CHAPTER 1
1. Income tax did not start edging its way in until 1894.
2. Between 1846 and 1851 Ireland lost about a quarter of her population through death and emigration.
3. An 1873 dollar was worth about $20 in 2016. In later years this figure rose, so a rough-and-ready way of calculating the vast sums spent in the Gilded Age in today’s money is to multiply by twenty-five.
4. This great restaurant finally closed in 1923 as a result of Prohibition.
5. Edith Wharton’s aunt.
6. See Chapter 8.
7. The phrase ‘the Four Hundred’ did not become shorthand for ‘society’ until 1892, when McAllister provided the press with the names of 400 of society’s most distinguished members.
8. The census of 1900 showed that there were more than three million inhabitants of New York but no more than .001 per cent were ‘in society’.