What is the Dark Side of the Gilded Age?

A Blog for Writers and History Lovers

I just realized that I passed my first blog anniversary. I started this blog in January 2012. Go me. This blog has made some serious transitions since then including one last week so in celebration of my missed anniversary, I'm writing a post about this blog. Aren't you excited?

photo credit: brizzle born and bred via photopin cc

For those who have been following this blog for a while, you may have noticed that last week I changed the blog's description a little. It used to just say "For Fans of Gothic, Paranormal, and Magical Late Victorian and Turn of the Century Historical Fiction."

First off, what a mouthful, huh? Second, I don't think this blog should only be for people who write historical fiction because I talk about history in general, so anyone who is interested in this history could enjoy the blog and not necessarily have to write historical fiction.

I also wanted to specify the Gilded Age because I want to make it clear that this blog is not really about the Victorian time period but about the end of the Victorian period and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Post-Mordem Photogrphay
Add photo credit: brizzle born and bred via photopin cc

Even more specifically, I focus on this period in American history. The term for this time period in England is called The Edwardian Period. Even though a lot of the history I specialize in is relevant and helpful for people interested in The Edwardian Period it's still not what I write about or know about. I specialize in American history from about 1880-1900, which is The Gilded Age.

To be clear the specific dates of The Gilded Age will be different depending on where you look, some say it goes from 1878 to WWI. Some say it runs from the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 to the Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency in 1901. You get the point.

But why the dark side of The Gilded Age?

The term "The Gilded Age" actually comes from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner who called it that because although everything seemed great and prosperous in America, underneath it all, things were pretty dark.

At the time, America's economy was booming and for the first time the country started to polarize into rich classes and poor classes. Twain and Warner were particularly commenting on greedy businessmen and corrupt politicians, which they felt America had "veiled in a thin coating of gold" because the country continued to focus on how great everything was and just ignored the bad stuff. 


Check out the "We Speak Student" Smoop website for more about The Gilded Age.

photo credit: El Bibliomata via photopin cc

When you look up The Gilded Age you will find a ton of information about Carnegie and American industry, immigration, the advent of labor unions and strikes, but that is not what I'm interested in and although some of that is pretty dark, it's not what I specialize in. I specialize in social or people history, that is what was going on with people on a day to day basis. I don't really care about the economy or politics or workforce power struggles.

Here are some examples of what I cover in this blog:

This was a time period when psychology was still in it's infancy and led to inaccurate diagnosis of thousands of people, forcing bizarre treatments and outright imprisonment in asylums. Hysteria was considered rampant among women, and from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, we know the treatments were pretty bad.

Medicine during this period was all messed up and electricity brought on more bizarre medical treatments not to mention the first electric chair.

The Eugenics Program sterilized people against their will to better the human race even though some of these people were deemed the wrong sort of people because they were victims, particularly rape victims were sterilized with  the rationale that they were promiscuous.

Meanwhile, death rates and infant mortality were high and the mourning culture and death photography was strong, creating creepy images that still haunt our culture.

Art Nouveau Architecture

photo credit: IPBrian via photo pin cc

This was a time when ghost stories and death literature got it's own genre for goodness sakes!

Might I add, crystal balls, seances, and ectoplasm?

Dude even Art Nouveau furniture and architecture was creepy!

The entire time period to this day is characterized by industry and railroads and blah, blah, but when you really start to look at day to day life, things were pretty messed up and yet people just seemed to turn a blind eye a lot.

Hope you don't mind I'm citing a whole bunch of my own blog posts... consider this that episode you sometimes get in a television series - which everyone hates but they do it anyway - where they recall all these past moments we've already seen and then call it a new episode anyway... Sorry.




What's really up is that my back injury is acting up and I can barely think, so sorry if this post sucks, but here's another excuse to list an old post from my first month of blogging. It's quite random really but here it is: What the Heck is Wrong With You Anyway?

Thanks for reading guys. My one year anniversary would quite a disappointment if I didn't know so many of you were reading.


About Stephanie Carroll
Stephanie Carroll is the author of A White Room and "Forget Me Not" featured in Legacy: An Anthology. She blogs about magical realism, her research into the Victorian Era and Gilded Age, writing, and life in general at www.stephaniecarroll.net and at The Unhinged Historian. She also founded Unhinged and Empowered, a blog for Navy wives and girlfriends.

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