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Was Harriet Beecher Stowe another inspiration for Julian Fellowes' The Gilded Age?


I have only watched the first episode of Julian Fellowes' The Gilded Age (on Sky Atlantic in the UK) but having read some of Edith Wharton and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the story already feels a little too familiar. 

Fellowes appears to have taken a few novels set around the 1880s, thrown them into a blender, seasoned with a dash of Downton Abbey and a drizzle of Upstairs, Downstairs and baked into a handsome multimillion dollar confection.

My suspicion that this was not an original thought was confirmed when I checked the reviews. There was: 

What HBO's 'The Gilded Age' Owes Edith Wharton from The Atlantic.

The Gilded Age Review: Julian Fellowes Does Edith Wharton from Time.

Google even offers a shortcut:


The Atlantic is scathing about Fellowes' debt to Wharton:

"Wharton’s New York, fully in thrall to money, celebrity, and power, feels almost more feudal than Downton does. But The Gilded Age takes this teeming morass of a historical period and essentially focuses on a single animating question: Will Bertha win the reigning socialite Mrs. Astor’s approval? As social commentary goes, it’s less The Custom of the Country than The Real Housewives of Washington Square."

The Atlantic reveals that Fellowes' interest in Wharton goes back a long way: her 1913 novel The Custom of the Country was the inspiration that started his writing career, he says. His screenplay for Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman in 2001, could be seen as transposing a cast of Wharton characters to an English stately home. 

So the Wharton connection behind The Gilded Age is firmly established. 

I suspect, though, that Fellowes has also read Harriet Beecher Stowe's two New York novels, My Wife and I (1871) and We and Our Neighbours (1875).

Even in this first episode, I spotted several similarities: 
- Characters meet unexpectedly thanks to the disruptive behaviour of a dog.
- A croquet game during an out-of-town houseparty is the setting for social mixing.
- A couple of respectable sisters from 'old New York' live together, one a spinster, the other a widow. 
- They are bored and socially isolated until a lively young woman comes into their lives. 

Stowe's New York novels are not considered her best - and the second, at least, rambles into long digressions about religion and morality. But they also include many excellent passages in Stowe's wonderfully engaging style. Fellowes' cherry-picking of a few characters and plot devices doesn't do them justice.

The only reference I could find to a Stowe connection with The Gilded Age was in a well-informed blog post about the third episode on The Vulture, a review site from New York magazine. The writer speculates that one of the minor characters could have been based on Victoria Woodhull, who, as well as being the first female candidate for the United States presidency, published a weekly paper. A story in it led to her arrest for obscenity. That story was about the alleged affair between the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and one of his parishioners. Rev. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

So, a very distant connection. The scandal was a huge story at the time, and one which Fellowes might like to consider if HBO want to reuse any of the sets or costumes they have created for The Gilded Age. 

For the moment, that won't be necessary because whatever failings Wharton fans might have found in the first series were ignored by critics and the show won a string of awards, including Best Writing in a Broadcast Network or Cable Series, Drama, for Fellowes from the Hollywood Critics Association.

A second series is being completed and will be offered for our viewing pleasure in 2023. 
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