Nellie and Charlie: A Family Memoir of the Gilded Age

When Nellie Smith from Oakland, California met Charlie Tower, a young millionaire from Philadelphia on a cruise to Alaska in l887, it was love at first sight. They soon married and moved to Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. In 1897, President McKinley appointed Charlie, now called Charlemagne, Minister to Austria-Hungary. The Towers moved with their five small children to a palace in Vienna where Mark Twain became a regular visitor. Charlemagne was named Ambassador to Russia in 1899. He and Nellie witnessed the sumptuous grandeur of the Court of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg. Upon the Towers' departure from Russia in 1902, they were accorded the singular honor of visiting the royal family at their vacation home in the Crimea. During Charlemagne's six years as American Ambassador to Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II considered him a friend and thought Nellie the most brilliant hostess on the international scene. Returning home to Philadelphia, family scandal and personal tragedy awaited as Nellie and Charlemagne saw the Europe they had known destroyed by war. Through diaries, letters and contemporary accounts, Nellie and Charlie gives a personal history of an American family living on two continents at the turn of the century.

Author: Helen Tower Brunet
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 02/22/2005
Pages: 228
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.52d
ISBN: 9780595343843

About the Author
Brunet, Helen Tower: -

The author, Helen Tower Brunet, is Nellie's and Charlie's lastborn grandchild. Raised in the Tower Homestead in Waterville, New York, she discovered Nellie's shipboard diary in an attic trunk. A freelance journalist, she lives in Mendham, New Jersey, where she is writing another book on the Tower family.

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