We all are familiar with the old saying ‘all that glitters is not gold’, and since I’m a student of the Gilded Age, it’s a phrase that has special significance to me—and it gave this website its name.

​You see, it was Mark Twain (photo) who coined the phrase ‘Gilded Age’ in his 1873 book, The Gilded Age—A Tale of Today. These days—after a hundred years of movies and television depicting grand balls in Newport and lives of the vastly wealthy—we tend to confuse ‘gilded age’ with ‘golden age’. That’s not what Twain meant by his unforgettable phrase, though.

He did not mean it as a compliment.

​‘Gilding’ is a process by which a minutely thin layer of real gold is overlaid atop some much more common base material, usually plaster, cheap metal, or wood. If you scratch away the gilding with a fingernail, you quickly see that all that glitters is most definitely not gold. But what is underneath is the structure that makes that little bit of gold possible.

​So when I first got interested in the Gilded Age, I found myself unmoved by the stories of Morgans and Vanderbilts, Astors, and Jeromes. Everything I read and watched seemed like so much celebrity worship, so I set out to tell extraordinary stories about ordinary people—and give regular folk a much-deserved moment of recognition.

I began to ask myself: How did real people in the Gilded Age think? How did they live their lives? What were their hopes and dreams, loves and losses, successes and failure? As I dug deeper, I found these people to be not only far more interesting than the one-tenth-of-one-percent, but also more instructive.

​In this curated collection of content, no matter what the topic, I promise you that you won’t find the superficial, the glittering surface that already attracts so much attention. I promise instead that you and I will scratch away the gilding to reveal what is real—the structure of history and language and nature . . . and of humanity itself.

I’m delighted that you’ve read this far, and welcome to Robert Brighton’s All That Glitters!