6 - The early literature of New York’s moneyed class

Summary

“Because a June thunderstorm had washed out the railroad tracks ahead, the pleasure party would not be able to reach Saratoga that evening. Fortunately, a stone's throw from the stalled train was a hotel. It looked improbably grand, but the travelers - Harry Masters; his wife, Clara; and their friend Edward Ashburner - decided to stay there for the night. They were going to be roughing it. Despite the eight columns in the hotel's portico, the bedding turned out to have bugs, and the other guests were not the sort of people Harry and Clara Masters socialized with back in the city.

Ashburner, who was from England, was still learning the customs of the American leisure class. During dinner he observed a new one. All the guests ate at a common table, and in order to shut out the diners not of “our set,” Harry and Clara spoke French. They spoke it rather freely, in fact - so freely that a man across the table began to stare. Ashburner was afraid that the staring man spoke French too and didn't like what he was hearing. But then the man ate some pound cake and cheese, together, and Ashburner knew they were safe.

“Oh, that's nothing,” said Harry, when told of Ashburner's fear and how it had been dispelled. “Did you never, when you were on the lakes, see them eat ham and molasses?”

So went the class war in mid-nineteenth-century New York. If you live in dread that the syrup will trickle over and contaminate the bacon, now you know why.

Harry, Clara, and Edward are fictional characters created by a writer named Charles Astor Bristed in 1850. Two years earlier, Bristed had inherited a Manhattan house, ninety city lots, and a country seat from his grandfather, John Jacob Astor, at his death the richest man in America.