• 60 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

Gilded Age Writing Prompts

Paired prompts from the two ends of one city in the 1880s and 1890s: the mansion and the tenement.

Gilded Age Writing Prompts

Show all 60
  1. Write the 200,000 lamps of the Chicago fair from the point of view of a moth.Fact: the Chicago fair of 1893 was the first all-electric fair, with over 200,000 lamps.
  2. A stockyard worker's family saves all summer for one day at the Chicago fair of 1893; write what each wants to see and the one ride they can afford.Fact: the fair ran in Chicago from May 1 to October 30, 1893.
  3. In a company town the company owns the houses as well as the works; write a worker's kitchen in the week the wages fall and the rent does not.Fact: before the strike that began near Chicago on May 11, 1894, wages were cut 20 to 30% and rents were not.

Next step Write about electricityWrite from the first mills

All 60 prompts

A mansion and a tenement 16

  • A circus walks 21 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge; write it twice, from a tenement roof and from a carriage stuck behind them. Fact: on May 17, 1884, a parade of 21 elephants crossed the bridge, which eased doubts about its strength.
  • A delivery boy from the tenements brings flowers to a mansion's side door and is let in at the front by mistake; write his three minutes inside. Angle: what does he count? What does he touch? What does he tell his sister?
  • A mansion child has a window seat over the avenue and is told not to stare; write what she watches anyway. Angle: carriages, a delivery boy, a girl her own age carrying someone else's laundry.
  • A mansion's daughter and her governess take a wrong turn downtown; write the block she was never meant to see. Angle: keep it fair. She notices the noise first, then the children playing, then the smell of bread.
  • A seamstress sews a ball gown at home downtown, paid by the piece; write the night she finishes it. Angle: she will never see it worn. Let her try to picture the room it is going to.
  • A tenement child gets a bedroom window for the first time, and it opens onto an air shaft; write what she can see, hear and smell from it. Fact: a New York law of 1879 required every habitable room to have a window opening to plain air.
  • Downtown, a family of six eats supper at a table that is also the ironing board and the desk; write the hour before bed. Angle: pair it with the footman's table uptown. Same city, same evening, one room.
  • It is the hottest night of July; write the tenement roof where a whole building has come up to sleep. Angle: who brings a mattress, who tells stories, who watches the lit windows uptown?
  • On the hottest night of July a mansion stands shut, its family away at the shore; write the caretaker's walk through the dust sheets. Angle: all those rooms and one lamp. He opens a window he is not supposed to.
  • Uptown, a ball gown sewn in a tenement is worn once; write the evening from the point of view of the dress. First line: I was made in a room smaller than the closet I hang in now.
  • Uptown, a footman lays a table for forty in a house with more rooms than guests; write the hour before the doors open. Fact: one summer house of the age, built at Newport, Rhode Island, between 1893 and 1895, had 70 rooms.
  • Walk through a mansion from the front door to the kitchen as a new maid who keeps opening the wrong door. Angle: count the rooms with nobody in them. End in the one room that is crowded.
  • Walk through a railroad flat from the front room to the back the way a visitor has to: through everybody's bedroom. Fact: railroad flats were so called because the rooms were linked together like the cars of a train.
  • Write the city twice: from the tenth floor of its newest office building, and from a cellar workshop in its shadow. Fact: a ten-story office building finished in Chicago in 1885 is counted an early skyscraper.
  • Write the first hour of the morning in a mansion, told only in sounds from below stairs. Angle: the family hears none of it. Who has been up since five to make that so?
  • Write the first hour of the morning in a tenement, told only in sounds through the walls. Angle: a coal scuttle, a baby, a sewing machine starting up, boots on the stairs.

Arriving by steamship 14

  • A banker watches the parade for the new statue from his office window as paper streams down; write what he thinks the statue is for. Fact: the statue's completion in 1886 was marked by New York's first ticker-tape parade.
  • A boy who came over last year meets this year's ship to find his cousin; write how he explains the city on the walk from the pier. Fact: about 20 million immigrants came to the United States during the Gilded Age.
  • A family three days off the ship joins the crowd crossing the new Brooklyn Bridge on its opening day; write the view from the middle. Fact: on May 24, 1883, its first day, 150,300 people and 1,800 vehicles crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.
  • A ferry owner watches the great bridge open and counts his passengers the week after; write his ledger and his mood. Fact: less than a week after the bridge opened in 1883, ferry crews reported a sharp drop in passengers.
  • A millionaire is asked to give to the fund for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal and says he will think about it; write the letter he never sends. Fact: raising money for the pedestal proved so hard that a newspaper publisher started a drive for donations.
  • A newsboy gives a nickel toward the pedestal of a statue he has never seen; write why. Fact: by August 1885, 80 percent of a newspaper's drive for the pedestal had come in sums under one dollar.
  • A passenger with a first-class ticket is met at the pier by her own carriage; write what she notices about the crowd from steerage as she drives past. Fact: from 1855 to 1890, two of every three immigrants to the United States came in through Castle Garden.
  • A ship comes into New York Harbor a week after the Statue of Liberty was unveiled; write the moment from the steerage deck. Fact: the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886.
  • A shipping line's owner reads the passenger count at his breakfast table; write what the numbers mean to him, and what they leave out. Angle: every steerage ticket is a sale. Let one name on the list catch his eye.
  • In the spring that Castle Garden closes, a society family sails the other way, for a summer in Europe; write the pier on the morning they leave. Angle: trunks by the dozen. Who on that pier is arriving for good as they wave goodbye?
  • On a steamship bound for New York, write the crossing from a first-class deck chair. Angle: the menu, the band, the rail she leans on. What does she see when she looks down?
  • On a steamship bound for New York, write the crossing from a shared bunk in steerage. Fact: steerage was the lowest class of passage; beds were often long rows of shared bunks with straw mattresses.
  • Write the landing at Castle Garden, at the tip of Manhattan, as someone with one address on a scrap of paper. Fact: over 8 million people entered the United States through Castle Garden in the 34 years after 1855.
  • Write the last day Castle Garden takes in a shipload of newcomers, as the clerk who locks up. Fact: Castle Garden closed as an immigrant landing depot on April 18, 1890.

The new electric light 15

  • A banker's office is among the first in New York wired for electric light; write the clerk who is told to turn it on. Fact: on September 4, 1882, a station on Pearl Street began supplying 400 lamps for 82 customers.
  • A factory owner's family takes the train to the Chicago fair of 1893 and rides the great wheel after dark; write the view from the top. Fact: the fair of 1893 had the world's first Ferris wheel, 264 feet high.
  • A few blocks from the first electric lamps, a tenement kitchen runs on one kerosene lamp; write homework at that table. Fact: in the Gilded Age kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting homes.
  • A gas fitter talks about the electric company over supper downtown; write what he says and what his daughter thinks. Angle: he calls it a fad. She has walked past the bank windows after dark.
  • A hotel puts a card in every room explaining the electric light; write the card, and the guest who does not read it. Angle: what might someone who has only known gas and candles try to do with a bulb?
  • A mansion is wired for electric light and the family gives a party to show it off; write the moment the chandelier comes on. Fact: a patent for a reliable, safe and practical electric lamp was granted on January 27, 1880.
  • A mansion's coachman watches the electric streetcar go by and wonders how long his horses will be wanted; write his evening in the stable. Angle: he says none of it aloud. Let him tell the horses.
  • A night class downtown meets under one electric bulb that the students pay for together; write the lesson. Angle: twelve grown men and women, one bulb, one borrowed book of English.
  • A stockyard worker's family saves all summer for one day at the Chicago fair of 1893; write what each wants to see and the one ride they can afford. Fact: the fair ran in Chicago from May 1 to October 30, 1893.
  • The electric streetcar reaches a row of small houses at the edge of the city; write a clerk's first ride to work. Fact: in the Gilded Age electric streetcars allowed faster commuting to work and easier shopping.
  • The maid who used to trim forty oil lamps a day has a free hour for the first time; write what she does with it. Angle: the new light uptown changes her day before it changes anyone's downtown.
  • Two years on, the electric company has ten thousand lamps to look after; write one day of the man who checks them. Fact: by 1884 the Pearl Street station was serving 508 customers with 10,164 lamps.
  • With the avenue lit, the theaters and restaurants uptown stay open late; write midnight on the sidewalk. Fact: as electric power spread across the cities of the Gilded Age, the streets were lit at night.
  • With the workshop lit, the day downtown gets longer too; write a shirt maker's eleventh hour under the new bulb. Angle: the same invention at the other end of town. What does the light take from her?
  • Write the 200,000 lamps of the Chicago fair from the point of view of a moth. Fact: the Chicago fair of 1893 was the first all-electric fair, with over 200,000 lamps.

A strike 15

  • A grocer in a strike town decides whether to go on giving credit; write his ledger for the third week. Angle: every name in the book is a neighbor. What does he write beside each one?
  • A mill owner's son of ten asks at dinner why the whistle did not blow today; write the answer he gets and the one he works out. Angle: the grown-ups change the subject. The coachman tells him more.
  • A railroad brakeman's pay is cut for the third time in a year; write the night he tells his family he will not go in tomorrow. Fact: the Great Railroad Strike began on July 14, 1877, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, after a third wage cut in a year.
  • A railroad's president reads the first telegram about stopped trains at his desk; write the hour before he answers it. Fact: the strike of 1877 was the first to spread across several states, and it ended 52 days later.
  • A steel company's clerk has to post the lockout notice on the gate; write the walk from the office with the paper in his hand. Angle: he knows half the men by name. He is not on either side yet.
  • A steelworker finds the mill gates locked against him; write the morning from outside the fence. Fact: a lockout and strike at a steel works in Pennsylvania began on July 1, 1892.
  • A stockholder two hundred miles from a strike reads about it in her newspaper; write the letter she sends her broker. Angle: she has never seen the mill. What does she ask about, and what does she not ask?
  • A striker's daughter of ten carries her father's dinner pail to the picket line; write what she hears there. Angle: songs, jokes, an argument about whether to give up. Nobody is hurt.
  • In a company town the company owns the houses as well as the works; write a worker's kitchen in the week the wages fall and the rent does not. Fact: before the strike that began near Chicago on May 11, 1894, wages were cut 20 to 30% and rents were not.
  • The owner of a company town believes he has built his workers a model place to live; write his walk down its main street on the day the strike starts. Angle: he counts the trees he planted. Let him be sincere, and let him miss something.
  • The strike is over and the owner walks the factory floor for the first time in two months; write what he looks at and what he looks away from. Angle: the machines are the same. Something else is not.
  • The strike is over and the whistle blows again; write the first morning back as a worker whose side lost. Angle: who walks in beside him, who is missing, and what the foreman says.
  • Write one week twice, in seven lines each: as a worker who puts in sixty hours, and as the owner of the works. Fact: one historian reckons Gilded Age workers put in roughly 60 hours a week for less than $800 a year.
  • Write the reply a factory owner gives to the call for an eight-hour day, in a speech to a club of other owners. Angle: give him his best argument, not a villain's. Which part of it does he believe?
  • Write the speech a union carpenter gives for the eight-hour day, to a hall of people who have just worked ten. Fact: Gilded Age unions crusaded for the eight-hour working day and the abolition of child labor.

How it works

A Gilded Age writing prompt works best with its opposite beside it: a footman's table for forty next to a supper eaten off the ironing board, a striker's kitchen next to the owner's walk down his own main street.

Read the full guide

Write both halves

In the list below most prompts stand beside a partner: the same evening, ship, lamp or strike from the other end of town. Each also works alone.

Why it is called the Gilded Age

Historians of the 1920s took the name from the title of an 1873 novel. Thirty-one prompts carry a fact, from the 150,300 people who crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on its first day to the 70 rooms of one summer house at Newport.

  • Give both ends of town the same weather. It is one city.
  • Nobody in a pair is the villain. Write each person as they would tell it.

Questions and answers

What is a good Gilded Age writing prompt?

A pair of them. A tenement child gets a bedroom window for the first time, and it opens onto an air shaft. A mansion child has a window seat over the avenue and is told not to stare. Write both windows.

When was the Gilded Age?

From the 1870s to the late 1890s in the United States, between Reconstruction and the Progressive Era. Most of these prompts are set in the 1880s and 1890s; the railroad strike is from 1877.

Are there Gilded Age writing prompts about immigration?

Yes, in the group on arriving by steamship. Over 8 million people entered the United States through Castle Garden, at the tip of Manhattan, in the 34 years after 1855. It closed on April 18, 1890.

Do these Gilded Age writing prompts name real people?

No. No owner, inventor or president is named, and nobody is asked to write as one. The people are footmen, seamstresses, clerks, ferry owners and children at windows.

More tools

Show 8 more

Browse Writing Prompts