Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

There is no getting away from it, Edith Wharton was grand. It never occurred to her to spare expense. On her honeymoon cruise, she and her feckless husband Teddy chartered a 333-ton steam yacht with a crew of 16. When they settled down at 884 Park Avenue, they bought the house next door to accommodate their staff. The famous house she and Teddy built at Lenox, Massachusetts, The Mount — ‘a delicate French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond’, as Henry James called it — had 100 windows and 35 rooms, looked after by a dozen servants, some of whom never dared to use the front stairs. By the end of her life after she had settled in France, she had a total of 22 staff at her two establishments, the Pavillon Colombe outside Paris and her neo-gothic fortress outside Hyères in the south.

She fretted about money, as the rich do. But she never had much cause to. When her father George Frederic Jones died in 1882, he left her $600,000 in real estate. Six years later, her cousin Joshua topped this up with a legacy of $120,000. The Joneses were big in real estate and in the Chemical Bank of New York which they owned. Edith’s great-aunts shocked the family by building two huge blocks at 57th Street, which was then way uptown, almost in the country (above 40th Street, the lots were not built on but already marked out by boulders of the living rock). This, Hermione Lee tells us in her great boulder of a biography, was the origin of the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Certainly the phrase started in America and before 1914, but surely it meant then as it does now, an orthodox, even banal strategy for upward mobility, like replacing a Mondeo with a Mercedes, not audacious behaviour like building a couple of skyscrapers in the middle of nowhere.