Culture & Money in the Nineteenth Century ABSTRACTING ECONOMICS Edited by DANIEL BIVONA & MARLENE TROMP CULTURE & MONEY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY eries in Victorian Studies S Joseph McLaughlin, series editor Katherine D. Harris, Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835 Rebecca Rainof, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity Erika Wright, Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, editors, Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics Culture & Money in the Nineteenth Century ACBSTRA TING ECONOMICS Edited by DANIEL BIVONA & MARLENE TROMP OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS ATHENS, OHIO Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 ohioswallow.com © 2016 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593–1154 or (740) 593–4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™ 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bivona, Daniel, editor. | Tromp, Marlene, 1966– editor. Title: Culture and money in the nineteenth century : abstracting economics / edited by Daniel Bivona, Marlene Tromp. Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2016. | Series: Series in Victorian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015049048| ISBN 9780821421963 (hardback) | ISBN 9780821445471 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Culture—19th century. | Money—Social aspects. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic History. Classification: LCC HM621 .C85746 2016 | DDC 306/.009034—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049048 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction Abstracting Economics 1 DANIEL BIVONA AND MARLENE TROMP PART ONE BROAD ABSTRACTIONS Character, Professional Expertise, and Nature Chapter One Born to the Business Heredity, Ability, and Commercial Character in Late Victorian Britain 25 AERON HUNT Chapter Two Shifting the Ground of Monetary Politics The Case of the 1870s 47 ROY KREITNER Chapter Three The Comparative Advantages of Survival Darwin’s Origin, Competition, and the Economy of Nature 73 DANIEL BIVONA PART TWO PARTICULAR ABSTRACTIONS Economics and Culture Chapter Four Art Unions and the Changing Face of Victorian Gambling 97 CORDELIA SMITH v CNTONTE S Chapter Five El Metálico Lord Money and Mythmaking in Thomas Cochrane’s 1859 Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination 117 JENNIFER HAYWARD Chapter Six From Cooperation to Concentration Socialism, Salvationism, and the “Indian Beggar” 145 SUZANNE DALY Chapter Seven Walter Scott’s Two Nations and the State of the Textile Industry in Britain 174 KATHRYN PRATT RUSSELL Chapter Eight Antidomestic The Afterlife of Wills and the Politics of Foreign Investment, 1850–85 199 MARLENE TROMP Contributors 223 Index 225 vi Acknowledgments Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics grew out of the Thirty-Second Annual Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference in 2011. This conference, chaired by Marlene Tromp and Daniel Bivona and entitled “Money/Myths,” sought papers that explored how money was understood in the nineteenth century and in its global context. We asked how the ideation of money evolved around and through art, music, architecture, race, nation, and empire; how the stories told about money influenced people and practices; and what role mythologies played in comprehending money. The confer- ence drew submissions from across the globe and representing a broad array of scholarship—historians, literary critics, architectural historians, art historians, economic historians, and music historians—and covered topics as varied as widowhood, charity, coins, speculation, debt, wages, industry, empire, fundraising, and even fiduciary sexuality. We were so intrigued by the body of papers and by the dialogues that emerged at the conference, particularly those that covered unmapped territory, that we sought the permission of the NCSA to put together a volume based on this event. We invited some of the best papers at the conference to include in this book, a sampling that reached across the range of fields that NCSA covers. At that time, we had little sense of how much our ideas would evolve as we wrangled with the questions that we, ourselves, had pro- posed in the call for papers. What we had originally called “mytholo- gies,” we came to see instead as active “abstractions.” “Mythologies” as a construct seemed too passive, too temporally and culturally transcen- dent, to capture what we saw as active, historically situated processes of interpenetration, naturalization, and universalization. Those structures that seemed most mythic, we came to believe, were, in fact, evidence of the process of abstraction at work. This understanding, then, guided the development of the volume and the chapters within it. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to the NCSA, its board of directors, and its president, Lucy Morrison, for their support of our concept for the conference and of the volume. We valued the willingness of the authors herein to share their work in this forum and to develop their contributions as we de- veloped the volume’s concept, acknowledging that while any strengths of this project are owed to many, any defects are ours alone. We owe a great deal to the body of scholars at the NCSA conference, who heard all our papers and helped us develop our insights. We especially want to thank the reviewers of this book, whose feedback was critical in helping us sharpen our thinking. We thank the staff at Ohio University Press for their support in bringing this project to the printed page. We also want to acknowledge and thank the staff at New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, particularly Mary Bauer, Lucy Berchini, Tracy Encizo, and Stacey Kimbell, who supported us as we wrote, and to ASU itself for the research leave that supported Daniel Bivona and for the encouragement that all its faculty produce schol- arship, even when engaged in administrative work. Our final word of thanks goes to our patient families, who have valued our active scholarly life and its work, even when it taxed our time and energy. It has been a pleasure, for both of us, to work together on this project and to engage in conversation about our field. We are grateful for the opportunity to do so with you now. viii INTRODUCTION Abstracting Economics Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp rom the early 1980s onward, scholars in the humanities have taken an increasing interest in economics as an object of critical study F in their own fields, and there are compelling reasons for this at- tention. Chief among these are the recognition that economics inflects and perhaps shapes nearly every other issue we study in the period and an understanding that the birth of the field during the nineteenth cen- tury gives that relationship between that moment of time and that body of knowledge special weight. Political economy, or the “dismal science,” emerged as a distinct, recognizable disciplinary strand closely entwined with Benthamite utilitarianism. Ultimately, the field enshrined its own intellectual heroes—Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo— in a pantheon constructed in John Ramsey McCulloch’s textbook The Principles of Political Economy (published in 1825). Even more influential with the literate public than McCulloch’s work during the next decade was Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy. Martineau’s narratives, published between 1832 and 1834, sought to help readers grasp the basic concepts of political economy by furnishing them with stories that illuminated important political economic concepts. Aimed at a broad audience that was, by and large, not well-informed about either the details of economic issues or the principles of political eco- nomic thought, Martineau’s Illustrations demonstrate how the literary (and humanistic) and the economic were closely tied together from the 1 DANIEL BIVONA AND MARLENE TROMP early days of the foundation of the discipline, as well as being linked to the emerging, and powerfully felt, need to justify the ways of political economy to man.1 What was also clear to many by the 1830s was that the doctrines of political economy were sufficiently obscure and counter- intuitive to ordinary readers to require the aid of didactic abstracts. Such economic narratives can today offer us a means of analyzing a range of cultural processes and attitudes that can provide a keener understanding of the nineteenth century. The kind and quality of in- vestment and the processes of speculation; the physical manufacture of money and its representational function, the shifting fiscal value of goods, services, and ideas; and how one understands investors become critical to understanding nineteenth-century social networks. Similarly, the language and concepts developed to articulate economic processes infiltrated other aspects of culture. How people understood the value of banknotes and how individuals, families, and groups were impacted by economic language, even in cases in which these matters seem only tangentially related to money matters, were