“The girls’ mothers are coming over to London in order to effectively sell their girls into the aristocracy,” Katherine Jakeways, the series’s creator, said in a video interview from her London home. “And the aristocracy are welcoming them with open arms because they’ve got roofs to mend.”
Added Beth Willis, an executive producer, from her home in Scotland: “How lonely that would be for so many of them. In America they might speak up a bit more at the dining table. They sometimes had their own money. And to come over to England and find these freezing cold houses with roofs literally falling in and being treated like a cash point must have just been awful.”
Here, too, there is historical precedent. In one example, the socialite Consuelo Vanderbilt, of the shipping-and-railroad Vanderbilt family, married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, becoming perhaps the best known of what were called the “dollar princesses.”
“Some of these marriages were arranged and didn’t end happily, but others did end happily,” said Hannah Greig, a historical consultant for “The Buccaneers.” “Sometimes the origins of the marriage were forgotten, and it became a love story. History offers lots of examples that you can draw on, for all of the different experiences that we see in ‘The Buccaneers.’”
Both series include characters representative of people who existed in Gilded Age society, even if they were under-acknowledged at the time. In “The Buccaneers,” Mabel (Josie Totah) is torn between a marriage of convenience, to a man, and a romance of passion, with her friend Conchita’s new sister-in-law (Mia Threapleton). In “The Gilded Age,” the old-money Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) carries on a passionate affair with John Adams, a scion of the presidential dynasty, all the while plotting his own marriage of convenience (and wealth) with the Russells’ debutante daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga). (In a refreshing twist, the most avid gold diggers in both series are men.)