Read ‘The Gilded Age’ Season 3 Finale Script “My Mind is Made Up”

When faced with the challenge, both Sonja Warfield and I were glad to take it up, and explain our purpose in 308. In many ways, in fact, Episode 308 encapsulated our original reasons for writing The Gilded Age.

It is my belief that the period between the Civil War and the First World War, not much less than half a century, marked the dawn of modern America. Of course the favored year for America’s beginnings is 1776, but Washington and Jefferson and the rest were very steeped in the values of old Europe. Their belief in lineage and tradition was more in keeping with the Royal courts of London or Paris or Vienna. Few of those excellent founding fathers understood that America was not only a new country but that it would find new ways to live life, and build a new Society, formed along different and new lines. 

Most of all, I wanted the show to be American, in its look and feel, to demonstrate the dawning of the American way of life. Then I read Black Gotham by Carla Peterson and I realized how I could shape it. The book told of Miss Peterson’s search for her own ancestry and detailed her discovery of the prosperous, Black bourgeoisie, based largely in Brooklyn, that had played a principal role in the New York of the late nineteenth century. 

In Europe, most of the Black community had arrived a hundred years later, after the Second World War, when there was a great need for skills and industry to rebuild the battered cities, but in America, where slavery had unfortunately been adopted by the early settlers, the need to rebuild and rethink their world came much earlier, hence the development of Black society by the 1870s and 80s. Happily, Sonja Warfield has pulled from her own family history to add details to characters and create authentic plot lines.

So, when it came to Episode 308, the end of the third series, from the start we knew we were heading for the duelling balls, Black and White, with which to finish the episode and the series. I think we both wanted to show that American Black society was far in advance of anything we could dramatise in the Europe of the same period. 

I worried at first that the rival presentation of the two, over-lapping balls, might seem confused but Sonja was more courageous than I, and I certainly underestimated our excellent director, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, who made the parrellel point both vivid and clear. Nor are either of us immune to the emotional demands that such a story makes. It will not surprise many that, when we watched the rushes of William proposing to Peggy, we both felt our eyes fill in a way that I blush to reveal.

The episode also gave us an opportunity to talk about the flexibility of American society, in contrast to Europe, with Enid Winterton’s rise and Jack Trotter’s success with his clock, and I hope we have conveyed some of the excitement of America and the way it offered whatever future you were prepared to fight for.  In this, it really was unique in the Western World. 

Of course America was not free of all the faults of the nineteenth century. Peggy has to fight to be taken seriously as a writer, being a Black woman, and Oscar van Rhijn must draw a curtain over his true sexual identity if he wants to get on, but even so, compared to the rest of the planet, America offered opportunities to the talented newcomer who was not afraid of hard work, that no other country could hope to equal. 

That, I suppose, is what we wanted to illustrate and bring to the public’s notice in a way that would attract their sympathy. Obviously, we needed a first class cast and crew to make any of this happen, and, by some miracle, we attracted the best there is. You, more than I will know whether or not we have been successful in our efforts.

Julian Fellowes