An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Sir Pentious Victorian-era backstory fic
Pentious Week Day 3: āFamily Timeā!
The birth, rise, fall, and death of historyās first and worst super villain: the mysterious, megalomaniacal machine-maker Sir Pentious.
As witnessed through the lens of a crumbling marriage.
An excerpt from a history book about commerce in America during the Reconstruction Era (the fifteen year period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Serpentine Era):
āā¦Ā But of all the business luminaries and burgeoning tycoons of the Reconstruction Era, the most notable outlier was Basil Grace, and for a multitude of reasons.
"First,Ā unlikeĀ other major businessmen who dominated the eraāsuch as Andrew Carnegie or John D. RockefellerāGrace wasnāt an American-born citizen, but a transplant, arriving in the United States in late 1965 or early 1966 from England with the intent of collecting on the debts owed to Grace Firearms & Steel in the wake of the Civil War.
"Second, Grace was not only an entrepreneur, but also an inventor in his own rightāon par with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikola Tesla, all of whom built upon new technologies that had been pioneered at Grace Firearms & Steel.
"Third, unlike other well-known tycoons who got their start after the Civil War in their twenties and were active into the dawn of the twentieth century, Grace was only active for a little more than a decade before mysteriously vanishing.
"Fourth, his remarkablyābut inconsistentlyāprogressive politics. Despite his admiration of and approval for common laborers, Grace never claimed to be on their side, once going so far as to write in a letter to a railroad magnate that āa well-governed trades-union consisting of honest, hardworking, morally-upright laborers is the greatest possible threat to our vaunted class of blood-sucking leeches.ā He never attempted to reconcile his business practices with his stated morals, instead choosing to tout the moral rectitude of pro-labor practices, acknowledge that he did not institute most of these practices himself, and further acknowledge his own cruelty.
"And the fifth and greatest difference that sets him apart from the other Gilded Age tycoons is that none of them are popularly suspected to be Sir Pentious.ā
(If you enjoy the fic, Iād appreciate a comment or reblog! Like, really appreciate, this chapter was hell to get posted, my computer simply would not cooperate, it took me over an hour to physically move the fic from its word document into AO3.)
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