This project took wing from the literary agent Deirdre Mullane, a twenty-four-karat guide and shepherd. A doubly rich moment in US history, we both agreed, the Gilded Age fascinates for its marquee figures, its opulence and extravagance, its hidebound rules and regulations, and its scandals and pitiless indifference to the poverty at its curbstone. New York would be the focus, we decided, but Gotham would demand an authorial wide-angle lens. To wrangle the numerous topics, plumb the high points and the low, then map them for the browsing as well as the attentive reader, I counted on Deirdre’s suggestions and line-by-line crystalline “blue pencil” from the beginning. Her generosity makes this author wish that every book might have its own Deirdre.
Every author would be buoyed, what is more, by an editor whose enthusiasm matches Clara Platter’s. A senior editor at New York University Press, Clara stepped up to claim What Would Mrs. Astor Do? with stellar publication plans. She offered the help, as needed, of her invaluable assistant, Amy Klopfenstein, whose turnaround time in response to my queries and “head scratching” puzzles was formidably fast and precise.
Others have contributed greatly. The professional photographer Jamie Adams has taken time out to align and edit the nearly one hundred photographs and other illustrations in these pages, for which I am enormously grateful. Marshaling the profusion of illustrations has meant visits to the Special Collections division of the Vanderbilt University Library, and I thank Juanita Murray and her staff for retrieving the rare illustrated books by A. B. Wenzell and May King Van Rensselaer, all of which were brought to my attention by the librarian James Toplon, who also secured illustrations from periodicals of the 1870s. I thank Sandra Bohn for arranging the roster of the Four Hundred, and like every author whose pages feature visual materials from archives, I am indebted to the librarians and staff members of the following: the Library of Congress, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Historical Society, the Newport Historical Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Alamy Company, and Brown Brothers. I appreciate, in addition, the eagle-eyed copyediting of Andrew Katz.
At home, yet one more time, my thanks to the man with the Panama hat.