Is The Buccaneers Based on a True Story?

Apple TV+’s “The Buccaneers” is predicated on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel of the identical identify. Its massive solid consists of Kristine Froseth, Christina Hendricks, Alisha Boe, and Mia Threapleton and traces a group of younger, rich American girls as they enterprise throughout the pond in search of high-class husbands within the 1870s, focusing on the conflict between British and American tradition and the lives of the younger girls of that period.

The present’s protagonists and their lives are completely fictional. However, their story is predicated on a actual phenomenon that occurred through the late 1800s and early 1900s, when many younger American girls, flush with new cash, traveled throughout the ocean with a purpose to discover aristocratic British males to marry. According to History, between the late nineteenth century and the Forties, many American heiresses traveled to Britain, providing their wealth to British aristocrats who possessed standing, class, and titles however who typically have been quick on funds.

Britain’s aristocracy misplaced a nice deal of cash through the Gilded Age, largely as a result of America started producing its personal grain throughout that point, damaging Britain’s earnings from the trade. Meanwhile, many American males have been rocketing to monetary success in America by way of numerous new companies, although their new-money standing typically left them with out social prominence. An answer, then, was to marry daughters of American wealth to inheritors of British class and standing.

Things did not at all times go easily for the ladies despatched over to Britain. Many of those girls grew up in luxurious however discovered British tradition and etiquette stifling and old school. Their efforts to modernize British society finally garnered them the nickname “dollar princesses.”

These “dollar princesses” wound up having a clear impression on historical past in additional methods than one. In 1874, an heiress named Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill, and the pair wound up having a son named Winston Churchill. Then, in 1880, a inventory and railway heiress named Frances Ellen Work married the longer term Baron Fermoy. Their marriage led to divorce in 1891, however greater than a century later, Work’s great-granddaughter Princess Diana married a then-prince named Charles.

Since then, the lives of those “dollar princesses” have been often chronicled on the web page and on display screen. The present “Downton Abbey” largely focuses on a fictional American heiress Cora Lady Grantham and her marriage to a British aristocrat named Lord Grantham. “The Buccaneers,” which premieres on Nov. 8, is the newest collection to element the adventures of the ladies who made the trek abroad in search of standing and who modified the tradition of the British aristocracy eternally alongside the way in which.