Newport, known as the Queen of Resorts, or as Elizabeth Drexel Lehr stated ironically in her memoirs: “the very Holy and Holies, the playground of the great ones of the earth from which all intruders were ruthlessly excluded,” was transformed each summer for the sole and very conspicuous consumption of New York’s most exclusive society. Entree into this tiny kingdom by the sea was highly sought after, and nothing–not wealth, lavish entertainments, nor even making a splash in the highest European circles could crack this nut–as the grand doyenne of Chicago society, Mrs Potter Palmer, soon discovered when she made her first foray into the city. But Mrs Palmer was made of sterner stuff and she kept battering the gates of social recognition until the Mrs Astor had to acknowledge her Midwest counterpart. Many others, however, were not so determined nor so successful in their attempts to enter Newport society, and defeated and with lightened pockets, they were apt to sail away to more congenial climes, perhaps even Narragansett Pier, a smart Rhode Island city, though not as smart as Newport, of course.

Prior to the early 1880s, Newport was a sleepy town whose charm lay largely in its agreeable climate and quaint Georgian air. Prior to the Civil War, Southerners journeyed north to Newport to escape the sweltering heat of their summers and did not disturb the genial air blanketing the city. A small but recognizable number of wealthy elites from other cities began to arrive in Newport, also attracted by the weather, and built the first mansions–but these were simple and modest, as native Newporters frowned on ostentatious display. Mrs August Belmont, a member of the Four Hundred, attempted to recreate the social milleu of New York but it wasn’t until Mrs. Astor, at the urging of Ward MacAllister, summered there that Newport officially arrived for the Four Hundred. The Astors purchased Beechwood in 1881 and promptly spent $2 million renovating it to their standards. Following in their steps was Alva Vanderbilt who in 1888 was given carte blanche to design and build a Newport estate by her husband as a birthday present. She hired Richard Morris Hunt and mischievously erected a tall wall around the construction site to keep away prying eyes. Marble House cost $11 million to build and furnish and Alva threw a ball to celebrate the completion of her “cottage” in 1892.

Just as the Vanderbilt mansions on upper Fifth Avenue sparked a rush to build magnificent mansions to replace the declasse brownstones of yesteryear, Alva’s Newport cottage was a gauntlet thrown to others, including her own brother-in-law, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to build a mansion even greater than Marble House. This was The Breakers. The ground was broken in 1893 and two years and seven million dollars later, Cornelius threw open the doors to this seventy room mansion to the awe of everyone. The Breakers stood on 13 acres of land at Ochre Point and faced the ocean, whose spray and crashing surf provided a dramatic backdrop to this impressive “cottage.” Joining Beechwood, Marble House, and The Breakers were other magnificent cottages such as Chateau-sur-Mer, The Elms, Rosecliff, Belcourt Caste, Ochre Court and Rough Point. These mansions and the accompanying wealth surrounding them completely changed the tone of Newport. Now, the city was all about the very, very rich.

Though the only hotels in Newport were for the lodging of salesmen from Tiffany, Mumms and other purveyors of luxury items, it was quite easy to “crash” the city, and the year-round inhabitants kept the Four Hundred from total exclusivity. To mitigate unwanted persons from mingling with them, a number of financial hurdles were erected, such the rather steep fee of keeping up appearances. For example, one could buy membership to the Newport Casino for $500, but keeping up appearances afterward was a pill for it was not unknown for an average “cottager” to spend $25,000-$40,000 on staff and maintenance of their residence alone. Women were expected to have on hand 80-90 new dresses, as no one ever wore a dress twice, and an entertaining budget of at least $150,000! And gentlemen weren’t exempt for Newport was one of the principle yachting centers in America, as the America’s Cup sailed annually in the vicinity, and the costs of buying and outfitting a yacht could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, minus the cost of keeping the boat in tip-top shape.

Stamina was also a requirement for the schedule was grueling and tightly regulated:

8-9 am: Breakfast. Change into riding habit
9-10 am: Morning ride. Change into day dress and drive in a phaeton behind a matched pair to the Casino, or to shop.
11-noon: Swimming at Bailey’s Beach.

According to Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, “Only the elite could bathe at Bailey’s Beach. It was Newport’s most exclusive club. The watchman in his gold-laced uniform protected its sanctity from all interlopers. He knew every carriage on sight, fixed newcomers with an eagle eye, swooped down upon them and demanded their names. Unless they were accompanied by one of the members, or bore an introduction from an unimpeachable hostess, no power on earth could gain them admission. If they wanted to bathe, they could only go to Easton’s Beach—’The Common Beach’ as the habitues were wont to call it. There they would have the indignity of sharing the sea with the Newport townspeople, referred to by Harry Lehr [her husband], who was fond of quoting the sayings of Louis XIV, as ‘Our Footstools.’”

Noon-2 pm: Luncheon on yacht or picnic on a local farm
2-3 pm: Drive to Polo Field to watch a polo match from carriage
3-5 pm: Promenade in carriage down Bellevue Avenue. Cards are left.
5-8 pm: Tea on lawn or terrace. Change for dinner
8-10 pm: Dinner on yacht, or supper before the weekly Casino dance, to which tickets are sold for $1 to spectators
10 pm-early morning: Dances, cultural offerings, theme balls with second supper at midnight and breakfast as dawn breaks over Sakonnet Point

With such tightly-restrained gaiety, it’s a given someone would break out to lessen the monotony, and for the staid Newport schedule, Harry Lehr and his Triumvirate, of whom Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish was his prime cohort, were at their service. Horseback dinners and Little Egypt scandals aside, it was in Newport that many of the Four Hundred’s grossest indulgences were, well, indulged in. Mamie Fish treated Gilded Age society as a plaything, establishing her modus operandi early on by declaring “I’m so tired of being hypocritically polite,” and was known for kicking her guests out of her home when she grew tired of them (accordingly, her invitations were highly sought after). With Harry Lehr at her side, the two terrorized Newport society, throwing dogs dinners, servant suppers and monkey fetes. So notorious were their antics, the more conservative members snubbed them–but that didn’t stop Mamie or Harry one bit. A particular antic that survives in the annals of history involves Grand Duke Boris of Russia who came to America at the invitation of Mary Goelet. Mamie announced a ball at Crossways in honor of the Grand Duke and purposely excluded a favorite of Mrs Goelet’s from the guest list. Mary retaliated by letting it be known none of her friends would attend. Mamie refused to be checkmated and turned to Harry for advice. When guests arrived at the Fish residence they were informed that Mamie’s guest of honor was Tsar Nicholas II! The eager guests bowed low when the doors were thrown open to announce the entrance of His Imperial Majesty–Harry Lehr dressed as a Tsar! Everyone had a great laugh over this, including the Grand Duke who met Harry the next day to crown him King Lehr.

When the summer ended so did the season, though after the turn of the century a few socialites stayed on into the early fall, and the Four Hundred moved on to its next social enclave. This jewel in the crown of New York society began its slow descent by the outbreak of WWI and though it retained prominence as the social resort, the new generation of idle rich found the Gilded Age mansions rather cumbersome and outmoded. Thankfully many of these outstanding mansions remain standing and available for tours to retain an appreciation for American social and architectural history.

Further Reading:
A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs Astor in Gilded Age New York by Greg King
Newport Villas: The Revival Styles 1885-1935 by Michael C. Kathrens
Wicked Newport: Sordid Stories from the City by the Sea by Larry Stanford and J. Bailey
The Golden Summers: An Ancient History of Newport by Richard O’Connor
The ultra-fashionable peerage of America by Charles Wilbur de Lyon Nicholls
This Fabulous Century: 1900-1910 by The Editors of Time Life
To Marry An English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace
Baedeker’s United States, 1909 by Karl Baedeker
Class and Leisure at America’s First Resort
The Newport Postcard Museum

Hairstyles of this period shifted with the shifting silhouette in dress and also reflected, as the era progressed, the growing freedom and emphasis on ease in hairdressing that marked a more mobile society. The agricultural depression of the 1880s which dampened spirits, expressed itself in the somber, less frivolous clothing of the decade. This was the height of the bustle era, but somehow they didn’t seem as jaunty or frivolous as they appeared in the 1870s. This bustle was formidable and wowing in its height and width, as though ladies were adamant against being blindsided from behind. Accordingly, men’s clothing became unerringly correct and, despite the aberration that was the Aesthetic movement, dark colors, close-tailored and stout fabrics were the norm. To accompany this fashionable armor, ladies’ hair was worn close to the head and rolled tightly at the crown, with small curls at the nape of the neck and light bangs (or “fringes” as they were called in England). Hardly any man of this period were clean-shaven and their hair was clipped short and shaggy.

The early 1890s saw a slight loosening of the hair, and as this decade progressed, ladies’ hair softened and ballooned nearly as drastically as their sleeves! Fringes remained, though with the slight pompadour effect, the height required need as much hair as a woman had on her head–and then some. Ever since the simple coiffures of the first two decades of the 19th century disappeared, ads filled newspapers selling all manners of fake hair. Ladies brushed their hair daily not only for cleanliness but to collect enough hair in the bristles to make their own “rats” and “pads” to bulk up their thin locks. The sale of hair became big business (hence the scene in Little Women) and to save even more time, hair companies created styled hairpieces–braided coils, ponytails, even whole wigs! No longer was it shameful for a woman to lack her own head of plentiful, glossy hair: she could buy it.

The 1900s were apogee of false hair. The full-blown pompadour look was in fashion, mostly inspired by Charles Dana Gibson’s iconic Gibson Girl. The sketches showed a beautiful woman with high and full up-do, and women rushed to emulate this with any manner of rats, pads and hair pieces. The Gibson Man–square-jawed, broad-shouldered, athletic, and more important, clean-shaven–inspired a new generation of young men as well. Beards had fallen out of favor and though mustaches retained their supremacy (particularly in the military, where officers were required to sport one), a lack of facial hair signified youthfulness and vigor, which matched the cavalier and derring-do spirit of the age. The latter part of the first century saw a widening of hats and a widening of hair to carry the wide-brimmed “Merry Widow”. However, the hair lost a bit of its height and was generally parted on the side or in the middle, and was fluffed low and wide towards the ears and nape.

The 1910s saw a near abandonment of facial hair for young men. Their hair was now loose and tousled, no longer trapped by the macassar oil and brilliantine pomade of former years. For ladies, the slimming silhouettes needed slimmer hair, but rather than a retread of the 1880s, their hair was dressed so that it appeared ear-length and curled–almost bob-like beneath their close-fitting hats. In fact, some women even went so far as to bob their hair, mostly inspired by Irene Castle who chopped her locks in 1914 before a scheduled surgery (she didn’t want to deal with caring for long hair during her convalescence). This inspired a craze for the “Castle Bob” and when Irene added a necklace around her head, the “Castle band” took off as well. The craze for bobs during the war years actually preceded the Golden or Roaring Twenties, and ironically (or not), ladies’ hair of the immediate post-war years made an attempt to recapture the twilight of the Edwardian era with a short-lived favoring of a slight pompadour. But the tide of fashion is unstoppable in progress, and the new generation threw themselves headlong into embracing hairstyles the older considered horrid and masculine, altogether forgetting the horror that met their generation’s shift in coiffure.

Further Reading:
Encyclopedia of Hair by Victoria Sherrow
One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair‎ by Allan Peterkin
The History of Hair: Fashion and Fantasy Down the Ages‎ by Robin Bryer
1911 Hairstyles from the Girls’ Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine

Much as today, the publishing industry of the Edwardian era wrestled with such familiar issues as distribution, declining interest in reading, literary fiction versus “trash” for the masses, competition for bookstores from cheap editions & used book sales, and the eternal assumption of an “us versus them” between aspiring authors and editors/literary agents of major publishing houses. Though things like iPods, television, the internet or video games were not distractions from reading, nonetheless around the turn of the century, the London correspondent of the New York Evening Post reported that the British bookseller was liable to tell a tale of woe: “The trade is not what was once, you know, sir, and what with the war and six-penny reprints, some of us are pretty well at the end of our tether,” and would then “proceed to show you a shelf after shelf of war-books which are not selling, and shelf after shelf of spring which we hoped to get rid of, but which is now so much old stock.”

At this time the industry was in a state of flux and readership was split amongst such disparate tastes as readers of popular novelists Marie Corelli, Elinor Glyn and Ouida, adventure novelists H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, and the Ruritanian genre, and readers of a more serious vein of fiction–G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, or the Webbs–though Dickens, Eliot and Thackeray remained perinneal favorites. The quantity of books published during the 1900s advanced considerably, with the number of new publications doubling between 1901 and 1913 from 6,044 in the former year to 12,379 in the latter. This trend lay in the improvement in family incomes and the ever-increasing interest in education, which accelerated with the decline in illiteracy. Aligning with this increase were the sudden growth of public libraries, whose public expenditure jumped from 286,000 pounds in 1896 to 805,000 pounds in 1911. Also, during this time, publishers made an attempt to make the classics more accessible to the reading public, and Collins’ Classics and the Everyman’s Library, each sold at modest prices in relatively durable editions, did much to extend an interest in classic English novelists and essayists.

For the aspiring novelist hoping to break into this seemingly impenetrable market, a score of books nestled on the shelves, some written by popular authors of the day and others by publishers themselves, full of advice on not only how to submit a novel but on the actual publishing process itself. The typical course to publication was detailed as following:

1. First, the aspirant should see that the typewritten copy was accurate, fastened together securely, and most importantly, clean. Their name and address, the title and description of the manuscript, and the length of the manuscript in words, should be prominent on the first page. A letter offering a view to publication and a request for return should the manuscript be rejected accompanied the manuscript in the mail.

2. When the manuscript arrived at the publishers’ offices, a clerk enters the particulars of the book into a ledger and it was shoved aside with other manuscripts to await the casual inspection of a partner or manager. The book is then taken from the pile and handed to a reader. It was their job to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat, and authors were advised to remember that “Publishing firms flourish by making profits; and profits are made out of books that sell; and it is in the business of the reader to recommend not good books merely, but good books that will sell.” Even if the reader enjoyed the book, there was a chance for rejection from the publisher if the lists were full or the reader’s remarks weren’t eye-catching enough. However, should the publisher accept the novel, to the trembling author went a contract.

3. The author was advised that under no circumstances should they bear the whole or part of the expenses of publication–that was to be born entirely by the publisher–nor should he agree to be remunerated on the half-profit system. The newly acquired author would then be remunerated in one of three ways: the publisher buys the entire copyright of the book for a lump sum down, (b) the publisher buys the copyright for a term of years, at the expiry of which it reverts to the author, and (c) the publisher may acquire the right to publish during the whole term of copyright, or for a shorter term, by agreeing to pay the author a royalty on every copy of the book sold (generally 10%, though well-established authors could revieve 25-33%). However, unlike today, this latter system did not guarantee an advance, and first-time authors were advised against insisting on an advance until they made a reputation.

4. The proofs were sent to the author, which were either in long “slips” or in page form, according to arrangement. After the proofs were returned, the next time the author saw their book was when a parcel of six free copies arrived on the day of publication. The author was advised to subscribe to a press-cutting agency for cuttings of reviews. If the first book achieved a sale of a thousand copies it was considered to have done very well, as the average circulation of first books was nearer to five hundred or less. After this first book, the author was further advised to have books published on a moderate, but regular schedule to build their reputation, stating that “even mediocre talent, when combined with fixity of purpose and regular industry, will infalliably result in a gratifying success.”

5. The literary agent was someone to aspire for, as the more successful agents were loathe to take on unknown authors who could prove unprofitable. According to advice, when the aspirant has made a name for himself and has the ability to his work on his own, then was the time to go to an agent as now the popular author–via their newly acquired agent–could demand a higher advance, more publicity and better placement in the lists. The agents’ percentage hovered around 10%, though once the author’s income exceeded two thousand a year, the agent should be willing to accept 5% on all sums over that amount.

The author with a little success would be tempted to publish their books in other countries, and while first-time authors were advised against worrying over foreign copyrights, then as today, a book that was a smash hit in England frequently fizzled in the United States, and vice versa. But in the end, the aspiring novelist turned published, had as equal a chance for success as authors today. Worries over advances, publishing profits, and so on preoccupied everyone, but thankfully, not enough to mitigate such wonderful novelists whose works have remained timeless classics in our age.

Further Reading:
Edwardian England, 1901-1914, ed by Simon Nowell-Smith
1001 Places to Sell Manuscripts: A Complete Guide for All Writers by James Knapp Reeve
Authors and Publishers: A Manual of Suggestions for Beginners in Literature by George Haven Putnam & John Bishop Putnam
Practical authorship‎ by James Knapp Reeve
The Author’s Desk Book by William Dana Orcutt