Apple TV+’s “The Buccaneers” relies on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel of the identical title. Its massive solid contains Kristine Froseth, Christina Hendricks, Alisha Boe, and Mia Threapleton and traces a gaggle of younger, rich American girls as they enterprise throughout the pond on the lookout for high-class husbands within the 1870s, specializing in the conflict between British and American tradition and the lives of the younger girls of that period.
The present’s protagonists and their lives are fully fictional. Nevertheless, their story relies on an actual phenomenon that occurred throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, when many younger American girls, flush with new cash, traveled throughout the ocean with a view to discover aristocratic British males to marry. In response to Historical past, between the late nineteenth century and the Nineteen Forties, many American heiresses traveled to Britain, providing their wealth to British aristocrats who possessed standing, class, and titles however who typically have been quick on funds.
Britain’s aristocracy misplaced an excessive amount of cash throughout the Gilded Age, largely as a result of America started producing its personal grain throughout that point, damaging Britain’s income from the trade. In the meantime, many American males have been rocketing to monetary success in America by varied new companies, although their new-money standing typically left them with out social prominence. An answer, then, was to marry daughters of American wealth to inheritors of British class and standing.
Issues did not at all times go easily for the ladies despatched over to Britain. Many of those girls grew up in luxurious however discovered British tradition and etiquette stifling and old style. Their efforts to modernize British society ultimately garnered them the nickname “dollar princesses.”
These “dollar princesses” wound up having a transparent impression on historical past in additional methods than one. In 1874, an heiress named Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill, and the pair wound up having a son named Winston Churchill. Then, in 1880, a inventory and railway heiress named Frances Ellen Work married the long run Baron Fermoy. Their marriage led to divorce in 1891, however greater than a century later, Work’s great-granddaughter Princess Diana married a then-prince named Charles.
Since then, the lives of those “dollar princesses” have been regularly chronicled on the web page and on display. The present “Downton Abbey” largely focuses on a fictional American heiress Cora Girl Grantham and her marriage to a British aristocrat named Lord Grantham. “The Buccaneers,” which premieres on Nov. 8, is the newest sequence to element the adventures of the ladies who made the trek abroad in search of standing and who modified the tradition of the British aristocracy without end alongside the way in which.
