Abstract: John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847- 1900), was considered by many to be the richest man on Earth in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his person traditional feudal patterns of privilege met new mechanisms of industrialisation and capitalist globalisation, which made him a pivotal exponent of the Victorian super rich. Hailing from a Scottish aristocratic line, already his father had invested heavily in the new hub of industrialisation, Cardiff, with its important harbour and new railway links to the coalfields and iron mines of South Wales. Yet Crichton-Stuart’s manifold activities by no means produced a completely central position inside the norms of his era and class. He was a millionaire without obvious business interests or skills, a society figure who managed to affront his contemporaries by converting to Catholicism and founding a Catholic dynasty, an excessive patron of Neo-Gothic architecture, and also an eccentric private scholar who spent much of his time researching extinct languages, but also the culture of the so-called Celts. The latter explains in part his political, cultural and educational investments in Scottish and Welsh institutions and nationalist politics. The essay asks how seemingly contradictory elements such as exploitative industrialism and charitable donations, cultural elitism and eccentric interests in marginal cultural spheres, wealth and excessive spending manage to form a centric amalgam of the Victorian upper class. Related to this, it also inquires how a discursively and intersectionally structured Cultural Studies approach to such a phenomenon with interests in economy and politics, class and gender, but also architecture, religion and language can function successfully outside problematic forms such as biographical criticism and traditional historiography.

Keywords: aristocracy, industrialisation, patronage, charity, eccentricity