning moment for the unofficial marriage brokers, Lady Minnie Paget and Consuelo Yzanga, Dowager Duchess of Manchester, the original buccaneers who had instructed, cajoled and manipulated wealthy young heiresses into making the perfect match.

Fame, money, power, prestige, perhaps even love – these were some of the reasons for the marriages that took place between wealthy American heiresses and the English aristocracy in 1895. For a few, the marriages were happy but for many others, the matches brought loneliness, infidelity, bankruptcy and divorce.

Focusing on a single year, The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau tells the story of a group of wealthy American heiresses seeking to marry into the English aristocracy. From the beautiful and eligible debutante Consuelo Vanderbilt, in love with a dashing older man but thwarted by her controlling mother, Washington society heiress Mary Leiter who married the pompous Lord Curzon and became the Vicereine of India, Maud Burke, vivacious San Francisco belle with a questionable background, this book uncovers their stories. Also revealed is the hidden role played Lady Minnie Paget and Consuelo Yzanga, Dowager Duchess of Manchester, two unofficial marriage brokers who taught the heiresses how to use every social trick in the book to land their dream husband.

The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau dashes through the year to uncover the seasons, the parties, the money, the glamour, the gossip, the scandal and the titles, always with one eye on the two women who made it all possible.

Here's a few biographies to check out on some of the iconic businessmen who made "the gilded age" what it was (and some of whom made their daughters those "dollar princesses"), should you wish to know more:

The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story—of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society.

The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic, one of many shocking and unexpected twists in the family’s story.

In this unconventional, page-turning historical biography, featuring black-and-white and color photographs, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe chronicle the lives of the Astors and explore what the Astor name has come to mean in America—offering a window onto the making of America itself.

The Astors; whose immense fortune came from furs, ships, and real estate; whose mansions bejewelled Fifth Avenue, Newport, and England; who became leaders — first in America, then in Britain — of polite society; whose births and deaths, private feuds and public scandals, political ambitions and philanthropic munificence have fascinated the rest of the world for close to two centuries.

The story of their rise to prominence, of their long reign, of their influence and importance, is more than the saga of a rich and unusual family, for it illuminates from a unique vantage point the history of the past two hundred years.

When twenty-year-old John Jacob Astor arrived in icebound Baltimore from Germany in 1783, his ambition was to live comfortably from the sale of musical instruments.

At his death in 1848, he was the richest man in America — he ruled over an empire and had founded a dynasty.

Today’s generation of Astors, still wealthy, lead influential but less flamboyant lives than their predecessors — as modest businessmen, horse breeders, playboys, philanthropists, novelists.

But between them and their ancestor John Jacob — who had spent his early years trudging along Indian trails bartering for furs and his last fourteen years quadrupling his fortune many times over on Manhattan real estate and rentals — lies a peerless array of characters, social and political forces in their own times, whose power and prestige continue to be felt today.

There was William Backhouse Astor, frugal and sombre, who loathed social gatherings. There was the Southerner Charlotte Augusta, who during the Civil War raised and equipped a regiment of black soldiers to fight for the North.

There was Caroline Astor, who gave balls costing as much as $200,000.

There was the vindictive, prickly William Waldorf Astor, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress.

There was an Astor feud settled only by the prospect of financial gain with the creation of the Waldorf-Astoria, designed to bring exclusiveness to the masses, a “glittering incandescent fantasy”.

And there was Nancy Astor, vociferous Member of Parliament and leader of the Cliveden Set.

From the free-wheeling entrepreneurial days of the early nineteenth century through two world wars to today, the Astors have been in the forefront of their age, both here and abroad, luminaries of politics, society, and culture.

Through five generations, in all their splendour, in a richly anecdotal narrative interwoven with paintings, drawings, and photographs making vivid the people, their mansions, their rise to social prominence in the United States and in England, here then are The Astors.

Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior.
Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasure.

The fate of Brooke Astor, the endearing philanthropist with the storied name, has generated worldwide headlines since her grandson Philip sued his father in 2006, alleging mistreatment of Brooke. And shortly after her death in 2007, Anthony Marshall, Mrs. Astor’s only child, was indicted on charges of looting her estate. Rarely has there been a story with such an appealing heroine, conjuring up a world so nearly forgotten: a realm of lavish wealth and secrets of the sort that have engaged Americans from the era of Edith Wharton to the more recent days of Truman Capote and Vanity Fair.

New York journalist Meryl Gordon has interviewed not only the elite of Brooke Astor’s social circle, but also the large staff who cosseted and cared for Mrs. Astor during her declining years. The result is the behind-the-headlines story of the Astor empire’s unraveling, filled with never-before-reported scenes. This powerful, poignant saga takes the reader inside the gilded gates of an American dynasty to tell of three generations’ worth of longing and missed opportunities. Even in this territory of privilege, no riches can put things right once they’ve been torn asunder. Here is an American epic of the bonds of money, morality, and social position.

The Astors

Caroline Astor

J.P. Morgan is more than just the name on one of the largest banks in America. He was a man who altered the course of American finance and the chief financier for the strategic interests of the titans of the day, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. He also financed new and ingenious technologies developed by Thomas Edison and was a visionary who saw the potential in Nikola Tesla.

His ability was not limited to Wall Street, though, and his reputation was not bound by the shores of America. He touched core industries in his lifetime, from shipping to power to steel and provided the spark that reignited the economic soul of America after the Crash of 1907.

He had a personal side too. Broken by the death of the love of his life, his once spritely demeanor changed, and he found solace in his work. The more he was befallen with sadness, the harder he worked, never once succumbing to the pressures of a world that was changing right around him.

J.P. Morgan built the financial world we live in today and did it with the might of his mind and the crux of his cane. The mold from which he came has long since been broken, and there is no other man, titan, or genius who has come close to the contributions he made for his industry and his country.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Alexander Hamilton: here is the essential, endlessly engrossing biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—the Jekyll-and-Hyde of American capitalism. In the course of his nearly 98 years, Rockefeller was known as both a rapacious robber baron, whose Standard Oil Company rode roughshod over an industry, and a philanthropist who donated money lavishly to universities and medical centers. He was the terror of his competitors, the bogeyman of reformers, the delight of caricaturists—and an utter enigma.

Rockefeller was the quintessential industrialist. He created an industry out of nascent oil and gas start-ups during a time when none existed. His strategies and tactics may not have been approved by all, but he was certain he was doing God’s work.

We live in a world today that is based on the actions of John D. Rockefeller. Everything we do and how we live are the result of oil and its power. This inherent structure is based on what one man did when the oil industry was just starting off. He was strategic in his thinking, choosing to enter the refining side of the oil industry instead of the exploring and drilling aspect of it. He started with one refinery and then quickly bought up more than 90 percent of his competitors in the state within a few short years.

The story of Rockefeller as told in this book provides a deep view of the oil industry and is told from a very human and real perspective. It looks at the events that shaped his life, from the shenanigans of his crooked father to the pleasant and philanthropic old man that he became. It is a story that is both instructive and interesting. It is a story of America itself told from the perspective of one of the world’s most successful men who rose from nothing and set the world on its path—a path that we still traverse today almost a century after his passing.

Read this book and learn about the conversations and twists and turns that were part of John D. Rockefeller’s life. Feel what he felt as he navigated happiness and disappointment, clarity and confusion.

The Rockefellers

Perhaps no other name in history can so truly encapsulate the phrase “rags to riches” as Rothschild does.

In the late eighteenth century, it was a gentle, astute Jew born in a Frankfurt ghetto, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, whose interest in old coins and canny investments would set the family on the path to becoming one of the most powerful dynasties of Europe.

Ennobled by the Austrian Emperor, soon the Rothschild name would become a household name.

Kings and princes, generals and businessmen, whether their move was political or economic, in a time of war or a time of peace, the controlling force behind them would be the Rothschild family.

Dazzlingly rich, the energetic, brilliant and downright extraordinary members of the Rothschild family were the force responsible for innovations in banking throughout the nineteenth century.

Times have changed and dynasties crumbled, but this marvellously rich history tells how the Rothschilds always endure.

Who are the Rothschilds? Still making headlines today, their fascinating history stretches back to the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, Germany, where the first Rothschild ancestors lived in the House of the Red Shield. There, one man and his five brilliant sons made their fortune as court agents to a royal prince. It would take Napoleon’s earth-shattering quest to conquer Europe to scatter the five brothers to the four winds, but when the dust of war settled, there was a Rothschild brother and a Rothschild bank in five cities: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Naples, and Vienna. The era of haute finance had begun, and the legend of a banking dynasty more powerful than any royal family in history was established.

In this book, you will follow the progress of the Rothschild family through the centuries. Their ranks included not only bankers and financiers but doctors, scientists, bomb experts, and collectors who amassed not only some of the finest art collections in Europe, but also one of the finest bug collections. Find out for yourself how the Rothschilds prevented wars, crowned and uncrowned kings, helped win the battle of Waterloo, looked down their noses at Nazis, and established a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The Rothschilds

Newport is the legendary and beautiful home of American aristocracy and the sheltered super-rich. Many of the country's most famous blueblood families, the closest thing we have to royalty, have lived and summered in Newport since the nineteenth century. The Astors, the Vanderbilts, Edith Wharton, JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Doris Duke, and Claus and Sunny von Bulow are just a few of the many names who have called the city home. Gilded takes you along as you explore the fascinating heritage of the Newport elite, from its first colonists to the newest of its new millennium millionaires, showing the evolution of a town intent on living in its own world. Through a narrative filled with engrossing characters and lively tales of untold extravagance, Davis brings the resort to life and uncovers the difference between rich and Newport rich along the way.

Newport, Rhode Island, was the summer playground of the Gilded Age for the Astors, Belmonts and Vanderbilts. They built lavish villas designed by the best Beaux Arts-style architects of the time, including Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim and Robert Swain Peabody. America's elite delighted in referring to these grand retreats as "summer cottages," where they would play tennis and polo and sail their yachts along the shores of the Ocean State. The coachman had an important role as the discreet outdoor butler for Gilded Age gentlemen--not only was he in charge of the horses, but he also acted as a travel advisor and connoisseur of entertainment venues. From the driver's seat, author and guide Edward Morris provides a diverse collection of biographical sketches that reveal the outrageous and opulent lives of some of America's leading entrepreneurs.

Will Starling

I saw this book reviewed in a magazine, so I've decided to have a look myself...it seems pretty interesting!

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

If you're a fan of the 18th century and/or British aristocrats, no doubt you've seen this film starting Kiera Knightly as the infamous in her time Georgiana Spencer, who became the Duchess of Devonshire and hosted "must attend" parties, lived with her husband-and his mistress (who was her best friend), and had a secret romance with MP Charles Grey, and ended up having his child...oh yes, she's also the great, great, great aunt of Princess Diana. If not, I highly recommend it, as well as the book it's based off of by Andrea Foreman.

Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In 1774 Georgiana achieved immediate celebrity by marrying William Cavendish, fifth duke of Devonshire, one of England’s richest and most influential aristocrats. She became the queen of fashionable society and founder of the most important political salon of her time. But Georgiana’s public success concealed an unhappy marriage, a gambling addiction, drinking, drug-taking, and rampant love affairs with the leading politicians of the day. With penetrating insight, Amanda Foreman reveals a fascinating woman whose struggle against her own weaknesses, whose great beauty and flamboyance, and whose determination to play a part in the affairs of the world make her a vibrant, astonishingly contemporary figure.

Royal Blood podcast, episode 92

 

Royal Blood podcast, episode 93

Jack the Ripper books

On August 31, 1888, the body of 43 year old prostitute Mary Ann Nichols was discovered on Bucks Row in the East End of London, beginning an autumn of terror for its residents and a nightmare of a case for the police, which has never been (nor will probably ever be) solved, and has fascinated people from around the world for 135 years and counting. Here's a list of some books I've found on this timeless mystery:

In the fall of 1888, Jack the Ripper slaughtered five prostitutes in London’s seamy Whitechapel District. He did not just kill—he ripped with a butcher’s glee—and then, after the particularly gruesome slaying of Mary Jane Kelly, he disappeared. For 127 years, Jack has haunted the dark corners of our imagination, the paradigm of the psychotic killer. We remember him not only for his crimes, but because, despite one of the biggest dragnets in London history, he was never caught.
I, Ripper is a vivid reimagining of Jack’s personal story entwined with that of an Irish journalist who covered the case, knew the principals, charted the investigation, and at last, stymied, went off in a bold new direction. These two men stalk each other through a city twisted in fear of the madman’s blade, a cat-and-mouse game that brings to life the sounds and smells of the fleshpot tenderloin of Whitechapel and all the lurid acts that fueled the Ripper headlines.
Dripping with intrigue, atmosphere, and diabolical twists, this is a magnificent psychological thriller from perennial New York Times bestseller Stephen Hunter, who the San Francisco Examiner calls “one of the best storytellers of his generation.”

Nonfiction:

Noble Blood podcast: 19th century

More from the Noble Blood podcast, this time it's the 19th century, 1800-1837

 

Episode 6

 

Episode 8

 

Episode 10

 

 Episode 14

 

Episode 71

 

Episode 73

 

Episode 88

Episode 241

Episode 242

Episode 287

Noble Blood podcast: 18th century

Here are some episodes of the Noble Blood podcast about some infamous historical figures worth checking out:

Episode 28

 

Episode 37

 

Episode 49

 

Episode 104

 

Episode 119

 

Episode 141

Episode 187

Episode 191

Episode 193

Episode 236

Episode 247

Episode 270

Episode 274