Dexter was a little too early. The United States, although it had dumped the nobility concept, still had the English feudal concept that big landowners ruled, almost by right. Manufacturing hadn't yet displaced landowning as the way to make money.
As for the follies of the rich, we still have that. Larry Ellison has a huge, silly house in Woodside, where, through much cutting of rock, a sort of pseudo rural Japanese landscape was created, complete with fog machine. In China, where being rich is a new thing, people are still trying to figure out status symbols. The results are amusing. (http://www.gq.com/news-politics/201501/chinas-richest). There are outfits selling titles of nobility on line. (http://nobility.co.uk/).
Here in Scotland the last vestige of feudalism (fue duties payable by "owners" of some property to the feudal superiors) was only abolished in 2000 as one of the first Acts of the Scottish Parliament:
Timothy Dexter's Wikipedia article is probably my favorite page on the entire site (I keep a list of my favorite weird finds, such as "List of Sexually Active Popes").
I have shown this story to dozens of friends, and every one finds it incredibly entertaining. This man's life should be a movie, and Steve Martin should play the lead.
Here are my top 4:
1) Timothy Dexter
2) List of Sexually Active Popes
3) List of nicknames used by George W. Bush
4) Toilet paper orientation
It's just amazing what kinds of things people take the time to write about on Wikipedia. I wish I could remember some of my other favorites but my bookmarks got all messed up a while ago so I only have those 4 from memory,
This is really interesting. I'm wondering if he was just sandbagging or at some point just figured out his own unique hustle with respect to his apparent intellectual deficiency. Definitely is now on my list of 'historical figures I would have liked to get drunk with'.
As the first American eccentric, he was a hipster before it was cool.
The common wisdom is a model of the world, but must be wrong in some ways, simply because the world is far more complex than any model we could comprehend. Bed pans weren't brought to the tropics because they weren't needed, therefore their other uses were not discovered. Acting on what you think is a good idea, that nobody else does, can lead to success. (Plus Luck...)
In investing, contrarianism can work, because the market often over-reacts to bad news. By buying on bad news, you can come out ahead, especially if you also do some checking. For example, Warren Buffett bought American Express when it was involved in a fraudulent salad oil transaction. Because its business (of credit cards) was based on trust, it was thought this would be diastrous. But Buffett checked the local shopping center to see consumers still using it. Their daily habits weren't affected by the news. So he bought big, and made a(nother) fortune.
I liked the picture reproduced from his book where he provides a supply of punctuation marks for you to 'pepper and salt' the rest of the text as you wish. Witty, and it recalls the practice of printing figures at the end of books (presumably as they were printed from wood blocks rather than type and had to be printed out of sequence).
I think this chap was less illiterate than the OA supposes...
In England, that model held on until 1880 or so. (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/04/books/never-has-so-few-own...) In the US, it ended earlier. But it was still in full force in Dexter's day.
As for the follies of the rich, we still have that. Larry Ellison has a huge, silly house in Woodside, where, through much cutting of rock, a sort of pseudo rural Japanese landscape was created, complete with fog machine. In China, where being rich is a new thing, people are still trying to figure out status symbols. The results are amusing. (http://www.gq.com/news-politics/201501/chinas-richest). There are outfits selling titles of nobility on line. (http://nobility.co.uk/).