On the ninth of September, 1884, in Troy, New York, Victoria Pertinax Morosini, the 25-year-old daughter of one of New York City’s richest immigrant financiers, eloped with her father’s coachman, Ernest Schilling. Her father, Giovanni Morosini, a business partner of Jay Gould who had risen from an immigrant factory boy to immense wealth, reacted with a fury that became front-page news across the country. He hired Pinkerton detectives to track the couple, filed a theft charge against his daughter for taking her own jewelry, disinherited her, and gave reporters a quotation that defined the era’s scandal: he called Schilling “a dirty stableman who washed his clothes in a horse trough,” saying his daughter had “disgraced us all. ”
Victoria was not alone in making such a choice.
Historian Caroli Climchuk has documented at least 70 reported cases between 1860 and 1910 of American heiresses who abandoned their inheritances to marry coachmen, riding masters, footmen, or family secretaries. Climchuk believes the true figure was significantly higher because wealthy families were skilled at keeping such stories out of the papers. The phenomenon was widely mocked in cartoons and parlor jokes, yet the mockery came from the same class whose daughters spent daily hours alone with the very men depicted as dangers. The story of Nancy Carnegie illustrates how the system could fail.
In the spring of 1904, Nancy, the youngest daughter of Thomas and Lucy Carnegie, secretly married her Irish-born riding master, James Heaver, in a Catholic ceremony in New York. The marriage was concealed for more than a year until her uncle, Andrew Carnegie, announced it to the wire services in June 1905. Lucy Carnegie, who had employed Heaver and refused to attend the wedding, was furious and refused to receive the couple. But Andrew publicly defended the marriage, declaring that Nancy had done better marrying a sober, moral man without wealth than most of his peers’ daughters had done by marrying “a worthless duke,” a pointed attack on the dollar princess trade that sold American heiresses into European aristocracy.
The family’s fortune was tied up in a nine-child trust Lucy had built to protect Cumberland Island, and it could not be used to cut Nancy out without dismantling the whole structure. The uncle’s endorsement removed the social pressure, and Nancy kept her share of the fortune, though she lost her mother’s welcome. The case of Frances Ellen Work shows the opposite outcome. Fanny, the daughter of Wall Street millionaire Frank Work, had in 1880 married an Anglo-Irish gentleman, James Boothby Burke Roche, who later became the third Baron Fermoy.
The marriage ended in divorce in 1891 after Fanny filed on grounds of desertion. In 1905, at age 47, she married a Hungarian-born riding master named Aurel Batonyi without telling her father, who learned of it from the newspapers. Frank Work, who had never approved of the first marriage and had long controlled Fanny’s allowance, was enraged. He told a reporter that his daughter “was nothing more to him” and added a thirteenth codicil to his will cutting her out completely.
He then pressured Fanny to divorce Batonyi by threatening to keep her disinherited if she stayed married, and she filed for divorce in 1907, which was granted in 1909. Frank Work died in 1911, and his will restored Fanny to the estate, but only on strict terms: her yearly allowance was capped at $80,000, a substantial sum that nonetheless left her unable to touch the principal or control the fortune for the rest of her life. She lived on that allowance for 36 years, dying in 1947 at age 89. Her twin grandsons eventually inherited the Fermoy barony, and through later generations the family line descended to Diana, Princess of Wales, and her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
The Ella Ty case involved a different kind of enforcement. In the late 1890s or very early 1900s, Ella Ty, the daughter of a respectable Baptist household in Williamsbridge, Westchester County, married the family’s Black coachman, James Randolph, in a small private ceremony. When the New York Herald reported the marriage, Ella told a reporter on the record that she was “the happiest woman in Westchester County,” that her husband loved her and she loved him, and that it was “nobody’s business but our own. ” She announced that the couple would walk up the main aisle of the Baptist church the following Sunday and take their places in the Ty family pew.
The community responded with threats of violence, including an unnamed youth quoted saying that men would give Randolph a coat of tar and feathers if he appeared. Ella’s own brother threatened her life if she persisted in the marriage. The couple left Williamsbridge for New York City, where the record suggests they lived quietly, though details of their later years are largely lost. Victoria Morosini’s life after her elopement was the most public.
After a period at a convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, she and Schilling reunited in New York City, and she began a career on the Bowery vaudeville stage, performing with a mandolin while Schilling, who worked as a Sixth Avenue streetcar conductor for $2 a day, walked her onto the stage. The act was built around her real biography, with audiences coming to see the millionaire’s daughter who had fallen so far. A New York Herald reporter who caught her years into her career described her as having grown stouter, noted her husband’s modest wage, and observed that her hair remained “brilliant and without a trace of age or grief.
” She was called an enigma who would remain so unless she chose to surrender her secret. She never did. She stayed married to Schilling for the rest of her life, dying in 1935 at about age 76 or 77. The punishments families used varied, including disinheritance, confinement in convents, private commitment to asylums, and the use of Pinkerton detectives.
But every woman in the documented cases knew the cost before she married. Each of the four women followed here made the choice with her eyes open: Nancy lost her mother’s welcome but kept her fortune; Fanny lost control of her inheritance and lived in a financial cage; Ella lost her family, her church, and her town; and Victoria lost everything her father’s fortune could offer, exchanging a $200-a-month allowance for a household economy based on her husband’s $2-a-day wage. The fortunes that punished them did not necessarily survive better than the marriages they condemned. The Morosini fortune scattered after Giovanni’s death in 1908.
The Work fortune eventually passed into the British aristocracy, including the royal family, despite Frank Work’s efforts to keep it in American hands. The Carnegie trust preserved Cumberland Island for the family for decades, with the Dungeness mansion burning in 1959. The last word belongs to Ella Ty, the only one of the four who sat down with a reporter to explain the trade she had made.
Asked whether she understood what her marriage would cost her, she said she was the happiest woman in Westchester County, and that it was nobody’s business but her own.