Plot
The novel focuses on Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler who has recently returned to the USA after more than 30 years in Europe, where he married into minor Napoleonic nobility; he is accompanied by his beautiful young widowed daughter Emma, the Princesse d'Agrigente, who immediately becomes the darling of New York high society. Despite his fame and affluent image, Schuyler finds work as a journalist because his wealth has been destroyed by the 1873 monetary crisis and his daughter's late husband has left her penniless. Schuyler also supports the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, Governor of New York, because he hopes to secure himself a diplomatic position with the incoming administration that will enable him to return to Europe.
The early chapters detail the Schuylers' introduction into New York society and the engagement between Emma and John Day Apgar, a wealthy but rather dull young lawyer and scion of a leading New York family. The later chapters chronicle Schuyler's sojourn in Washington, DC and Emma's growing friendship with the wealthy Denise Sanford and her boorish husband William. Emma and Denise become close friends but after Denise dies in childbirth Emma breaks off her engagement to Apgar and marries Sanford instead.
The political backdrop to the story is the 1876 U.S. presidential election, a close run contest between Tilden and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden won the popular vote, but there was a dispute over the results in four states, including Florida. In Florida, the Republican leaders of the State initially reported a victory for Tilden, before deciding that in fact Hayes had won. Vidal builds up to this historic crisis through the activities of a mixed cast of historical and fictional characters, some of the latter having previously appeared in Burr, or having descended from characters in that novel.
Read more about this topic: 1876 (novel)
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“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
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And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
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