The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture - Hardcover

Tick one of the following: money; class; status; style. No luck? Then pick up a copy of this marvellous book and find out how the other one-thirtieth used to live (for as the aptly named Sir Leo Chiozza Money put it in 1905, "more than one-third of the entire income of the United Kingdom is enjoyed by one-thirtieth of its people"). J. Mordaunt Crook has written a spellbinding account of the lives, culture and architecture of the nouveaux riches in the 19th century, all those millionaires and multi-millionaires who grew wealthy off the back of the Industrial Revolution but who lacked the real breeding of blue-blooded aristocrats. There's never been a study of this phenomenon before, but even though Crook concentrates chiefly on the houses these people built for themselves (from town houses in Mayfair to gorgeously vulgar country estates) manages also to uncover a wealth of fascinating material on their lives and attitudes in general. The dozens of illustrations of parvenu excess alone make the book worth buying, and Crook expertly pieces together the gradual shift from land to money as the index of wealth, and the myriad social changes that that entailed. --Adam Roberts

The story of the decline of the British aristocracy is relatively well documented, but this text examines the new plutocracy who challenged it, exploring where its members resided, what they spent their money on and how they lived down, or up to, their parvenu wealth.