We are treated to lashings of Disraeli, Trollope, Dickens, Ouida, H G Wells and that undeservedly forgotten figure, W H Mallock. Yes, here they come, with coats of the newest fashion, with pedigrees of the newest forging, with their moors in Scotland, with their rivers in Norway, with their game preserves in England, with some thousands of human beings calling them masters, somewhere they probably forget where. Here they come, our cotton-spinning plutocrats, bringing in luxury, and vulgarity, and damnation. As for architecture, Mordaunt Crook scotches the myth that the Gothic Revival was somehow based on new money dressed up in the trappings of antiquity. The 1st Earl of Iveagh, king of Guinness, wanted, as Mordaunt Crook remarks, the style of the enlarged Elveden Hall in Suffolk 'to be sober enough not to frighten the pheasants'.
Much fun is had with the details of nouveau taste.
The Sussex seat of the Pearsons, later Viscounts Cowdray, was adorned with a frieze allegorising the history of locomotion, culminating with an image of Lady C riding a silver bicycle from Tiffany's. The fraudster Whitaker Wright's Surrey pile, Witley Park, had an underwater billiards room. A strong streak of anti-Semitism, alas, coloured many of the comments. Surtees rechristened the Vale of Aylesbury 'Jewdea'. The 'Randlords' provide plenty of good copy.