ABSTRACT
Newland Archer dined one evening in the 1870s with his mother, his sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, and the authority on New York’s families, the old bachelor Sillerton Jackson. The news about the imminent financial collapse of a prominent banker had been the topic of conversations for weeks now. The participants in the “pyramid” of the New York elite always felt the banker, Julius Beaufort, to be “common.” Arriving from England with letters of recommendation in his hand (but little money in his purse), the uneducated Beaufort had “speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents mysterious.” 1
