12 ms·

What happened when the rich stopped intermarrying in Britain

149 points by samizdis 4y ago

samizdis 4y ago
> Assortative mating eventually bounced back and is still going strong. British matchmakers Gray & Farrar, for instance, with their minimum fee of £15,000, boast of having "the connections and network to attract the right people for the right people." - That paragraph links to the site of top-tier matchmaker Gray & Farrar [1], which IMO is worth a visit. Beyond parody, and dripping with the smug evils of a British-style class system. [1] https://www.grayandfarrar.com/ https://www.grayandfarrar.com/
- solardev 4y ago
  Wow, the rich British must have really good eyes. Can't read anything on that site... all caps light gray text on textured beige wallpaper, surrounded by lynched naked people: https://www.grayandfarrar.com/services/ https://www.grayandfarrar.com/services/ Kinda makes me glad I'm not in THAT dating circle.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    This design style bothers me to no end. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/67891/what-is-the-reason-for-small-lightly-coloured-text https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/67891/what-is-the-rea...
  - cs137 4y ago
    Not to mention, the gratuitous capitalization and the grammar errors.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  This is incredibly funny. Here I am thinking the upper echelons operated like Thurn and Taxis, using signals too subtle for the common folk to notice. It's just a .com on the clearnet lmfao
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    They’re selling the dream to plebeians. Patricians have Burka’s Peerage, the Almanack de Gotha, Who’s Who or the Social Register. This is for insecure strivers.
    - dash2 4y ago
      Maybe it’s for neither. Their marketing blurb is all about being global and very successful - not actually old money and certainly not for plebeians.
      - barry-cotter 4y ago
        The nouveau riche are plebeian by definition. The haute bourgeoisie/gentry/patrician class isn’t just defined by money. It’s defined by no one on the family having a memory of a member of the family not having had wealth, power and prestige.
        WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        That’s not really how it works. High nobility can be very poor. They still remain member of high nobility. White Russian still frequented other nobles in exile after the revolution when most of them had become penniless. It’s not strictly about money.
        RalfWausE 4y ago
        Yeps, thats right... back when i was in school i had a "von" type classmate, they even "owned" a castle (a ruin... back then on the wrong side of the iron curtain), and lived in a social housing project.
        barry-cotter 4y ago
        At no point did I refer to nobles or nobility. The Roosevelts, Vanderbilts and Hearsts have never been noble but they’re the same social class the British used to call gentry or the French haute bourgeoisie.
- jayceedenton 4y ago
  > dripping with the smug evils of a British-style class system This smacks of a an entrepreneurial young chancer having a go. The business is founded on the hope that the smug evils of the British class system exist, rather than evidence of them. Many startups are founded on the idea that there is huge profit to be made by targeting the rich. Sell 'high-end' services at crazy prices. The inflated price is one of the KSPs of the product as the exclusivity itself is what's on sale. The fact that these services exist doesn't really prove anything, other than that there is a perception of something there to exploit. Gray & Farrar looks like a website built by young business guys who have watched too much Made In Chelsea, and The Apprentice. The website is genuine, but yes it's a parody of the British class system, just not a knowing one.
  - Biologist123 4y ago
    I thought you might be right, but the business seems to have been around for a while as a mother and daughter partnership. https://www.spears500.com/adviser/4455/claire-sweetingham https://www.spears500.com/adviser/4455/claire-sweetingham https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/OC346350 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... All-in-all, toe-curling. But my guess is that they only need 3 or 4 clients a year to run it as a sideline.
    - Joeboy 4y ago
      > But my guess is that they only need 3 or 4 clients a year to run it as a sideline. I mean, keeping a website and limited company running for a year costs a lot less than the minimum £15k quoted in TFA. They could have had one client since they incorporated in 2009, and be in the black.
      - Biologist123 4y ago
        I wonder if the author is just being incredibly naive about the real business here.
        4y ago
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  Netflix made a (mostly true) documentary “Inventing Anna” about someone who moved to New York with the fake identity of a German heiress (whose father occasionally cuts her off). She had a bunch of hotels and some tech investors fooled. I feel like she should have gone into the matchermaker racket instead.
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    I felt that conclusion was unwarranted. So she was a 'fake' heiress. Aren't they all? Just jumped-up rich claiming some sort of divine right? Why wasn't she as good as any of them? Because of dogma, chiefly. People of the time figured she wasn't 'real' in the sense she didn't follow some imaginary ideas of being deserving or whatever. But only after they initially believed her, which means she was socially as adept at the role as any of them.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      She was not what she claimed to be, if you're surprised that lying to people isn't OK then I've got really terrible news for you. Anna created numerous fake documents purporting to show she actually had lots of money in foreign banks (she did not) and there was a family trust that could access the money on her behalf (no such thing existed) and so she'd tell people it's OK, my trust will pay you back - knowing she's just taking services she hasn't paid for and has no intent to ever pay for. In most jurisdictions Fraud requires two things: Dishonesty and intention thereby to gain or that another loses. For most people it's thus really easy to avoid committing fraud - be honest. If you don't like honesty you need to ensure you never have intention for you to gain or another to lose, which is going to be a really steep climb in many circumstances given we live under capitalism.
      - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
        No person claiming magical special humanhood is 'what she claimed to be'. That's my point. Say you're a Dutchess if you like; your claim is exactly as valid as anyone else's; which is to say, nonsense. I applaud her for capitalizing on the public gullibility to believe in devine humans with special rights.
- switch007 4y ago
  > OUR CLIENTS ARE PART OF A SELECT GROUP OF PEOPLE WHERE EQUALS ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN. THEIR LIVES MAY BE LIMITLESS, BUT THE NUMBER OF SUITABLE PARTNERS THEY MEET MOST CERTAINLY ISN’T even The Onion couldn’t do parody that well
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Poe’s law in advertising.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  That’s hilarious. A 40 year old second generation business trading off the idea of British classism. The people who they’re implying use them wouldn’t be seen dead on their roster. The peerage know each other either personally or through reputation by friends of friends. Even if you’re going for the broader group of people who went to public school or who are second or more generation public school you wouldn’t find too many of them using the services of a firm that advertises. Where’s the exclusivity or cachet in that? All you need is money.
- melony 4y ago
  Has nobody heard of the International Debutante Ball?
- strix_varius 4y ago
  I particularly enjoyed this trying-too-hard run-on sentence: > THIS IS THEREFORE A HIGHLY SELECT AND SOPHISTICATED GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY THE UNSPOKEN RULE OF ONLY WANTING TO MEET OTHER PEOPLE LIKE THEM AND WHO ARE COMFORTABLE WITH WHO THEY ARE AND WHO THEY WOULD IDEALLY LIKE TO MEET.
  - divbzero 4y ago
    They spend years conducting their selective search and succeed against all odds, only to discover that their ideal mate is similarly selective and unwilling to choose them in return.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
southerntofu 4y ago
> titled women married husbands 44 percentile ranks poorer in terms of family landholdings 0.66 * super rich is still super rich. I wouldn't go so far as to say "the rich stopped intermarrying", although the article explains how a very tiny oligarchy/aristocracy did stop intermarriage at some point. It's also worth noting that the bourgeois balls the article mentions to reproduce class through marriage are still very much a thing, at least here in France the "rallies" as they're called are still taking place with the same function of producing quasi-arranged marriages to benefit one's family.
- t_mann 4y ago
  That's not how percentiles work. They could be almost exactly as rich for what we know, but given the context (extremely high wealth inequality) four deciles would likely imply many orders of magnitude in absolute wealth difference.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Right, in the U.K. today there’s a pretty massive difference between 99th %ile wealth and 55th %ile wealth. I don’t know what it looks like for landowners (similar I expect) but maybe in the 1860s most people were not landowners so the e.g. 20th %ile landowner owned more land than say 90% of landowners (people or e.g. farm LLCs/partnerships) do today.
- projektfu 4y ago
  If it happened in 2020 in the US, women in the 99th percentile overall (household net worth over $11 million) would be marrying men in the 55th percentile (99-44) and a net worth of $160,000. Roughly speaking. I'll split the difference with you if it's no big deal.
  - qzw 4y ago
    You're of course correct about the percentile v. percentage difference, but it's worth highlighting that the article is only talking about landed wealth, which presumably distinguished the old money from the nouveau riche. So a more analogous (if silly) modern equivalent might be to talk about percentile of net worth held in cryptocurrencies or meme stocks.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
a_humean 4y ago
I don't understand the time scales here. Three years of very wealthy noble women marrying less but still very wealthy commoner men lead to major educational reform less than 10 years latter through changes in the house of lords? Even if such a blip of an event were to have an effect, it would surely happen on a generational timescale (20-30 years) rather 5-7 years later. These peerages are quite literally generational inheritances of titles - you don't suddenly become a lord after getting married.
- beloch 4y ago
  >Her brothers were 50% less likely to enter parliament >... >Constituencies that were no longer represented in parliament by the local peer were much less likely to oppose the introduction of state education Women of the peerage take lower class husbands, sullying their family name. Their brothers lose their bids to enter parliament to people outside the peerage. Critically, those outsiders support educational reforms. I'd be curious to know why the peers seemed to be willing to support outsiders over peers who had sisters with "poor taste" in men. Wouldn't such snobs prefer their own kind, however tarnished, over outsiders? Then again, the bitterest feuds are within families or between religions that are barely distinguishable from one another. Perhaps total outsiders were vastly preferable to peers who were letting their class down. If true, the peers own snobbery bit them in the arse.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Some people are too liberal to take their own side in an argument.
  - toyg 4y ago
    There were likely multiple concauses. The non-aristocrats winning parliament seats in that period were typically people who had made a lot of money in industry and commerce (or someone directly sponsored by such). Those individuals were very strong-willed; it's entirely possible that they wrestled control from the weakened aristocrats in many ways, and probably gossiping about "disgraced" young women was just one easy tool. Once elected, these people supported education reforms because they needed it: their businesses required a cheap but educated workforce. Not unlike what Google and friends need now (hence the big push to "learn to code").
aaron695 4y ago
sgt101 4y ago
Odd that this coincided with the second industrial revolution, but there you go...
lordnacho 4y ago
But landholdings are not the only type of wealth, and specifically at that time with the industrial revolution going on, stuff like factories become a source of great riches. So marrying down 44 percentiles in land does not mean marrying 44 percent down in wealth, it could just be marrying the same amount of wealth with a more industrial component. Also the industrial revolution itself seems more likely to cause education reform than changing peers, who are lifetime appointments. Fewer hands needed in agriculture, plus more jobs requiring people to be able to read means you need kids in schools instead of on farms. It's probably true that prestige went down. It takes a long time for that sort of thing to change. There are still people around today who are impressed by titles. It seems very unlikely that the elites would not fight tooth and nail for the best matches for their kids. Not having the queen around makes no difference, it seems most likely there would still be a scene where people went and made connections, and the criteria would be largely the same.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Despite the potential similarities in wealth, the difference in background did make a difference. This is because the bourgeoisie of this period were heavily influenced by the progressive and radical literature and pamphlets of their time. The main parties in English politics of this period were between the Liberal party (which was a fusion of old Whigs and new radicals) and the Tori/Conservative party which was aligned with nobility. One of their main disagreements was whether the mass populace should be "advanced" through welfare or whether they should be left to their traditional roles and rungs in society. Many bourgeoisie who had gained their wealth through the early industrial period joined the Whigs and they left a tradition which brought many of the next generation into the Liberal party. This of course aligned with their own interests. A healthy and educated workforce was critical to their ambitions. Though I do think in general they were motivated by a certain amount of ideological good will. The Tori and Conservative parties in England did not just oppose state welfare. They often opposed industrialization as it was the foundation of their opponents' power and it creates potential for shifts in the roles of individuals in society. Interestingly this creates a persistent confusion to this day wherein Americans don't understand why the "conservative" party in England is not 1:1 a party for business as it is in America. As they have a historical interest in opposing some development and supporting conservation.
cs137 4y ago
I'm skeptical, correlation not being causation and all that, but nevertheless I think there's an optimistic message here. The social structure of the bourgeoisie is, in fact, fragile, and that can be used to our benefit. We don't have to use guillotines if we can, with much less violence (ideally, none at all), destroy the upper class's ability to function as a class. It's not that I care either way for their lives on an individual level; but, as a student of history, I recognize the horrible downstream costs of even justified applications of violence. This is doubly true in the US, where it's the biggest assholes (the far right, many of whom openly fantasize about a bloody civil war) who are most prepared to go that way. It will not take a whole lot to destroy the elite's ability to function as an elite, and once that is done, they are nothing but a deservingly disliked tiny minority that have lost the support on which they rely (both individually and collectively) in order to function. In practice, the efforts will probably not be entirely nonviolent (they will certainly be unlawful, and one must be prepared to return fire when fired upon) but the bloodshed can be kept to an absolute minimum so long as focus is kept where it belongs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  the thing you're missing is that Americans want elite private networks. so there will always be universities, private clubs, and consolidation of media organizations that function solely due to their network of prior members and influence. so even if the .01% are more effectively demonized, a surrogate of why they have ability to function as a class will persist. unless you have a proposal for that too, it pretty much has nothing to do with "bloodshed or not"
- samatman 4y ago
  You didn't stop being bourgeois when you embraced communism, buddy.
- FredPret 4y ago
  You’re advocating class warfare because you’ve decided a particular class should not exist. Very generously you also decree that this should be done with a minimum of bloodshed. How utterly cringeworthy.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
My current understanding from reading books like The Millionaire Next Door is that great wealth is currently lost in three generations. I was wondering if this old tradition in Britain used to escape that trend?
- lampshades 4y ago
  I’m watching this play out with my sister-in-law right now. Her grandfather made a ton of money, her mom never worked but had enough to live a good life off of inheritance, and my wife and her sister have just inherited the remains (only a million or so left for each of them). I’m wonder how long it takes for my SIL to spend it all because I’ve read so many articles mentioning how wealth disappears over generations trying to prepare for this moment with my wife. Yet to be seen, but spending has already commenced. Thankfully I think I’ve drilled into my wife’s head the seriousness of psychologically acclimating to having a large sum of money dumped in her lap and to not spend any of it.
  - thirtyfivecent 4y ago
    You're in danger of being divorced soon
- samizdis 4y ago
  There's an interesting and well-researched book about wealth, especially hereditary and linked to land holdings in England, that addresses the question: Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole. There's a Guardian review from 2019 [1] that covers the gist of the subject. Here's a sample paragraph: When once asked how young entrepreneurs might succeed in Britain, the late Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor (owner of 131,000 acres, including much of London’s Belgravia and central Liverpool), observed, drily, that they should “make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. Though Shrubsole estimates that the recent sell-off of ancestral lands to the “new money” of hedge-funders and oligarchs accounts for perhaps 17% of the total in England, 30% rests in the hands of the feudal Norman “cousinhood”, whose offspring have until recently preserved their birthright with a Downton-esque doggedness. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-england-guy-shrubsole-review-land-ownership https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-engla...
rmbyrro 4y ago
While I found the historic nuggets worth the read, the article stretches too much to conclude that it resulted in expansion of access to education. There isn't a single bit of effort to demonstrate the connection factually. Just pure, imaginative speculation. I'm not contesting. Don't have the evidence to support nor deny the allegation.
ricardobayes 4y ago
The real question is, why is every single article of this site posted here.
dan-robertson 4y ago
The article seems a bit unbelievable to me but on the other hand the First World War had an absolutely massive effect on the British aristocracy so maybe it shouldn’t be totally implausible. I don’t know how you blame the lack of the season rather than other changes at the time though.
jasonkester 4y ago
Reading this and the discussion below, it occurs to me that I don’t actually know what a “peer” is. I had assumed it had something to do with being in parliament, but the clearly that’s mistaken, since it doesn’t flow with the article or comments. Does anybody have a concise summary of all this stuff that even an American can understand?
- floren 4y ago
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  "Peer" means that they hold a position in the archaic fancy-hats club that sometimes gets referred to as "nobility", except for baronets who are too low to be peers.
  - Cederfjard 4y ago
    What jasonkester might have been thinking of is that peers are eligible to sit in the House of Lords.
    - Taniwha 4y ago
      however while the House of Lords is an analogous to the US Senate it's NOT a co-equal house with the House of Commons
- andrewem 4y ago
  Peers are people who hold titles from this set of descending order of importance - Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, and Baron (and feminine equivalents). These tended to be hereditary, so that a person who the king or queen gave a title like Duke of Marlborough got to pass it down to a descendant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingd... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Marlborough_(title) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Marlborough_(title)
- komadori 4y ago
dash2 4y ago
Here's a link to a (much) earlier version of the actual paper: http://pseweb.eu/ydepot/semin/texte1314/GON2014ASS.pdf http://pseweb.eu/ydepot/semin/texte1314/GON2014ASS.pdf Offtopic, kind of sad that "publication" now means the opposite of publication, i.e. concealing something from the public behind a paywall.
somedudetbh 4y ago
If you're interested in answering the question "How, from their peak at around 1870, did this insanely wealthy and powerful group come to lose so much of their wealth and power over the next fifty years", I recommend _The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy_ by David Cannadine. Personally, I find the book's explanation more compelling than the "the London Season was cancelled for three years so rich people stopped marrying each other" explanation.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Haven't read the book -- I assume WWI had a lot to do with it?
  - somedudetbh 4y ago
    WWI is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book. I read this book a long time ago so I'm probably remembering a lot of it wrong, but basically, by WWI, the decline already quite advanced, enough to be a cliche: the Gilded Age mansions and museums of New York were already filled up with art and artifacts bought off of broke British aristocrats. The causes are complex, and interesting. One of the big challenges for the British aristocracy was that American farming started to destroy the economics of traditional agriculture-oriented landholding in the UK in the late 19th century. So, the 'bargain' the British aristocracy had sort of explicitly or implicitly made over the centuries with the rest of the British population was that the aristocracy were, you know, the nobles. The knights. We call them 'armigerous' families because the have a _coat of arms_. The British aristocracy viewed WWI as an opportunity to be like, "Ok, THIS is our time to shine, this is what we've been playing rugby at Rugby for all these years..." The sons of the British aristocracy signed up eagerly, and were put into leadership positions. In the early part of the war, they were still using tactics oriented around personal bravery and charge-leading, so while WWI was horrific for all of Europe with (IIRC) ~10% of the of-age men being killed in the war, the impact on the aristocracy was much worse, with some estimates being around 30% of the young men of the aristocracy dying in the war. There were far-reaching restructurings of society after WWI, but the aristocracy couldn't come back from the combined loss of a generation of a men, and failure to achieve their gambit: they basically bet it all on "we'll show you, we'll lead the nation through this war" and the public perception was that they completely failed. So it's not so much that WWI did it, as it was basically done, and WWI was a last gasp. Like I said though I read this book in...I wanna say 2006? It's been a while.
personjerry 4y ago
In theory, how would a commoner marry into aristocracy? Asking for a friend.
- wmf 4y ago
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  They would enlist, go to war, and assume the identity of a fallen noble officer.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    And thus the inspiration for the backstory in Mad Men ?
UIUC_06 4y ago
> she was much less likely to become the kind of terrifying matriarch so familiar to readers of PG Wodehouse My favorite line.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
This is something that contributes to a feeling that the period from after the Civil War until the mid century as a more prolific period of technological and social progress than the nascent neoliberal period. It's one thing to give blacks the vote; it's another when centuries class distinctions are meaningfully eroded through the force of technological and social progress outright. Onward and upward.
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
  restated: Indoor plumbing and, "not slavery" were bigger deals than TV, the Internet, and Nike Vapor Max will ever be.
citizenpaul 4y ago
My take is that even 100-200 years ago there was really not much moving up oppertunity outside the monarchy. The result was a rather cruel treatment to those lower in the power stucture. Those lower stayed anyway in hopes if moving up. Now days a person low in the monarchy has better results by defecting while leveraaging their position to some gov or corporate instance. They no longer must endure a less than status with empty hope of falling up luck.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
I love these little nuggets of history, but as any glance at any alternative history (video) essay tells you, there is never just one causal link and usually dozens of factors. The 1860s were probably the high water mark for British power in the world, but as for weird things that chnaged all that try this one: - Frederick Tudor created the ice industry (think what the hero from Frozen did), allowing storage of buffalo and cattle beef in trains and ice houses in chicago - which travelled by boat through the great lakes and over the recently dug Eerie canal and out New York and across the Atlantic to cause world wide economic depression as agricultural societies collapsed due to the competition - which meant traditional MPs and rural power was upended - and new industrialists coukd afford to pay their politicians while the landed gentry found there was a massive rural depression There are so many fascinating threads through history.
- turdit 4y ago
- cafard 4y ago
  The rural economy had its troubles long before the 1860s: look at the history of the Corn Laws. And did Chicago beef really travel by the Erie Canal or by railroad?
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    Beef travelled by both - the railway cars were also refrigerated (I believe the last wooden style ice cars were decommissioned post WWII!) But transport by water is roughly two orders of magnitude cheaper than (pre railway) land transport - see also acoup.blog on Land Trains and game of thrones for a interesting segue.
unity1001 4y ago
This shows how an aristocratic society that is based on actual class distinction still persists in England. English always say that, but as a foreigner, you dont get it until you read actual studies that solidly demonstrate it like this. England is the only country that has an upper house consisting of appointed, hereditary members with lifetime appointments, consisting of aristocrats, the rich and even theocrats.

149 points by samizdis 4y ago

> Assortative mating eventually bounced back and is still going strong. British matchmakers Gray & Farrar, for instance, with their minimum fee of £15,000, boast of having "the connections and network to attract the right people for the right people." - That paragraph links to the site of top-tier matchmaker Gray & Farrar [1], which IMO is worth a visit. Beyond parody, and dripping with the smug evils of a British-style class system. [1] https://www.grayandfarrar.com/ https://www.grayandfarrar.com/

solardev 4y ago
Wow, the rich British must have really good eyes. Can't read anything on that site... all caps light gray text on textured beige wallpaper, surrounded by lynched naked people: https://www.grayandfarrar.com/services/ https://www.grayandfarrar.com/services/ Kinda makes me glad I'm not in THAT dating circle.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  This design style bothers me to no end. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/67891/what-is-the-reason-for-small-lightly-coloured-text https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/67891/what-is-the-rea...
- cs137 4y ago
  Not to mention, the gratuitous capitalization and the grammar errors.
mxkopy 4y ago
This is incredibly funny. Here I am thinking the upper echelons operated like Thurn and Taxis, using signals too subtle for the common folk to notice. It's just a .com on the clearnet lmfao
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  They’re selling the dream to plebeians. Patricians have Burka’s Peerage, the Almanack de Gotha, Who’s Who or the Social Register. This is for insecure strivers.
  - dash2 4y ago
    Maybe it’s for neither. Their marketing blurb is all about being global and very successful - not actually old money and certainly not for plebeians.
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      The nouveau riche are plebeian by definition. The haute bourgeoisie/gentry/patrician class isn’t just defined by money. It’s defined by no one on the family having a memory of a member of the family not having had wealth, power and prestige.
      - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        That’s not really how it works. High nobility can be very poor. They still remain member of high nobility. White Russian still frequented other nobles in exile after the revolution when most of them had become penniless. It’s not strictly about money.
        RalfWausE 4y ago
        Yeps, thats right... back when i was in school i had a "von" type classmate, they even "owned" a castle (a ruin... back then on the wrong side of the iron curtain), and lived in a social housing project.
        barry-cotter 4y ago
        At no point did I refer to nobles or nobility. The Roosevelts, Vanderbilts and Hearsts have never been noble but they’re the same social class the British used to call gentry or the French haute bourgeoisie.
jayceedenton 4y ago
> dripping with the smug evils of a British-style class system This smacks of a an entrepreneurial young chancer having a go. The business is founded on the hope that the smug evils of the British class system exist, rather than evidence of them. Many startups are founded on the idea that there is huge profit to be made by targeting the rich. Sell 'high-end' services at crazy prices. The inflated price is one of the KSPs of the product as the exclusivity itself is what's on sale. The fact that these services exist doesn't really prove anything, other than that there is a perception of something there to exploit. Gray & Farrar looks like a website built by young business guys who have watched too much Made In Chelsea, and The Apprentice. The website is genuine, but yes it's a parody of the British class system, just not a knowing one.
- Biologist123 4y ago
  I thought you might be right, but the business seems to have been around for a while as a mother and daughter partnership. https://www.spears500.com/adviser/4455/claire-sweetingham https://www.spears500.com/adviser/4455/claire-sweetingham https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/OC346350 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... All-in-all, toe-curling. But my guess is that they only need 3 or 4 clients a year to run it as a sideline.
  - Joeboy 4y ago
    > But my guess is that they only need 3 or 4 clients a year to run it as a sideline. I mean, keeping a website and limited company running for a year costs a lot less than the minimum £15k quoted in TFA. They could have had one client since they incorporated in 2009, and be in the black.
    - Biologist123 4y ago
      I wonder if the author is just being incredibly naive about the real business here.
      - 4y ago
fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
Netflix made a (mostly true) documentary “Inventing Anna” about someone who moved to New York with the fake identity of a German heiress (whose father occasionally cuts her off). She had a bunch of hotels and some tech investors fooled. I feel like she should have gone into the matchermaker racket instead.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  I felt that conclusion was unwarranted. So she was a 'fake' heiress. Aren't they all? Just jumped-up rich claiming some sort of divine right? Why wasn't she as good as any of them? Because of dogma, chiefly. People of the time figured she wasn't 'real' in the sense she didn't follow some imaginary ideas of being deserving or whatever. But only after they initially believed her, which means she was socially as adept at the role as any of them.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    She was not what she claimed to be, if you're surprised that lying to people isn't OK then I've got really terrible news for you. Anna created numerous fake documents purporting to show she actually had lots of money in foreign banks (she did not) and there was a family trust that could access the money on her behalf (no such thing existed) and so she'd tell people it's OK, my trust will pay you back - knowing she's just taking services she hasn't paid for and has no intent to ever pay for. In most jurisdictions Fraud requires two things: Dishonesty and intention thereby to gain or that another loses. For most people it's thus really easy to avoid committing fraud - be honest. If you don't like honesty you need to ensure you never have intention for you to gain or another to lose, which is going to be a really steep climb in many circumstances given we live under capitalism.
    - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      No person claiming magical special humanhood is 'what she claimed to be'. That's my point. Say you're a Dutchess if you like; your claim is exactly as valid as anyone else's; which is to say, nonsense. I applaud her for capitalizing on the public gullibility to believe in devine humans with special rights.
switch007 4y ago
> OUR CLIENTS ARE PART OF A SELECT GROUP OF PEOPLE WHERE EQUALS ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN. THEIR LIVES MAY BE LIMITLESS, BUT THE NUMBER OF SUITABLE PARTNERS THEY MEET MOST CERTAINLY ISN’T even The Onion couldn’t do parody that well
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Poe’s law in advertising.
barry-cotter 4y ago
That’s hilarious. A 40 year old second generation business trading off the idea of British classism. The people who they’re implying use them wouldn’t be seen dead on their roster. The peerage know each other either personally or through reputation by friends of friends. Even if you’re going for the broader group of people who went to public school or who are second or more generation public school you wouldn’t find too many of them using the services of a firm that advertises. Where’s the exclusivity or cachet in that? All you need is money.
melony 4y ago
Has nobody heard of the International Debutante Ball?
strix_varius 4y ago
I particularly enjoyed this trying-too-hard run-on sentence: > THIS IS THEREFORE A HIGHLY SELECT AND SOPHISTICATED GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY THE UNSPOKEN RULE OF ONLY WANTING TO MEET OTHER PEOPLE LIKE THEM AND WHO ARE COMFORTABLE WITH WHO THEY ARE AND WHO THEY WOULD IDEALLY LIKE TO MEET.
- divbzero 4y ago
  They spend years conducting their selective search and succeed against all odds, only to discover that their ideal mate is similarly selective and unwilling to choose them in return.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago

southerntofu 4y ago

> titled women married husbands 44 percentile ranks poorer in terms of family landholdings 0.66 * super rich is still super rich. I wouldn't go so far as to say "the rich stopped intermarrying", although the article explains how a very tiny oligarchy/aristocracy did stop intermarriage at some point. It's also worth noting that the bourgeois balls the article mentions to reproduce class through marriage are still very much a thing, at least here in France the "rallies" as they're called are still taking place with the same function of producing quasi-arranged marriages to benefit one's family.

t_mann 4y ago
That's not how percentiles work. They could be almost exactly as rich for what we know, but given the context (extremely high wealth inequality) four deciles would likely imply many orders of magnitude in absolute wealth difference.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Right, in the U.K. today there’s a pretty massive difference between 99th %ile wealth and 55th %ile wealth. I don’t know what it looks like for landowners (similar I expect) but maybe in the 1860s most people were not landowners so the e.g. 20th %ile landowner owned more land than say 90% of landowners (people or e.g. farm LLCs/partnerships) do today.
projektfu 4y ago
If it happened in 2020 in the US, women in the 99th percentile overall (household net worth over $11 million) would be marrying men in the 55th percentile (99-44) and a net worth of $160,000. Roughly speaking. I'll split the difference with you if it's no big deal.
- qzw 4y ago
  You're of course correct about the percentile v. percentage difference, but it's worth highlighting that the article is only talking about landed wealth, which presumably distinguished the old money from the nouveau riche. So a more analogous (if silly) modern equivalent might be to talk about percentile of net worth held in cryptocurrencies or meme stocks.

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a_humean 4y ago

I don't understand the time scales here. Three years of very wealthy noble women marrying less but still very wealthy commoner men lead to major educational reform less than 10 years latter through changes in the house of lords? Even if such a blip of an event were to have an effect, it would surely happen on a generational timescale (20-30 years) rather 5-7 years later. These peerages are quite literally generational inheritances of titles - you don't suddenly become a lord after getting married.

beloch 4y ago
>Her brothers were 50% less likely to enter parliament >... >Constituencies that were no longer represented in parliament by the local peer were much less likely to oppose the introduction of state education Women of the peerage take lower class husbands, sullying their family name. Their brothers lose their bids to enter parliament to people outside the peerage. Critically, those outsiders support educational reforms. I'd be curious to know why the peers seemed to be willing to support outsiders over peers who had sisters with "poor taste" in men. Wouldn't such snobs prefer their own kind, however tarnished, over outsiders? Then again, the bitterest feuds are within families or between religions that are barely distinguishable from one another. Perhaps total outsiders were vastly preferable to peers who were letting their class down. If true, the peers own snobbery bit them in the arse.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Some people are too liberal to take their own side in an argument.
- toyg 4y ago
  There were likely multiple concauses. The non-aristocrats winning parliament seats in that period were typically people who had made a lot of money in industry and commerce (or someone directly sponsored by such). Those individuals were very strong-willed; it's entirely possible that they wrestled control from the weakened aristocrats in many ways, and probably gossiping about "disgraced" young women was just one easy tool. Once elected, these people supported education reforms because they needed it: their businesses required a cheap but educated workforce. Not unlike what Google and friends need now (hence the big push to "learn to code").

aaron695 4y ago

sgt101 4y ago

Odd that this coincided with the second industrial revolution, but there you go...

lordnacho 4y ago

But landholdings are not the only type of wealth, and specifically at that time with the industrial revolution going on, stuff like factories become a source of great riches. So marrying down 44 percentiles in land does not mean marrying 44 percent down in wealth, it could just be marrying the same amount of wealth with a more industrial component. Also the industrial revolution itself seems more likely to cause education reform than changing peers, who are lifetime appointments. Fewer hands needed in agriculture, plus more jobs requiring people to be able to read means you need kids in schools instead of on farms. It's probably true that prestige went down. It takes a long time for that sort of thing to change. There are still people around today who are impressed by titles. It seems very unlikely that the elites would not fight tooth and nail for the best matches for their kids. Not having the queen around makes no difference, it seems most likely there would still be a scene where people went and made connections, and the criteria would be largely the same.

DubiousPusher 4y ago
Despite the potential similarities in wealth, the difference in background did make a difference. This is because the bourgeoisie of this period were heavily influenced by the progressive and radical literature and pamphlets of their time. The main parties in English politics of this period were between the Liberal party (which was a fusion of old Whigs and new radicals) and the Tori/Conservative party which was aligned with nobility. One of their main disagreements was whether the mass populace should be "advanced" through welfare or whether they should be left to their traditional roles and rungs in society. Many bourgeoisie who had gained their wealth through the early industrial period joined the Whigs and they left a tradition which brought many of the next generation into the Liberal party. This of course aligned with their own interests. A healthy and educated workforce was critical to their ambitions. Though I do think in general they were motivated by a certain amount of ideological good will. The Tori and Conservative parties in England did not just oppose state welfare. They often opposed industrialization as it was the foundation of their opponents' power and it creates potential for shifts in the roles of individuals in society. Interestingly this creates a persistent confusion to this day wherein Americans don't understand why the "conservative" party in England is not 1:1 a party for business as it is in America. As they have a historical interest in opposing some development and supporting conservation.

cs137 4y ago

I'm skeptical, correlation not being causation and all that, but nevertheless I think there's an optimistic message here. The social structure of the bourgeoisie is, in fact, fragile, and that can be used to our benefit. We don't have to use guillotines if we can, with much less violence (ideally, none at all), destroy the upper class's ability to function as a class. It's not that I care either way for their lives on an individual level; but, as a student of history, I recognize the horrible downstream costs of even justified applications of violence. This is doubly true in the US, where it's the biggest assholes (the far right, many of whom openly fantasize about a bloody civil war) who are most prepared to go that way. It will not take a whole lot to destroy the elite's ability to function as an elite, and once that is done, they are nothing but a deservingly disliked tiny minority that have lost the support on which they rely (both individually and collectively) in order to function. In practice, the efforts will probably not be entirely nonviolent (they will certainly be unlawful, and one must be prepared to return fire when fired upon) but the bloodshed can be kept to an absolute minimum so long as focus is kept where it belongs.

deleted 4y ago
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yieldcrv 4y ago
the thing you're missing is that Americans want elite private networks. so there will always be universities, private clubs, and consolidation of media organizations that function solely due to their network of prior members and influence. so even if the .01% are more effectively demonized, a surrogate of why they have ability to function as a class will persist. unless you have a proposal for that too, it pretty much has nothing to do with "bloodshed or not"
samatman 4y ago
You didn't stop being bourgeois when you embraced communism, buddy.
FredPret 4y ago
You’re advocating class warfare because you’ve decided a particular class should not exist. Very generously you also decree that this should be done with a minimum of bloodshed. How utterly cringeworthy.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

My current understanding from reading books like The Millionaire Next Door is that great wealth is currently lost in three generations. I was wondering if this old tradition in Britain used to escape that trend?

lampshades 4y ago
I’m watching this play out with my sister-in-law right now. Her grandfather made a ton of money, her mom never worked but had enough to live a good life off of inheritance, and my wife and her sister have just inherited the remains (only a million or so left for each of them). I’m wonder how long it takes for my SIL to spend it all because I’ve read so many articles mentioning how wealth disappears over generations trying to prepare for this moment with my wife. Yet to be seen, but spending has already commenced. Thankfully I think I’ve drilled into my wife’s head the seriousness of psychologically acclimating to having a large sum of money dumped in her lap and to not spend any of it.
- thirtyfivecent 4y ago
  You're in danger of being divorced soon
samizdis 4y ago
There's an interesting and well-researched book about wealth, especially hereditary and linked to land holdings in England, that addresses the question: Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole. There's a Guardian review from 2019 [1] that covers the gist of the subject. Here's a sample paragraph: When once asked how young entrepreneurs might succeed in Britain, the late Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor (owner of 131,000 acres, including much of London’s Belgravia and central Liverpool), observed, drily, that they should “make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. Though Shrubsole estimates that the recent sell-off of ancestral lands to the “new money” of hedge-funders and oligarchs accounts for perhaps 17% of the total in England, 30% rests in the hands of the feudal Norman “cousinhood”, whose offspring have until recently preserved their birthright with a Downton-esque doggedness. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-england-guy-shrubsole-review-land-ownership https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-engla...

rmbyrro 4y ago

While I found the historic nuggets worth the read, the article stretches too much to conclude that it resulted in expansion of access to education. There isn't a single bit of effort to demonstrate the connection factually. Just pure, imaginative speculation. I'm not contesting. Don't have the evidence to support nor deny the allegation.

ricardobayes 4y ago

The real question is, why is every single article of this site posted here.

dan-robertson 4y ago

The article seems a bit unbelievable to me but on the other hand the First World War had an absolutely massive effect on the British aristocracy so maybe it shouldn’t be totally implausible. I don’t know how you blame the lack of the season rather than other changes at the time though.

jasonkester 4y ago

Reading this and the discussion below, it occurs to me that I don’t actually know what a “peer” is. I had assumed it had something to do with being in parliament, but the clearly that’s mistaken, since it doesn’t flow with the article or comments. Does anybody have a concise summary of all this stuff that even an American can understand?

floren 4y ago
TheCoelacanth 4y ago
"Peer" means that they hold a position in the archaic fancy-hats club that sometimes gets referred to as "nobility", except for baronets who are too low to be peers.
- Cederfjard 4y ago
  What jasonkester might have been thinking of is that peers are eligible to sit in the House of Lords.
  - Taniwha 4y ago
    however while the House of Lords is an analogous to the US Senate it's NOT a co-equal house with the House of Commons
andrewem 4y ago
Peers are people who hold titles from this set of descending order of importance - Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, and Baron (and feminine equivalents). These tended to be hereditary, so that a person who the king or queen gave a title like Duke of Marlborough got to pass it down to a descendant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingd... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Marlborough_(title) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Marlborough_(title)
komadori 4y ago

dash2 4y ago

Here's a link to a (much) earlier version of the actual paper: http://pseweb.eu/ydepot/semin/texte1314/GON2014ASS.pdf http://pseweb.eu/ydepot/semin/texte1314/GON2014ASS.pdf Offtopic, kind of sad that "publication" now means the opposite of publication, i.e. concealing something from the public behind a paywall.

somedudetbh 4y ago

If you're interested in answering the question "How, from their peak at around 1870, did this insanely wealthy and powerful group come to lose so much of their wealth and power over the next fifty years", I recommend _The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy_ by David Cannadine. Personally, I find the book's explanation more compelling than the "the London Season was cancelled for three years so rich people stopped marrying each other" explanation.

SoftTalker 4y ago
Haven't read the book -- I assume WWI had a lot to do with it?
- somedudetbh 4y ago
  WWI is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book. I read this book a long time ago so I'm probably remembering a lot of it wrong, but basically, by WWI, the decline already quite advanced, enough to be a cliche: the Gilded Age mansions and museums of New York were already filled up with art and artifacts bought off of broke British aristocrats. The causes are complex, and interesting. One of the big challenges for the British aristocracy was that American farming started to destroy the economics of traditional agriculture-oriented landholding in the UK in the late 19th century. So, the 'bargain' the British aristocracy had sort of explicitly or implicitly made over the centuries with the rest of the British population was that the aristocracy were, you know, the nobles. The knights. We call them 'armigerous' families because the have a _coat of arms_. The British aristocracy viewed WWI as an opportunity to be like, "Ok, THIS is our time to shine, this is what we've been playing rugby at Rugby for all these years..." The sons of the British aristocracy signed up eagerly, and were put into leadership positions. In the early part of the war, they were still using tactics oriented around personal bravery and charge-leading, so while WWI was horrific for all of Europe with (IIRC) ~10% of the of-age men being killed in the war, the impact on the aristocracy was much worse, with some estimates being around 30% of the young men of the aristocracy dying in the war. There were far-reaching restructurings of society after WWI, but the aristocracy couldn't come back from the combined loss of a generation of a men, and failure to achieve their gambit: they basically bet it all on "we'll show you, we'll lead the nation through this war" and the public perception was that they completely failed. So it's not so much that WWI did it, as it was basically done, and WWI was a last gasp. Like I said though I read this book in...I wanna say 2006? It's been a while.

personjerry 4y ago

In theory, how would a commoner marry into aristocracy? Asking for a friend.

wmf 4y ago
TrackerFF 4y ago
They would enlist, go to war, and assume the identity of a fallen noble officer.
- euroderf 4y ago
  And thus the inspiration for the backstory in Mad Men ?

UIUC_06 4y ago

> she was much less likely to become the kind of terrifying matriarch so familiar to readers of PG Wodehouse My favorite line.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

This is something that contributes to a feeling that the period from after the Civil War until the mid century as a more prolific period of technological and social progress than the nascent neoliberal period. It's one thing to give blacks the vote; it's another when centuries class distinctions are meaningfully eroded through the force of technological and social progress outright. Onward and upward.

kwatsonafter 4y ago
restated: Indoor plumbing and, "not slavery" were bigger deals than TV, the Internet, and Nike Vapor Max will ever be.

citizenpaul 4y ago

My take is that even 100-200 years ago there was really not much moving up oppertunity outside the monarchy. The result was a rather cruel treatment to those lower in the power stucture. Those lower stayed anyway in hopes if moving up. Now days a person low in the monarchy has better results by defecting while leveraaging their position to some gov or corporate instance. They no longer must endure a less than status with empty hope of falling up luck.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

I love these little nuggets of history, but as any glance at any alternative history (video) essay tells you, there is never just one causal link and usually dozens of factors. The 1860s were probably the high water mark for British power in the world, but as for weird things that chnaged all that try this one: - Frederick Tudor created the ice industry (think what the hero from Frozen did), allowing storage of buffalo and cattle beef in trains and ice houses in chicago - which travelled by boat through the great lakes and over the recently dug Eerie canal and out New York and across the Atlantic to cause world wide economic depression as agricultural societies collapsed due to the competition - which meant traditional MPs and rural power was upended - and new industrialists coukd afford to pay their politicians while the landed gentry found there was a massive rural depression There are so many fascinating threads through history.

turdit 4y ago
cafard 4y ago
The rural economy had its troubles long before the 1860s: look at the history of the Corn Laws. And did Chicago beef really travel by the Erie Canal or by railroad?
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Beef travelled by both - the railway cars were also refrigerated (I believe the last wooden style ice cars were decommissioned post WWII!) But transport by water is roughly two orders of magnitude cheaper than (pre railway) land transport - see also acoup.blog on Land Trains and game of thrones for a interesting segue.

unity1001 4y ago

This shows how an aristocratic society that is based on actual class distinction still persists in England. English always say that, but as a foreigner, you dont get it until you read actual studies that solidly demonstrate it like this. England is the only country that has an upper house consisting of appointed, hereditary members with lifetime appointments, consisting of aristocrats, the rich and even theocrats.