Economies of Things: Material Attachments in British Romantic Literature

by

Adrienne Todd

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

© Copyright by Adrienne Todd, 2019

Economies of Things: Material Attachments in British Romantic Literature

Adrienne Todd

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

Romantic literature reveals a persistent attention to everyday material things, such as a sheepfold, a house, and a spinning wheel. Romantic texts indicate that Britons used these things as anchors to build their identities, memories, and relationships. Yet, while recognizing the importance of mnemonic and emotional ties between people and things, these texts nonetheless portray these bonds as increasingly unstable. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, changes in two areas of the economy—paper money and the rise of consumerism—transformed the ways in which Britons understood their relationships to things, fostering more indirect, fleeting interactions with the material world, creating a gap between people and things. While some writers depict this new distance from things as tragic, Economies of Things does not portray this gap solely as a loss. As authors mobilize aesthetics to address the problem of detachment from things, their responses inspire some of the central aesthetic concerns of Romanticism. Tracing these literary responses to economic change—taking as primary case studies the writings of Austen, Burke, Wordsworth, and De Quincey—I uncover strong connections between aesthetics and economics in Romantic-era literature. While aesthetic inventions become

ii solutions for an economic problem, economics becomes a discussion ground for aesthetics. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conversations about economy take on a peculiarly “Romantic” character by taking up concerns such as imagination, creativity, and aesthetics. The gap between people and things inspires two theories of the imagination: Wordsworth’s portable creativity, adapted to the transience of consumerism, and De Quincey’s grotesque, consumer imagination, founded on the destruction rather than the production of material things. This gap also shapes theories of the sublime and the grotesque. To prevent the powerful infinity of paper money from being interpreted as sublime, Burke theorizes an alternative infinity: the infinite grotesque. Based in bodily processes that dissolve formed, solid material things into endless streams of organic matter, this aesthetic category reappears in the works of De Quincey, Wordsworth, and the caricaturists Gillray and Newton. From the stories of lost bonds between people and things emerge aesthetic theories that shape the movement we call Romanticism.

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Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to the excellent guidance of my supervisor, Alan Bewell, who not only oversaw this dissertation but also provided the inspiring coursework that led to the earliest formulation of this project. His guidance played a particularly crucial role in inspiring my work on consumerism, as well as the grotesque from Milton to Burke.

This thesis has also benefited a great deal from the helpful feedback of my committee members, Angela Esterhammer and Dan White. Angela’s comments helped me think through the important distinctions between the different types of material things in this dissertation, from commodities to mountains and trees. Dan enriched my discussion of debt by suggesting the concept of interest and helped me formulate the connection between economic discourse and the aesthetic concerns of Romanticism.

In her role as external examiner to my defense, Judith Thompson offered a fascinating perspective on this dissertation through her comments on Thelwall and materialism, as well as gender and conceptions of textual labour. Terry Robinson’s feedback also enriched the late stages of my project by pointing to eighteenth-century precursors for concerns about paper money, such as the South Sea bubble. Paul Downes provided insightful comments about how Marx’s labour theory of value could enhance this project.

Many of the key ideas in this thesis emerged from productive conversations with my partner, Jonathan Kerr, to whom I’m also indebted for his diligent editing.

I am immensely thankful for the constant support of my family, particularly my parents and brother, who also provided careful proofreading.

The graduate student community of University of Toronto has been immensely supportive of this project. I am grateful for feedback from my dissertation writing group, including Philip Sayers, Katherine Shwetz, Margeaux Feldman, and Joel Faber.

This research was supported by the Christopher Wallis/Ontario Graduate Scholarship in the Department of English, the Thomas and Beverley Simpson/Ontario Graduate Scholarship at the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Social Sciences and Humanities

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Research Council of Canada Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Avie Bennett Award, and the Viola Whitney Pratt Memorial OSOTF (Ontario Student Opportunity Trust Funds) Scholarship in English.

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Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv

Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………vi

List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………vii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

1 Bonds, Credit, and Reciprocity: Social Relationships as Debts in Romantic Credit Economies………………………………………………………………………..24

2 Gigantic Economies: Paper Money, Aesthetics, and the Infinite Grotesque…….62

3 Living “with objects and with hopes”: Consumerism and the Portable Imagination……………………………………………………………………..103

4 Creative Destruction: Towards a Grotesque, Consumerist Imagination……….129

Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………..157

Copyright Acknowledgements………………………………………………………….183

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List of Figures

Fig. 1 James Gillray, “Smelling out a Rat; or The Atheistical Revolutionist disturbed in his Midnight ‘Calculations’”……………………………………………………..78

Fig. 2 James Gillray, “Midas, Transmuting all into Paper”…………………………….94

Fig. 3 James Gillray, “Sin, Death, and the Devil Vide Milton”………………………...95

Fig. 4 Richard Newton, “The Inexhaustable Mine” [sic]…………………………….....98

Fig. 5 Richard Newton, “The New Paper Mill or Mr. Bull Ground into 20 Shilling Notes”……………………………………………………………………………97

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Introduction

This dissertation studies how material things, circulating in economies within late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, shape some of the most central aesthetic concerns of Romanticism: namely, theories of the imagination, the sublime, and the grotesque. Romanticism reveals a persistent attention to simple, everyday things, as unassuming as a pile of stones, a portrait, a spinning wheel, a basket. These texts demonstrate a profound awareness of the ways in which Britons looked to these material anchors to build their identities, memories, relationships, and systems of morality. Yet Romantic literature, while recognizing the importance of mnemonic, emotional, and moral bonds between people and things, nonetheless portrays these bonds as increasingly unstable. During the period, changes in two areas of the economy—paper money and consumerism—transformed the ways in which Britons understood their relationships to things. In the eyes of many commentators, these twin economic developments fostered more indirect, fleeting interactions with the material world, threatening emotional and mnemonic bonds with things.

This perceived distance between people and things appears throughout Romantic literature. While this dissertation focuses primarily on the works of Jane Austen, Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, and Thomas De Quincey, other telling examples include the works of John Clare, Thomas Love Peacock, and Charles Lamb. John Clare describes his powerful attachment to his home, Helpstone: “Hail scenes obscure so near and dear to me / The church the brook the cottage and the tree” (47-9). Clare’s poems pay careful attention to particular things—the church, brook, cottage, and tree—in which he has invested the memories and emotions of his youth. A simple thing such as a stone has the power to invoke strong feelings: “e’en a post old standard or a stone / Moss’d o’er by age and branded as her own / Would in my mind a strong attachment gain / A fond desire that there they might remain” (89-93). The human mind, Clare implies, develops “strong attachment[s]” to material things through specific experiences that took place in their presence, embedding in these things the history of an individual’s life. These affective, mnemonic bonds between people and things form over long durations of time, becoming part of a “[d]ear native spot which length of time endears” (51-2). Yet, while Clare cherishes these “strong attachment[s],” he also finds them threatened by recent economic changes. In 1807, land

1 2 enclosures had radically altered the landscape of Helpstone. Parliamentary acts had permitted the enclosure of land to make it more profitable; landowners added fences, altered the paths of streams, and converted common grounds shared by the community into individual, geometrical plots of land with straight edges (Paulin xix). Clare highlights the economic motives of enclosure by linking it to “[a]ccursed wealth oe’r bounding human laws” (123-7). Enclosure was intertwined with consumerism because these changes to the landscape enabled the larger English economy, which was undergoing a “consumer boom” (McKendrick et al. 11), to encroach upon rural areas that had previously been less affected by consumerism. As John Barrell has argued, enclosure destroyed the circular, “open-field” shape of English farmlands, which had been more conducive to trade within rural areas, in order to create a grid-like shape of roads and farmland, increasing mobility and connecting rural economies into the larger consumerist one (94-6). As a result of this encroachment onto Helpstone, a gap has formed between Clare and the things in his home, causing dislocation and detachment.

While Clare’s poem laments the loss of familiar landmarks in Helpstone, other Romantic texts focus on bonds with one particularly significant material anchor: the estate. As Chapter 2 demonstrates, the estate proves essential for Burke as a reservoir for his vision of English tradition, national identity, and morality. Likewise, Felicia Hemans’ “Homes of England” depicts the same deep investment in the English home: “The stately Homes of England” stand tall among “ancestral trees,” invoking familial and national history and anchoring her conception of English culture, as “[a]round their hearths by night” the family meets to sing and read stories from “some glorious page of old” (1, 3, 10-6). The home solidifies national identity and religion, because it is “[w]here first the child’s glad spirit loves / Its country and its God!” (Hemans 39- 40). Yet paper money, in the eyes of many Romantic-era writers, poses a threat to emotional and mnemonic bonds with the estate. For Burke, mandatory paper bills replaced the tangible wealth of gold and land with allegedly ephemeral paper; while gold and land have inherent use value and thus embody some of their value in their physical form, paper holds no inherent usefulness and serves as a symbolic representative of value. Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics suggest that traditional forms of material wealth, including the home or estate, have been replaced by what he views as the flimsy, immaterial spectre of paper money. In his poem, “Chorus of Bubble Buyers,” a group of speculators has been tricked by individuals who “upheld the delusion” of a speculative investment “[b]y prating of paper, and wealth, and free trade”:

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Now curst be the projects, and curst the projectors, And curst be the bubbles before us that rolled, Which, bursting, have left us like desolate spectres, Bewailing our bodies of paper and gold (41-2, 29-32) Paper money has turned the speculators into immaterial “spectres” who lament the loss of their material “bodies of paper and gold.” This material loss also involves the loss of the estate: For what is a man but his coat and his breeches, His plate and his linen, his land and his house? Oh! We had been men had we won our mock riches, But now we are ghosts, each poor as a mouse (33-6) In another of Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics, a Scottish fort loses its traditional appearance and becomes a paper money bank: They whitewashed the front of their old border fort They widened its loop-holes, and opened its court; They put in sash-windows where none were before, And they wrote the word ‘Bank’ o’er the new-painted door (“Border Ballad” 13-6) A group of bandits uses this paper money bank to strike back at the English authorities who had suppressed them; the new bank uses “sly paper credit and promise to pay” (11) to destroy the material anchors of the English authorities, making their estate and belongings vanish into immaterial nothingness: “To his [the Englishman’s] goods and his chattels, his house and his land, / Their promise to pay is as Harlequin’s wand / A touch and a word, and pass, presto, begone” (27-9). Throughout Romantic-era literature, paper money intervenes to replace traditional material forms of wealth with the allegedly ephemeral medium of paper.

A final example of the gap between people and things can be found in Lamb’s “Old China.” Here, as in the poetry of Clare, consumerism causes material detachment for the character Brigid (though not necessarily, as I suggest below, for the central character, Elia). Brigid expresses longing for a nostalgic past she shared with Elia, drawing a contrast between her new, wealthy way of life, in which she and Elia indulge in consumerist luxuries all the time, and her old way of life, in which they had little money, rarely bought luxuries, and thus built long-lasting bonds with things. “I wish the good old times would come again,” she remarks, “when we were not quite so rich . . . A purchase is but a purchase now that you have money

4 enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph” (296). Elia had cherished a brown suit: “Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare” (296). Brigid and Elia also treasured a folio of Beaumont and Fletcher, which they “eyed for weeks” before purchasing, and the description of this book highlights it materiality, weight, and substance (296). Elia arrives in the bookshop, and the bookseller “by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures—and . . . lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome” (296-7). Both the word “lugged” and the wish that the book be more “cumbersome” stress its materiality. But when Brigid and Elia become wealthy and make new purchases all the time, their relationships to things become more transient, as old belongings are constantly replaced by new ones: “can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical—give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit—your old corbeau—for four or five weeks longer than you should have done?” (298). In Brigid’s mind, an intensification of consumerism weakens bonds with one’s belongings.

However, Economies of Things: Material Attachments in British Romantic Literature does not portray this perceived gap between people and things solely as a loss.1 Rather, I argue that this gap inspired aesthetic innovations. For example, the sense of detachment from things becomes aesthetically productive for Lamb. While Brigid yearns to return to their poorer days, Elia counters her position with a defense of luxury. In addition to highlighting the increased comfort they derive therefrom, Lamb associates the world of consumer commodities with a particular ephemeral, dreamlike aesthetic, one at the core of his own text. The images on Elia’s china teacups (a consumer luxury) inhabit an airy, fantastical world detached from traditional understandings of time and space, portraying “little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective—a china tea-cup” (295). The dreamlike aesthetic of the teacups is pivotal to

1 The term “economy of things” has also been used by IBM’s Veena Pureswaran and Robin Lougee, though in a different context. Pureswaran and Lougee predict the rise of a new “economy of things” as the Internet of Things transforms physical assets “into participants in real-time global digital markets” by making them “as easily indexed, searched, and traded as any commodity” (1).

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Lamb’s text as a whole, resurfacing in the ghost children of “Dream Children” and the shadowy persona of Elia himself, a “phantom” whose records are “but shadows of fact . . . sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history” (187, 119-200).

As authors mobilize the aesthetic to address the problem of detachment from things, their strategies of response and adaptation shape some of Romanticism’s core aesthetic theories. These stories of loss are productive not only because they prompted the creation of literature but also because they inspired specific aesthetic theories, namely the infinite grotesque, Wordsworth’s portable model of imagination, and De Quincey’s grotesque consumerist model of imagination.2 Lamb’s description of the airy, detached world of consumer luxuries as “grotesqu[e]” speaks to a larger appropriation, explored by Chapters 2, 3, and 4, of the grotesque as a core aesthetic in Romantic-era writing and art. This category becomes essential for grappling with changing emotional relationships to things and the new social structures brought about by these transformations. Moreover, new distances from the material world inspire Wordsworth and De Quincey to theorize mobile models of imagination adapted to the ephemerality of consumerism. By tracing these literary responses, I uncover particularly strong connections between aesthetics and economics in the Romantic period. While aesthetic inventions become solutions for an economic problem, economics becomes a discussion ground for aesthetics. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conversations about political economy take on a peculiarly “Romantic” character as they gravitate towards debates about creativity and literary production. By “Romantic” character, I refer to the fact that these economic conversations take up central concepts and concerns of Romanticism, such as imagination, creativity, and aesthetics. Parallel concepts emerge in economic and literary discourses of Romanticism. Economies of Things exposes the extent to

2 My concept of the imagination as a response to perceived gaps between people and objects is influenced by Forest Pyle’s idea that the imagination acts as an adhesive power, “the figure by which Romantic texts address the disjunction between subject and society as well as that between spirit and matter” (1). M. H. Abrams likewise argues that Romantic poetry attempts “to overcome the sense of man’s alienation from the world by healing the cleavage between subject and object” (65). My idea of aesthetic concepts emerging out of pressure or crisis is indebted to the work of John Whale: see note 12 of this introduction. In discussing De Quincey’s consumerist imagination, I draw on the work of Karen Fang, who refers to Lamb’s model of creativity as the “consumer imagination” (“Empire” 815).

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which the economies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were Romantic economies.

In response to the perception of distance from things, writers turn to literature to explore and understand their relationship to the material world and their new sense of alienation in consumerist, paper-based economies. These narratives are often stories of loss. Clare finds little consolation for the radical alterations of Helpstone, and tragedies often befall Wordsworth’s wandering figures who have become detached from all “objects of memory” (“W. W. to Charles James Fox” 315). Yet, from these stories of loss emerge aesthetic theories that shape the movement we call Romanticism.

0.1 Economies of Romantic England

The Romantic sense of material detachment responds to two primary areas of economic change: the rise of consumerism and compulsory paper currencies. According to many contemporary thinkers, the development of eighteenth-century consumer culture weakened material anchors by encouraging individuals to replace old possessions with new ones, thereby shortening the duration of time spent with particular belongings and rendering attachments more transient. One assumption of this dissertation is that the advent of consumerism—in other words, an intensification of consumption—changes relationships between people and things. Jane Bennett’s observations about American consumer culture apply equally to the English context: “materialism, which requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever- shorter cycles, is antimateriality. The sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter” (5). A substantial body of scholarship has traced the transformations brought about by the “consumer revolution” in eighteenth-century England (McKendrick et al. 9). Consumer spending rose dramatically in the eighteenth century, along with the development of new “marketing techniques” and an increased emphasis on luxury and fashion (McKendrick et al. 9). Consumerism prized novelty, constantly encouraging the purchase of newer, more fashionable possessions (McKendrick et al. 10). Fashions changed more rapidly than before (McKendrick et al. 10). In the eighteenth century, more middle-class buyers became capable of purchasing luxury goods, thereby causing an influx of such imports into England (Berg 30). Moreover, the growth

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of consumerism encouraged the rise of an accompanying ideology. Colin Campbell’s work connects the “autonomous, self-illusory hedonism” of consumerism with Romantic aesthetics (200-1), stressing how Romantic ideals of imagination play a part in this hedonism (78). Other scholars have also linked consumerism to Romanticism: Timothy Morton traces how English acts of consumption shaped representations of other cultures (Poetics of Spice), and Alan Bewell shows how consumerist ideas of commerce, mobility, and exchange framed Romantic conceptions of nature—while some saw nature as “local, rooted in place, and separate from commercial concerns,” others understood it as a world of moveable objects suited for translation, sale, and exchange (6-7).3 All of this work has shown not only the historical importance of consumption in the period but also its connections to the aesthetic ideals of Romanticism, a connection that I hope to illuminate further. Romantic theories of imagination, I argue, crystallize in debates about economics, and specifically about the role of material things in the economy. Debates about money become a site of negotiation for larger questions about the material roots of Romantic imaginations.4

Like consumerism, the rise of paper currencies provoked anxieties about material detachment. The replacement of traditional forms of wealth with paper invoked a more anonymous, emotionally neutral relationship to things: rather than an estate, which for Burke embodies history, memory, and his vision of English national identity, or a piece of gold, which Burke perceived as a more solid, stable form of money (with its greater weight, substance, and intrinsic use value as a malleable, durable metal), paper bills did not embody feeling, stability, or tradition. Though paper bills were in fact physical items, skeptics criticized their inability to act as material anchors by depicting them as immaterial. Percy Shelley describes paper money as ethereal and phantom-like, calling it “the Ghost of Gold” (“Mask of Anarchy” 170-6). Debates about paper currencies perennially return to questions about the roles of things in the economy, and more crucially, how changes to these roles transform the ways in which Britons grounded

3 For more on the connection between consumerism and Romanticism, see Fang’s work on the “consumer imagination” in the work of the late romantics, an integral part of their efforts to carve out their own literary identities distinct from those of the high romantics (“Empire” 815).

4 I am indebted to Alan Bewell’s seminar, “Romanticism and the Rise of Consumerism,” for providing the original conceptual framework for my study of Romantic consumerism.

8 their identities and systems of morality in material culture. Although paper money assumed various forms throughout Romantic Europe, of most relevance to Burke were the assignats, an experimental currency created by the National Assembly during the French Revolution. The assignats were French rather than English, but Burke’s famous account of these bills in his Reflections on the Revolution in France became highly influential for English Romantic writers, as well as caricaturists, who later adapted Burke’s infinite grotesque aesthetic for their own economic satires. Launched in 1789 as an attempt to address a shortage of specie and the state’s “ongoing deficit” (Spang 74), the assignats represented pieces of land previously owned by the church and state that had been confiscated by the National Assembly. The Assembly also rendered this currency compulsory (no longer exchangeable for specie). Because the possession of an assignat represented a stake in a portion of land, the bills were allegedly tied to a material form of wealth. Spang has demonstrated that the question of money’s materiality dominated discussions of the assignats within the National Assembly (80). Politicians both supporting and opposing the assignats defended their arguments by linking their favoured currencies (specie or paper) to tangible sources of value: while precious metals allegedly contained intrinsic value, the assignats corresponded to pieces of land (Spang 80).

After the rise of the assignats in France, paper money gained increasing importance in the economy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Because of high debt, a cash shortage, and the need to fund the war with France (Poovey 175-6), England implemented the Bank Restriction Act in 1797. This legislation rendered paper money a mandatory legal currency in England, and the decree lasted until 1821, extending the Restriction Period throughout the Romantic era. Whereas previously, a banknote could be redeemed at any time for gold at the Bank of England, the Restriction Act suspended this exchangeability. As in debates about assignats, controversies about the Restriction Act arose because the legislation apparently detached money and its value from any grounding in an object of intrinsic value. Paper money had no material anchors. These controversies generated a rich outburst of storytelling: commentators took to a range of genres—fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and caricature—to tell the story of money’s history, particularly the role of things in that history. While Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics narrates the history of money as a shift from materiality to abstraction, pointing out that “promises of payment / Are neither food nor raiment” (“Pan in Town,” 7-8), by contrast, Henry Thornton tells a different story about the origins of money. Attempting to naturalize the

9 credit and trust he sees as the foundation of paper money, Thornton depicts credit as the earliest facilitator of exchange, one which in fact precedes physical forms of money. His Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain begins with a moment of speculative economic history, as he takes us back to a time prior to all currencies—“that early and rude state of society, in which neither bills nor money are as yet known”—and suggests that credit arose naturally from necessity and convenience (13-4). One party often offered goods to a farmer, for example, based on the “confidence” that the farmer’s crops will bear fruit in the future, and the farmer was “either compelled by the law of the land, or induced by a sense of justice, to fulfill his part of the contract” (Thornton 14). Thornton posits a circular trajectory: the economy begins with credit and returns there again in the form of paper money, which is itself a type of credit and confidence. Thornton indicates, This commercial credit is the foundation of paper credit; paper serving to express that confidence which is in the mind, and to reduce to writing those engagements to pay, which might otherwise be merely verbal. . . . [P]aper credit also spares the use of the expensive article of gold; and . . . serves to enlarge, confirm, and diffuse that confidence among traders, which, in some measure, existed independently of paper (14-5) As I will discuss shortly, Thornton’s circular history in fact comes closer to the truth than a one- way narrative from materiality to abstraction, a common but inaccurate vision of monetary history.

Opponents of paper money believed that material things, notably gold and land, were becoming increasingly less central to the economy, replaced by symbolic markers such as paper bills, credit, and cheques (whose ultimate goal was to represent value through numbers in accounting ledgers rather than embodying it in things [Poovey 51]). This narrative of dematerialization remains influential today in accounts of monetary history. As Rebecca Spang indicates, “the shift from substance to abstraction [is] central to nearly every history of money” (10). This view posits the gradual removal of things from Western capitalist economies: barter is replaced by metal currencies, which in turn give way to paper banknotes (Spang 10). Contemporary economists now discuss the benefits of eliminating cash altogether and transitioning to an entirely digital economy (“Dreams” n. pag.). Joel Kurtzman’s 1993 book, The Death of Money, expresses profound suspicion about digitization’s power to eliminate material things from finance. Money, Kurtzman claims, “is no longer a thing, an object you can dig up at

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the beach or search for behind the cushions of a sofa; it is a system” (11). Money has become a network of computers, a spectral assembly of ones and zeroes: “This new money is like a shadow. Its cool-gray shape can be seen but not touched. It has no tactical dimension, no heft or weight” (Kurtzman 16). The digital nature of this network has been emphasized further through recent surges in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. However, recent scholars have shown (and Chapter 1 demonstrates) that this narrative of dematerialization misrepresents the history of money.5 The British economy prior to paper money primarily consisted not of gold and silver but the abstract medium of private credit. Narratives that depict the British economy as increasingly abstract, progressing from barter to metal currencies to paper money, are stories invented by contemporary commentators.6 In agreement with this recent scholarship, my aim is not to suggest that the Romantic-era economy has become less material—in other words, that it has become an economy without things—but rather that changing economies have brought about altered emotional relationships to things. Detachment does not necessarily equal outright dematerialization. While paper money is still an object, it attracts a lower level of affective and mnemonic investment: critics of paper money perceive the bills as anonymous, interchangeable items, as opposed to the historically and symbolically resonant form of the estate, or the more solid form of gold, which for many commentators embodied tradition and solidity. Paper bills also constantly change hands in exchange, rendering it difficult to form attachments to them. Though literary texts sometimes criticize the new relationships to things by describing paper money as ephemeral, I read these phantom-like descriptions as expressions of the new transience writers perceived in their relationships to these fast-moving, interchangeable objects. The texts in this study mobilize the aesthetic to grapple with new economic experience, offering literary solutions to the perceived problem of a gap between people and things.

In line with more recent evaluations of monetary history, the structure of Economies of Things does not follow a narrative of dematerialization but rather takes an economy of private

5 These critics include Craig Muldrew, Deborah Valenze, and Margot Finn, whose work is discussed in detail on pages 11-2 of this introduction.

6 Many scholars have recognized the fabricated nature of this narrative, including Rebecca Spang (10) and Matthew Rowlinson (2). I build on Rowlinson’s idea that the history of the economy as dematerialization is a “narrative” that is imposed back onto history: “the supposed difference between these two forms of exchange [symbolic and monetary] is projected onto history in a narrative of the displacement of symbolic exchange by money” (2).

11 credit as its starting point. Focused on Austen’s letters and novels, my first chapter explores the “commissions” economy, a private system of debt within the Austen circle whereby friends and family members bought goods for one another through personal credit. I trace how commodities circulated in the intimate networks that preceded the paper money economy and how these networks allowed individuals to invest memories and emotions in things, solidifying social relationships and bonds of trust. The commissions economy offers an example of one of the private credit economies that, as Craig Muldrew, Deborah Valenze, and Margot Finn have demonstrated, constituted the dominant method of exchange in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century England. Muldrew argues that the economy of Early Modern and Restoration England functioned through a “culture of credit” (2): coins were rare, and the majority of transactions were made with personal debt (3). Most of these credit arrangements were informal and did not involve the exchange of physical items or even a written account of debts (Muldrew 3). Crucially, Muldrew stresses the “interpersonal and emotive” nature of private debts (3); the “central mediating factor” in credit dealings was trust (4). Valenze’s The Social Life of Money in the English Past likewise emphasizes the informal, unstandardized nature of money in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. She challenges P. G. M. Dickson’s classic account of the “Financial Revolution,” which figures this period of English history as one of rapid economic transformation, resulting in key changes such as the creation of the national debt and the rise of financial institutions like the Bank of England and various insurance facilities (Dickson 6-7). Valenze argues that money was not nearly as stable and institutionalized as Dickson implies. Paper currencies were characterized by “indeterminacy,” always changing as new forms of paper bills arose and individuals experimented with finance (1-2), and the few coins in circulation were “clipped, bitten, counterfeited, chucked, and generally abused” (1). No single institution controlled money, nor was there public agreement about what money was or should do (Valenze 2): “State finance, commercial ventures, and private investment strategies were heavily contested matters, resolved … in a flurry of debate over money” (Valenze 20). Finn furthers this line of inquiry by arguing that older, more social economic models like personal credit remained influential throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century (90), contrary to the conventional understanding of many historians and economists, who portray “the cash nexus as an axiomatic feature of eighteenth-century English retail activity” (5-6). Instead of the “anonymous, autonomous” transactions of the cash economy (Finn 6), we find a variety of “exchanges effected through borrowing and lending, gifting and purchasing on account, . . .

12 shaped by. . .networks of social relations” (Finn 12). Finn also deepens our understanding of the gendered and hierarchical nature of private credit economies, another topic central to Chapter 1 of this dissertation. Self-interested gifting reinforced class and gender structures, and novels questioned the hierarchies embodied in gifting and social credit, including “the instrumental use of gifts by men to objectify women” (Finn 45). Credit relations maintained class differences by creating hierarchical structures of obligation (Finn 9-10); for example, gifts from masters to servants or from the wealthy to the impoverished “were calculated to reward past service, to promote future deference and to underline the lesser status of the recipient” (84).

Much as the history of the English economy follows a non-linear trajectory, Economies of Things does not order its chapters chronologically. In order first to establish a model of how individuals invested emotions in things, I begin with a relatively stable example of an older credit economy, in which bonds between people and their possessions remained strong. Economic developments, particularly the rise of paper money, took place at different times throughout England based on regional variations. Urbanization rapidly increased the number of customers in stores within cities, quickening the shift from credit to cash in densely populated areas by making it more difficult to evaluate the trustworthiness of each client (Fowler n. pag.). Thus, while many of Austen’s letters were written later than other texts in this study, her predominantly rural lifestyle and frequent communication with small, domestic circles make her writings a good example of an economy still primarily based on private credit (though, as we will see, her later correspondence hints that this system of private debt had begun to give way to cash). Austen’s letters provide an example of bonds between people and things working as they should: individuals still invest memory and emotion in things, and the ties between people and things have not yet undergone any weakening. After this example of a private credit economy, the final three chapters shift attention to moments of perceived distance between people and things. Chapter 2 turns to the rise of paper money. Burke’s reaction to this change is negative, but even while condemning paper money, he popularizes an innovative aesthetic theory, a subtype of the grotesque. My final two chapters shift to documenting models of imagination that emerge from the loss of bonds with things. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the increasing mobility of economic goods in consumerism imperils Wordsworth’s thing-centred vision of imagination, which derives fundamentally from long-lasting bonds with material anchors. While Wordsworth laments this loss, he also responds by creating a different model of imagination adapted to

13 consumerism: a new way of imagining based on a new way of relating to things in a mobile world, a method grounded in “spots of time” and poems, redemptive mobile commodities capable of enriching the imagination and preserving local places even while circulating apart from them. Finally, Chapter 4 documents a model of creativity that not only adapts to but thrives on the ephemerality of consumerism: De Quincey’s “grotesque” palimpsestic imagination (Suspiria 144). Rather than proceeding chronologically, then, Economies of Things traces a constellation of moments—clustered within the Romantic period but not always in order—in which writers perceive a distance emerging between people and things.

0.2 Methodology: Things, Economics, and Literary Analysis

Economies of Things brings together two fields of enquiry: material culture studies and economic literary criticism. In the past few decades, scholarship about material culture has shifted from focusing on how things affect human relations to tracing the lives, histories, and vitalities of things themselves. Arjun Appadurai’s influential The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective argues that even if we agree that things acquire meanings only through human interactions, “this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (Appadurai 5). Appadurai concludes that “even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (5). A decade and a half later, Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” takes Appadurai’s focus on things a step further. Brown suggests that Appadurai ignores the “problem of matter” and the distinction between things and objects (Brown 6-7). Brown distinguishes between objects and things: “we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture-above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. . . . We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy” (4). Most recently, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton have argued for the value of “Object-Oriented Ontology,” a critical approach that even more strongly asserts the importance of considering objects apart from human relations. Harman insists that objects have existences apart from human thoughts, perceptions, and agency, although we can

14 never access these always-receding essences of “things-in-themselves” (185).7 By granting things an autonomous existence, Object-Oriented Ontology posits a “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things” and warns us not to privilege “the human-world relation” (Harman 187, 185). Likewise, Bennett emphasizes the peculiar agency of things, which she calls “thing-power”: their ability to captivate attention, shape the world, exist independently of human perception, and resist assimilation into human understanding (2, 5). The important work of these scholars has explored different approaches to object-centred scholarship, and all of this criticism, to varying degrees, has demonstrated the value of a close methodological focus on things.8

My own approach is indebted to this close attention to things. My methodology resembles Appadurai’s in that I examine commodities in order to learn more about human social life. However, while Appadurai focuses primarily on uncovering the trajectories of commodities, my ultimate goal is to explore the emotional and mnemonic relationships between things and Romantic-era authors or characters. Following Brown’s important work on “Thing Theory,” I use the term “things” rather than “objects” in this dissertation. While I do study things as a way to learn more about social life—an action that Brown associates with objects rather than things, because “we look through objects” to learn more about humans—I use the term “things” because in many moments they thrust themselves forward into the notice of observers, who catch glimpses of “the thingness of objects” (4). As Bennett suggests, two aspects of “thing-power” are the abilities to capture attention and resist human understanding (2, 5). An example is Michael’s

7 In addition to Harman’s article below, see Morton’s “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry” for more on the object-oriented approach and its application to literary studies. Morton’s article provides an insightful counterargument to Burke’s concept of the infinite grotesque by arguing that “there is no such thing as ‘matter without form’” (207). Morton identifies a bias in recent scholarship towards viewing flows and processes as more real than static objects; yet, he argues, “behind every flow, behind every stasis, there is an object that cannot be reduced to anything whatsoever” (208). While Morton may be correct that formless mater constitutes a thing like any other, I am most interested in what Romantic authors define as things. Burke’s writings reveal his (perhaps erroneous) assumption that “matter without form” does exist (Morton 207). For Burke, the very essence of the infinite grotesque is to convert formed objects to indistinguishable masses of matter. 8 For additional examples of literary criticism that focuses centrally on things, see the following works: W. J. T. Mitchell’s article, “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images”; Mary Jacobus’s book, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud; and the volume of essays edited by Larry H. Peer, Romanticism and the Object. Mitchell studies some of Romanticism’s “momentous concepts and images of thinghood,” such as fossils and totems (167). Jacobus argues that lyric poetry becomes a vehicle for thinking through the connections between physical things (stones, bodies, trees) and abstract ones (history, translation) (2). Peer’s volume contains a range of essays about Romanticism and objects, including Marilyn Gaull’s “‘Things Forever Speaking’ and ‘Objects of all Thought,’” which highlights the importance of the object / thing distinction in Wordsworth’s poetry.

15 unfinished sheepfold, which demands the observer’s notice as a thing, particularly because it fails to function as it should, remaining unfinished; it is, in a sense, broken. For Brigid in “Old China,” the old suit asserts itself as a thing through its very breaking down, as it becomes threadbare and worn, whereas the new, expensive clothes they buy later go without much notice, functioning perfectly and not drawing attention, more like objects than things. While I use the term “things” for the above reasons, my own methodology is focused most centrally on uncovering the relationships between people and things, and my primary aim is not to explore what Bennett calls “thing-power” or the autonomous existence of things. Moreover, while both Appadurai’s work and my own trace the lives of things to learn more about human relations, Appadurai’s sociological approach differs crucially from my literary one. I examine not only the paths of commodities but also literary writing about those paths. In many of these texts, the literary or the aesthetic—from poetry itself to models of imagination and theories of sublime and grotesque—becomes the solution to the problems the texts identify. The literary works themselves become circulating entities that address a social problem.9 Moreover, literary analysis of these writings is necessary to reveal the particular intertwinement of aesthetics and economics in the Romantic period. In the ways that authors depict the trajectories of things, we discover the Romantic character of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century economies. Because of the crucial involvement of narrative and aesthetics in Romanticism’s treatment of economies of things, a literary approach rather than a sociological one is best suited for this dissertation.

Because I focus, like Appadurai’s study of the “social lives of things,” on uncovering what things teach us about human lives and relations, I lose the opportunity to engage in the close exploration of objectivity involved in “Thing Theory”; however, I gain a fresh perspective by combining this framework with a more recent strand of economic literary criticism, “The New Economic Criticism,” centrally focused on historical contexts and institutions such as banks and governments (Osteen and Woodmansee 3, 10). From this fusion arises a close attention to

9 Theories of imagination, the grotesque, and the sublime are not the only solutions that these texts offer to the problem of an apparent disconnect between people and things. Burke, for example, suggests a return to gold specie and maintaining voluntary exchangeability between paper money and gold. However, the scope of this dissertation is focused primarily on the role of the aesthetic and literary in addressing the gap between people and things.

16 the ways in which the trajectories of things are shaped by institutions and historical contexts such as debates about paper currencies. The New Economic criticism diverges from previous work in economic literary criticism. Kurt Heinzelman’s early work in this field examines poetry and economic discourse side by side, tracing how the rising science of political economy influences concepts of imagination, and how poetry in turn shapes economics (11). Marc Shell, another early economic literary critic, explores structural parallels between the logic of money and “the logical or semiological workings of language” (3). Shell pays close attention to the materiality of money, particularly the ways in which historical debates about money have centred on the relationship between the physical substance of money and its symbolic value, or “the relationship between the substantial thing and its sign” (6). However, Shell tends to follow the classic dematerialization narrative that has been discredited by more recent criticism.10 In 1999, Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee theorized a newer form of economic analysis called the “New Economic Criticism.” While earlier critics such as Heinzelman and Shell focus on finding parallel structures between language and money, and imagination and economics, the New Economic Criticism more strongly emphasizes historical and material contexts. Osteen and Woodmansee describe this approach as “a branch of New Historicism” (3), and as “more attentive to contextual discursive formations—law, banking, art history, etc.” (14). The most recent criticism from the last two decades has furthered this interest in historical financial institutions. Mary Poovey highlights the connections between genre and the credit economy; Alexander Dick traces the relationship between paper money and aesthetic standards (Romanticism); and Eric Lindstrom posits a connection between fiat money and the lyric. This economic criticism has established a valuable frame for the complex web of connections between economics and aesthetics. My debts to this school of criticism show in the centrality of history, politics, and institutions to this dissertation. The Bank of England, as well as the National Assembly of France as an issuer of paper money, serve as the key loci of socioeconomic change in the chapters that follow. Moreover, an act of legislature—the Bank Restriction Act of 1797—provides a catalyst for perceptions of rupture between people and things. Adopting this perspective enables me to approach Romantic aesthetics, so often perceived

10 See, for example, Shell’s opening discussion of the history of money from “ancient Lydia” to “the electric money of contemporary America” (1).

17 or self-fashioned as autonomous and detached from historical realities, as deeply grounded in material and institutional contexts.

By bringing economic criticism together with material culture studies and object-centred criticism, I focus more particularly than previous economic critics on affective and mnemonic bonds between people and things. Influenced by object-oriented approaches, in which analysis follows the lives of particular things—from the fish and stockings of Austen’s commissions economy to the stones in Michael’s sheepfold—I ask how things carry memories and cultural meanings, as well as how these meanings are shaped by changing economic conditions. Moreover, my emphasis on emotion differentiates my project from the social science of economics itself. I analyze the intersection between the large-scale trends studied by economists—inflation rates, consumption patterns, debt levels—and the lived, sensory, and emotional experiences of individual characters. Literary analysis proves crucial for accessing aspects of subjective experience that cannot be captured by economic data. I ask questions about subjective experience such as: how does debt imbue certain belongings with emotions of trust and confidence but also guilt and subordination? How does consumer culture express itself in the anxious nightmares of an opium addict?

The Romantic era offers the ideal period for this study. Within this epoch, France made its assignats compulsory and England passed the Bank Restriction Act. Consumerism boomed. The science of political economy was born. Yet, while the earliest boundaries of the discipline of economics were being drawn, authors still frequently wrote both literary and economic works: De Quincey wrote prolifically in economics in addition to his literary works, and Burke published aesthetic as well as political and economic theory.

While historical reasons have guided my choice of period, so, too, have they guided my selection of “things” within this study. The things I discuss tend to be of a certain type: most are potentially mobile—things that one can see or hold, and of a fairly small size, from opium to furniture, stones, and gold bullion.11 Morton has aptly exposed some assumptions and biases in

11 Wordsworth does occasionally reference larger, more immobile things in nature, such as trees and mountains, and Burke also references the immobile property of the estate.

18 how recent scholars conceive of things: they tend to be suspicious of material things as necessarily “‘static,’ ‘boring,’ ‘reified’” and instead privilege “processes or flows” as “more real” than other things, making “flowing liquids . . . the template for everything else” (“An Object-Oriented Defense” 208, 207, 207). Yet, as Morton points out, this assumption is not necessarily accurate. A dress may be a thing, but a piece of land might also be considered a thing, or the atmosphere, or the planet; “there may be an infinite regress of ‘objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects’” (Harman qtd. in Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense” 208). While Morton’s critique is valid, Economies of Things is more concerned with how Romantic-era thinkers perceived and defined things, rather than contemporary definitions. Burke’s writings reveal that he does privilege certain types of things and view them as, to borrow Morton’s phrase, “more real than others”: gold and land, for example, are real things to Burke, but the shapeless forms of the infinite grotesque are not. He uses the aesthetic of the grotesque to represent this very formlessness, the result that emerges when solid things dissolve into raw matter. The things in this dissertation tend to be those privileged by the authors themselves, and this leads to a certain bias in the type of things investigated.

While many of the things in this study are human-made, exchangeable commodities, such as opium, dresses, and gold specie, some are natural things, such as Clare’s “brook” and “tree” (49). While one might assume that for Romantic authors, natural things would serve as the primary pillars of stability, Austen builds mnemonic and emotional bonds with consumer goods. Moreover, Wordsworth suggests that certain humanmade things may serve as receptacles of memory and emotion, usually in rural settings where they are exempt from consumerist exchange. In the traditional economy of Michael’s farm, for example, a few cherished possessions such as a lamp and farming tools remain with the same family for long periods. While I recognize that natural objects and commodities bore different connotations for Romantic writers, I discuss both of them within this dissertation because of the similar mnemonic, emotional function they fulfill. While brooks and trees offer mnemonic and emotional stability for Clare, dresses and stockings fulfill the same role for Austen.

This dissertation defines an economy as a system of exchange in which some kind of entities circulate, though those entities may be tangible or abstract (such as promises, visits, services, or even emotions like gratitude). These systems often overlap, like a series of concentric circles. Chapter 1 discusses the larger public credit economy of England, and within

19 that, the rural retail economy of private credit, and within that, smaller economies of private credit in family circles. Chapters 3 and 4 widen this scope further to include international consumer economies, particularly the eastern import of opium.

0.3 Stories of Attachment and Detachment: From Austen to De Quincey

Economies of Things begins with an older, more traditional economy of private credit not yet fully transformed by paper money. The letters and novels of Austen offer a rich source of information about her economic habits and attitudes towards money, debt, and credit, yet too few scholars have given the letters the attention they merit. While her correspondence hints at the replacement of private credit with cash, a transition that was underway during her lifetime, her predominantly rural life nonetheless remains grounded in private debt. Within these older economies, commodities acquired emotional and mnemonic value by circulating among an intimate community of family and friends. One dress, for example, passes through many different hands as the Austen sisters engage in communal shopping, collaborating at different phases of the process, from lending money to choosing a fabric, buying it, and sewing it together. Austen allows her sister to choose the materials: “the kind of brown is left to your own choice, and I had rather they were different, as it will always be something to say, to dispute about which is the prettiest” (Letters 81). Austen’s acknowledgement that the family will continue to dispute which fabric “is the prettiest” indicates that her community derived social bonding and interaction from these collaborative purchases. Through circulation, the dress acquires social meaning and builds relationships. The trust encouraged by private debts—through lending and borrowing money, and through trusting another person to handle one’s money and choices— reifies bonds between individuals. Austen’s writings reveal that such personal arrangements of private credit structured relationships with retailers as well, providing the most common modus operandi for the larger British retail economy. Moreover, her letters extend this credit model beyond economic transactions and into the social sphere, crafting a model of social relationships structured by debt, and governed by the same laws of reciprocity and mutual trust created through economic and social exchanges—of money, commodities, visits, greetings, letters, and favours. To have a debt was to have a relationship with a person, and balancing or closing the accounts signifies the end of that relationship. Austen’s letters keep rigorous accounts of social,

20 monetary, and “Epistolary debt” (Letters 341). Relationships function ethically when the debtor and creditor continually swap roles, the natural result of reciprocal exchanges.

Mansfield Park, however, complicates the representation of debt in Austen’s work. The novel implies the troubling underside of private credit economies: while they may encourage healthy bonds between the relatively equal economic actors of Austen and her sister, they also have the potential to forge coercive bonds—of restraint rather than trust—when disparities of class and gender complicate the playing field. These disparities enable one person to cling perpetually to the creditor position, skewing the relationship and stopping the back-and-forth movement between creditor and debtor. Moreover, while the ethical debts of the commissions economy are interest-free, debts in Mansfield Park grow with time, shadowing the structure of interest, because what Fanny must pay back is always greater than what she was originally given. When Fanny arrives at Mansfield, she finds herself perpetually in debt to her wealthy relatives for the kindness and financial assistance they have provided in her upbringing. The novel exposes the moral dangers that result from the concept of “the debts of one’s sex,” a form of debt associated with women for their upbringing (Mansfield Park 366).12 Mansfield Park exposes certain conditions under which reciprocity cannot function. While Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments creates a positive image of human interactions grounded in reciprocity, Austen challenges this vision. Her works show what Finn, in her analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century diaries, describes as “the dual character of credit . . . as a dangerous, degrading source of obligation and as an inevitable component of moralised economic exchange” (67). Taken together, Austen’s letters and novels exemplify this “dual character.”

While my first chapter documents an economy that remains relatively stable, and in which people form affective and mnemonic bonds with circulating objects, my second chapter turns to paper money as a distancing medium between people and things. Focused on international politics, and perhaps anxiously looking ahead to England’s future, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France takes stock of the rise of the assignats in France. This text tells a story of the history of money, and in doing so, it redefines the crucial Romantic aesthetic categories of the sublime and grotesque. The rise of the assignats forces Burke to revisit

12 Parenthetical citations of Mansfield Park will henceforth appear as “MP.”

21 a relationship, only briefly addressed in the Enquiry, between these two closely related categories. Reflections reveals Burke’s awareness that the assignats, which symbolize the French Revolution he despises, embody a troubling sublime potential. Produced in large, inflationary, and even potentially endless quantities, the assignats exemplify the sublime characteristics of gigantic size, formlessness, and infinity. Troubled by paper money’s infinity, Burke theorizes a distinct form of the grotesque, the infinite, deathly grotesque, in order to recategorize the endlessness of the paper economy. The infinite grotesque derives from bodily processes— consumption, vomiting, defecation—and transforms solid, formed things such as gold and land (traditional forms of wealth) into shapeless masses of raw matter. Through these repeated images of bodily process, Burke tells the story of the history of money, its progression from solid things to ephemeral paper. In 1797, the infinite grotesque aesthetic becomes influential beyond Burke, when British caricaturists James Gillray and Richard Newton adapt his aesthetic for their own commentaries on the Bank Restriction Act. Moreover, Burke’s aesthetic allows him to represent, and ultimately condemn, what he saw as a fundamental change in England’s relationship to material culture. Without the solid wealth of estates and gold, society can no longer root itself in emotional bonds with things; thus, society undergoes a corresponding grotesque transformation into a formless mass, a “swinish multitude” (69). Burke’s account of the history of material things in the economy fundamentally intersects with his theories of the central aesthetic categories, sublime and grotesque. It is through these acts of storytelling, through the pressure and anxiety caused by economic change, that Burke’s, Gillray’s, and Newton’s aesthetic theories take shape.13

While Burke’s aesthetic focus is the sublime and grotesque, Chapters 3 and 4 centre on the imagination. Like Burke, Wordsworth perceives a crisis in the relationships between people and things. This new distance poses a problem for Wordsworth, because his model of imagination grounds itself on reciprocal, extended dialogue between the mind and certain material things, a dialogue that ideally forms long-lasting bonds with “enduring” things (Prelude 1.436). Wordsworth’s poetry returns obsessively to descriptions of mnemonic, emotional bonds between people and things such as an oak tree, a pile of stones, and a hiking staff. For

13 My claim that aesthetic theories emerge from pressure or crisis builds on Whale’s argument that concepts of imagination emerge as “a reflex or a reaction to an epistemological, cultural, or representational crisis” (11-2).

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Wordsworth, the distance from these things derives from consumerism. “Michael” contrasts the economy of Michael’s valley, in which few things circulate and with little speed, with the mobile world of consumer commodities outside the Lake District. In Michael’s economy, individuals spend longer periods with particular things, remaining in the same location for extended amounts of time, buying very few belongings, and repairing old tools rather than buying new ones. I read the poem “Michael” not just as a tragedy about the loss of family and traditional rural English identity but also as a loss of a certain culture of being-with-things. Yet, from this tragedy emerges an alternative way of being-with-things and a corresponding alternative model of imagination, adapted to the mobility of consumerism and grounded in “spots of time” and poems, mobile commodities that preserve a place through the very consumer circulation that caused the initial crisis. The tragedy of distance from things thus has an aesthetic solution (poetry). For Burke, too, the solution to this problem is aesthetic: the infinite grotesque allows him at least to represent and comprehend the changes in his economy, as well as offering a vehicle to condemn them.

De Quincey, like Wordsworth, creates a model of imagination adapted to the ephemeral relationships with things promoted by consumerism. Examining De Quincey’s economic theory in addition to that of other economists, I map an important debate in Romantic Britain about the nature of production. Economists defined “productive labour” in a strictly material sense as work that produces a saleable physical thing. While manufacturers are an example of “productive labourers,” “unproductive labourers” include those who generate no tangible product, such as servants, actors, and intellectuals—including authors. Since production equals material creation, consumption acts as its destructive antithesis, depleting or destroying the goods created by labour. Thomas Malthus depicts consumption as the opposite of production; progress is impossible because the need for food will always rise when living conditions and population increase, creating never-ending cycles of famine and death (1). This economic model conceives of things as static entities that retain the same size, shape, and identity until they are consumed. While De Quincey’s economic writings echo Smith’s ideas about productive labour, his literary writings push back against this narrow definition of productivity. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis offer a model of creativity founded on the destruction, rather than the creation, of material things. Echoing but also re-envisioning Wordsworth’s concept of imagination, De Quincey depicts the creative process as grounded in the body, a

23 machine that consumes material things and converts them into immaterial products—a massive processing mechanism not unlike the giant machine in Newton’s caricature, “The New Paper Mill,” which processes formed things into formless, ephemeral matter. De Quincey, an opium addict and thus an avid consumer of imperial imports, adapts pre-existing Romantic models to a society increasingly driven by consumption. De Quincey’s creativity, exemplified by his famous palimpsest, derives its richness from destruction and erasure, continually discarding old layers to make way for new ones in a distinctly consumerist fashion. The palimpsest epitomizes an object that is not static but in constant transformation, passing through cycles of creation, consumption, and transformation. The palimpsest constitutes a fundamentally “grotesque” object—a word De Quincey himself uses to describe it (Suspiria 144)—because it is constantly in the process of transforming, merging with other things, dying, and being reborn.14 The grotesque emerges as a key aesthetic in Romantic literature because it proves crucial for conceiving of the new relationships between people and things. The grotesque helps authors represent and understand the apparent formlessness of their new economy. While De Quincey embraces this aesthetic and Burke and Wordsworth reject it, all three authors respond to the same problem: the sense of material detachment from things. Romantic economies take on a “Romantic” character as De Quincey’s economic discussions become inseparable from his discussions of aesthetics and creativity.

14 My understanding of the grotesque is indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Keiser. See Chapter 2 of this dissertation for more about their arguments.

24

Chapter 1 Bonds, Credit, and Reciprocity: Social Relationships as Debts in Romantic Credit Economies

Before paper money became the primary vehicle for exchange in England, private credit fulfilled this role. Chapter 1 begins here, with an analysis of these older debt economies in the rural British retail system and intimate family circles. Austen’s writings provide a case study for the ways in which objects circulated in these economies, allowing individuals to invest memories and emotions in them as they move. These credit systems model emotional and mnemonic bonding with things prior to perceptions of a major rupture between people and things. Chapter 1 thus functions as a more stable example of how Romantic Britons attached themselves to things, while the following chapter explores perceived threats to this model brought about by paper money. Austen’s predominantly rural lifestyle led her to experience the ubiquity of paper money later than other writers in this study.

In Austen’s letters, detailed accounts of shopping reveal the family practice of purchasing through “commissions”: a private debt economy in which one person, closer to a shopping centre, buys items for another on credit. Acting as economic documents within the Austen circle, the letters divulge the multiple, overlapping systems of credit that structured Austen’s daily experience.15 Private credit not only provided the backbone of the commissions economy but also constituted a standard mode of operating in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British retail. As the letters verify, and as Muldrew, Finn, and Valenze have shown, purchases in stores were commonly enacted through personal credit accounts, which customers had many months to settle.16 Shopkeepers’ ability to judge creditability was premised upon a personal relationship with a client. Within these retail transactions, as in the Austen family commissions, to have a debt with someone was to have a relationship with them. An open account signified a frequent

15 The contrast I draw throughout this chapter between private and public credit is indebted to Natalie Suzanne Roxburgh, whose work I discuss further on page 39. By “private credit,” I refer to transactions between individuals, such as a personal spending account agreed upon between a customer and a shopkeeper, or debts contracted between two family members. This personal debt is distinct from public credit, which involves national or state-level entities such as government deficits and paper money, itself a form of state debt (Brantlinger 35). For my historical information about British retailing, I am indebted to the work of Muldrew, Finn, and Valenze, as well as Hoh- Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Christina Fowler, and others: see page 37. 16 See pages 11-2 for Muldrew’s, Finn’s, and Valenze’s arguments.

25 customer and an ongoing connection; at least one other visit must always be paid to settle the account. Likewise, to be in “Epistolary debt” entailed that another letter must be written (Letters 341). For Austen, the debts created within this personal credit economy forge bonds of trust and intimacy between individuals. Debt not only creates relationships through fiscal transactions but also provides the underlying structure of social bonds. Austen writes to her friend Alethea Bigg, “I think it time there should be a little writing between us, though I beleive [sic] the Epistolary debt is on your side” (Letters 341; emphasis original). “You are quite a visit in my debt, Mr. Bingley,” Mrs. Bennet comments in Pride and Prejudice (341).17 As these remarks imply, structures of obligation give order to the social as well as the financial world, and ethical interaction is premised upon reciprocal exchanges (of visits, letters, greetings). All forms of debt—fiscal, social, emotional, epistolary—must be governed by strict rules of reciprocity, a central moral tenet of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. An ethical bond derives from the constant switching of the debtor and creditor roles—an oscillation that is the inevitable result of reciprocity.18 Rigorous accounting in Austen’s letters helps ensure fairness by carefully tracking outstanding balances of all kinds. The letters reveal the underlying structure of her vision of social relationships as systems of debt and credit.

While Austen’s model of relationships as debts is mostly latent and structural in the letters—manifest in the structure of the commissions economy and the rigorous accounting of social, epistolary, and economic debts—Mansfield Park takes up the debt model of relationships explicitly, making debt-relations one of its central objects of inquiry. Although the phrases “Epistolary Debt” and “a visit in my debt” are common figures of speech, Mansfield Park implies that the importance of debt relationships extends far beyond its role in casual conversation, constituting the central structure for the power relationships in the novel and the framework through which critical moral decisions are made. The commissions economy of the letters depicts credit relationships functioning under healthy conditions, but Mansfield Park complicates this paradigm by drawing attention to the dual nature of debt, its potential for

17 Parenthetical citations of Pride and Prejudice will henceforth appear as “PP.”

18 My concept of the interconnectedness of borrowers and lenders is influenced by Margaret Atwood’s claim that creditors and debtors are “joined at the hip” (150), on either side of a scale that continually moves—at least in a healthy economy—towards balance (163). See further pages 45-6 and 58 of this chapter.

26 oppression as well as intimacy. I challenge the common notion of Austen’s conservatism through close attention to debt in Mansfield Park, demonstrating that the novel critiques traditional notions of gender, Smith’s Enlightenment visions of reciprocity, and the tendency of the English estate to reproduce skewed power relations. While Smith’s model of reciprocity assumes that exchanges occur on a relatively equal playing field, Austen’s reworking of this principle proves more sensitive to pre-existing social contexts. What happens when the debts that structure a relationship are not the gender-neutral dues of the commissions economy, nor the letters owing between two sisters, but instead what Miss Crawford calls “the debts of one’s sex,” a type of obligation based in uneven social relations and associated specifically with women (MP 366)? Interactions between two individuals may constitute in and of themselves a miniature economy of social debts—an exchange of visits, favours, letters—but in Mansfield Park, these smaller economies always intersect with larger ones. Pre-existing social disparities come to the foreground: adopted from a poorer family and constantly reminded that she is “not a Miss Bertram,” Fanny Price is burdened by a constant, ever-growing debt to the Bertrams for her upbringing (42; emphasis original). Mr. Crawford, too, tries to use his higher social status to make Fanny his perpetual debtor. By basing her model of relationships on the overarching structure of debt, Austen implies a concept of interaction that is necessarily premised upon asymmetry, on one person being obliged to another. However, this asymmetry does not become pernicious when, as in the letters, obligation is constantly switching hands, the debtor and the creditor always swapping roles to create a balance of imbalances. Mansfield Park dramatizes the difference between, on the one hand, a perpetual asymmetry resulting from a balance of imbalances, and on the other, an infinite asymmetry resulting from never-ending debts held solely on one side. Debt still fosters ties between individuals in Mansfield Park, but these are ties of a different nature: of restraint and limitation. Moreover, while ethical debts involve no interest—the amount owed always equals the original amount given, whether a letter for another letter of the same size, or a fifteen-minute visit for another visit of the same length—Fanny’s perpetual debts in Mansfield Park grow with time. By continually accumulating, her debts take on the structure of interest. Austen describes Mr. Crawford as having “deepest interest” in Fanny (MP 307; emphasis original), a word that bears the common sense of personal concern but also the financial implication of ownership, of “having a right or title to, a claim upon, or a share in” (OED, def. I.1). While Austen’s letters imply the potential of reciprocity and interest-free debts

27 to forge positive bonds of intimacy, her fiction signals an awareness of certain social conditions under which reciprocity ceases to function as it should.

1.1 The Commissions Economy: Forging Bonds of Debt and Intimacy

Although shopping commissions appear throughout Austen’s novels, her correspondence provides the best insight into this miniature economy. The letters themselves played an essential role in the Austen family as documents for ordering, accounting, and transferring money and goods within this network. Yet, despite the wealth of information these letters contain, their critical history has often been one of undervaluation.19 H. W. Garrod famously criticizes the “feminine triviality” of Austen’s subject matter (36) and suggests that rather than discussing political events (33), Austen’s letters contain “wearying lengths in which one meets nothing but the most uninspired talk about petticoats and drawing-room curtains, colds, coquelicots and magnesia” (34). Even E. M. Forster, who elsewhere professed himself a “Jane Austenite” (“The Six Novels” 148), reviewed R. W. Chapman’s 1932 edition of the letters unfavourably, finding the correspondence full of “trivialities” rather than “public affairs”: “balls, officers, giggling, dresses, officers, balls, fill sheet after sheet” (“The Letters” 158, 161, 159). What neither Garrod nor Forster recognize is that Austen’s depictions of these bonnets, dresses, petticoats, and curtains are far from trivial, nor can they be separated from public affairs. Through the rigorous description, documentation, and accounting of these material things, Austen’s letters reveal a map for her representation of social relations as a system of debt and credit. Far from being separate from public life, Austen’s depiction of debt engages with public debates in which Smith, Burke, Burney, Edgeworth, and Godwin participated, as well as with the transforming economy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.20

19 For a complete publication history of Austen’s correspondence, see Jo Modert (“Letters/Correspondence” 272-3), and for the letters’ earliest (Victorian) reception, see Stephanie Moss. Victorian responses tended to be less depreciative than some of the early twentieth-century ones: after the publication of Lord Brabourne’s first major edition of the letters in 1884, Victorian readers used Austen’s correspondence to romanticize her biography as part of a “simpler life” in an imagined, nostalgic past (Moss 261). 20 By adding Burney and Edgeworth here, I am drawing on Catherine Gallagher—see pages 57-8 of this chapter.

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More could also be added to recent critical re-evaluations of Austen’s letters. Often drawing on feminist theory, this scholarship does the important work of reclaiming the value of Austen’s epistles and freeing them from previous associations with “feminine triviality” (Garrod 36). One angle of reappraisal, adopted by Deborah Kaplan, Carol Houlihan Flynn, and Susan Whealler, highlights the letters’ importance as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s writing that engages with, for example, the politics of the public and private spheres and the cultural “doubleness” experienced by women of Austen’s social status (Kaplan, “Representing” 212).21 Other commentators stress the significance of what Austen calls “little matters” (bonnets, petticoats, social events, and other minutiae of daily life) by suggesting their usefulness for either historical studies or analyses of Austen’s novels (Letters 162, 186).22 These more recent studies of Austen’s correspondence are valuable, and the feminist reclamations essential. But so much of the importance of these letters—as instances of social and monetary accounting and a map of Austen’s model of social relationships—remains unexplored.23 Even critics who focus on

21 Kaplan argues that the letters express the “doubleness” experienced by women of Austen’s rank, who inhabited both the male-dominated gentry culture (of which Austen’s family was a part), and a “women’s culture,” which called attention to and sometimes challenged female subordination (“Representing” 212, 215, 211). Flynn maintains that Austen’s correspondence engages with conflicting power structures of class and gender (n. pag.), and Whealler explores how the epistolary medium allowed those without public authority to speak about those in control (184; 193). See also Suzanne Juhasz, who likewise reclaims the letters on feminist grounds: details such as “bonnets and balls” were the subject matter of Austen’s domestic life, and were only thought trivial because considered “feminine” (86). 22 According to Modert, the “little matters” provide a valuable index to the life of the rural gentry in Austen’s time (“Letters/Correspondence” 271-2), and for Kathryn Sutherland the letters “are the key to everything,” the source of the “raw data” that Austen transforms into her novels (18). See also the following scholars who have implicitly or explicitly reclaimed the value of Austen’s correspondence on other grounds, such as aesthetic, linguistic, and book- historical. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade uses the letters as tools for unearthing Austen’s “linguistic identity” (5), William May charts the importance of Austen’s letters to twentieth-century women writers, Joseph Kestner focuses on what the letters teach us about the epistolary forms and processes, and Arthur Axelrad offers a bibliographical manuscript-study of the Austen-Crosby correspondence. 23 In my survey of criticism on fashion and shopping in Austen’s writings, I have not found an extended analysis of the commissions and their importance as part of a miniature credit economy. Some studies address other aspects of fashion besides credit purchases, such as how attitudes towards dress reveal character in Austen’s novels (Clair Hughes); the relationship between clothing and self-fashioning, agency, and identity (Ford; Li-ching Chen); and how fashion serves as a vehicle for Austen’s representations of popular culture (Timothy Erwin; Tamara Wagner). Others focus on historical information about particular styles and trends, often drawing on the letters and novels for evidence (Byrde’s Jane Austen Fashion; Lise Rodgers; Antje Blank; Jeffrey Nigro). Some commentators mention the shopping commissions in passing but only to make a brief historical note that these orders were practiced by the Austen family, without exploration of the social implications of the commissions or their connection to larger issues such as credit and friendship (for example, see Elaine Bander 119-20; Juhasz 88-9; David Selwyn 219, 221; Byrde’s “Dress and Fashion” 131; Mary Hafner-Laney 142; Hughes 187). Terry Castle mentions the Austen sisters’ practice of buying fabrics for one another in passing (n. pag.), as does Roy Porter in “Pre-Modernism and the Art of Shopping” (8), but neither explores the significance of the commissions.

29 shopping and fashion in Austen’s letters, such as Susan Allen Ford, Suzanne Juhasz, Penelope Byrde, and others, either do not mention or discuss only briefly the crucial shopping “commissions” that fill vast portions of the letters—and it is these commissions that reveal the miniature economy of epistolary credit that was so integral to Austen’s life and writings.24

An analysis of debt in Austen’s writings contributes to the classic discussion of Austen’s politics by casting doubt on the notion of her conservatism. In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler argues that Austen’s novels belong to what was a set genre in the partisan time in which she wrote: the “conservative” class of novels, which follow a regular formula of attacking the “cult of self” associated with sentimentalism and liberalism (3, 88). “Mansfield Park,” Butler maintains, “is the most visibly ideological” of Austen’s works, and follows the genre of “anti- jacobin novels” (218). Butler contrasts Austen’s “acquiescent” heroines—with their virtues of duty, self-abnegation, and control—with the free speaking and independent heroines of reformists such as Godwin, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft (xvi). Fanny’s silences (such as when she refuses to tell Tom Bertram not to act in Lovers’ Vows, or to tell Edmund not to

24 We can find some foundation for analyzing private bonds of debt in another subfield of scholarship on Austen’s correspondence, which focuses on the intimate relationships between sisters and friends created by Austen’s letters. Castle’s “Sister-Sister,” a review of Deirdre Le Faye’s 1995 edition of the letters, argues that the correspondence between Jane and Cassandra Austen attests to “the primitive adhesiveness—and underlying eros—of the sister-sister bond” (n. pag.). “Sister-Sister” prompted substantial controversy, as well as additional responses of all sorts from contributors ranging from Claudia Johnson to J. G. A. Pocock (although this controversy arose in part due to a London Review of Books headline not chosen by Castle, which read “Was Jane Austen Gay?”). The series of responses can be found on the online text of “Sister-Sister,” at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n15/terry-castle/sister- sister. Making a similar point about intimate female friendships, Juhasz describes the nature of Austen’s epistolary relationships: “Austen’s newsy gossip surely conveys information, but it functions more profoundly to maintain the connection itself between the separated sisters. It gives linguistic shape to the texture of their habitual interaction, and serves as a kind of emotional shorthand to offer and ask for affection” (84-5). Just as Juhasz proposes, the letters give linguistic form to a relationship, one premised upon a reciprocal system of social exchange (in their purpose to “offer and ask for affection”). What remains to be explored about these social bonds is their economic dimension, their inherent structure as debt and credit. The modelling of reciprocal social exchange in the letters is deeply rooted in a particular culture of “getting and spending”: a system of private, domestic, and epistolary lending. Yet, while Wordsworth’s conception of “getting and spending” laments the collapsed distinction between commerce and social, psychological life, for Austen the interconnectedness of the economic and the social is not a deadening consequence of modern consumerism but simply results from the parallel principles of reciprocity and trust, debt and repayment, that unify her visions of ethical economic and social behaviour. For more in this field of women’s friendships, epistolarity, and Austen, see Kaplan’s “Female Friendship and Epistolary Form” and her book, Jane Austen Among Women. Maggie Gover also studies the linguistic strategies Austen uses to create a “bond” with her readers in both her letters and novels (3). See also Janet Todd, who discusses female ties in Austen’s correspondence but points out some of the tensions within these relationships; and Robert Mack, who analyzes the relationships between Austen family members from a different perspective, arguing that the body of Austen family writing encouraged the Austens to think of themselves as a “corporate entity” by fostering “a peculiar kind of writerly ‘corporateness’” within the family (37, 34).

30 court Miss Crawford) constitute for Butler “the appropriate social demeanour of the Christian heroine, who is humble and unassertive” (240). Yet, the recurring theme of debt in Mansfield Park casts doubt upon these claims. Fanny’s silences are far more complex than virtuous humbleness or moral strength, and they are not always “appropriate” or right. Butler overlooks how in the telling scene from the east room, Fanny’s reticence with Edmund does not arise from virtue but rather from the sudden intervention of “debt” into her train of thought as she looks at all the presents given to her by her cousins (173). When Mr. Crawford proposes to Fanny after heaping obligation upon her, it is then that Austen tells us Fanny is “more silent than ever” (311). Fanny’s reserve derives from conditions both economic and social (since the distinction between a financial and a social relationship, a debt and a bond, does not exist for Austen). Though not a product of her own failings but of social/economic conditions, Fanny’s silence in the east room is also not the virtuous course of action because it contributes to Edmund’s participation in the theatrics.

My reading of Mansfield Park aligns more closely with Claudia Johnson’s interpretation of the politics of the novel, although my focus on the letters differentiates my argument from Johnson’s by promoting a more favourable view of gratitude in Austen’s writings. I agree with Johnson’s claim that Austen’s novels, like many written in the 1790s, cannot be neatly categorized as either Jacobin or anti-Jacobin (xxi). Johnson stresses the dark side of Sir Thomas’s benevolence (he always reminds Fanny she is not a Bertram, and his finances depend on slavery [98]) and points to the disturbing qualities in Fanny’s unquestioning submission to male authority (111) and her preoccupation with “gratitude” (107). According to Johnson, while conservative writers saw gratitude towards benefactors as a core component of morality, Austen “explores the sinister aspects of benevolence and the burden of gratitude it places on a recipient” (107). Austen does dramatize the consequences of what Johnson calls the “burden of gratitude” when excessive obligations arise from skewed, one-sided relationships; however, I argue that Austen’s depiction of gratitude is not only “sinister,” as Johnson describes it, but also a positive emotion under the right circumstances. The letters teach us that under conditions of proper reciprocity, gratitude remains an important form of affective return. Austen’s correspondence repeatedly offers “gratitude” as partial payment for epistolary debts. In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney first becomes interested in Catherine Morland out of “gratitude” for her attentions to him, which later becomes a deeper attachment (180). We have only to look within Mansfield Park to

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Edmund’s treatment of Fanny for an example of Austen’s idea of a healthier emotional economy. As we will see in my third section, Edmund’s acts of kindness towards Fanny are committed “quietly,” in pointed contrast to Mr. Crawford’s “more prominent attentions” (262). Edmund, unlike Mr. Crawford, does not exaggerate his creditor role to create an impression of an unpayable debt demanding an ever-growing return. Edmund acknowledges Fanny’s reciprocations—her valuable acts of caring for his mother, her thoughtful conversations, her acts of moral virtue, her gratitude and thanks—and does not regard Fanny as his perpetual debtor, but rather as a sometimes-debtor, sometimes-creditor with whom he exchanges affects, communications, and acts of kindness. My findings from a study of debt in Austen’s writings do not go so far as Johnson to conclude that Mansfield Park is a “bitter parody of conservative fiction” whose enterprise “is to turn the conservative myth sour” (96, 97).

An analysis of debt in Austen’s writings should begin with her correspondence, in which the shopping “commission” functions as a source and product of trust, building fiscal and emotional bonds in small communities. Austen’s use of the word “commission” is well known in the context of authority granted to an officer in the navy (“Commission,” def. 2.b), but a “commission” could also refer to “[a] charge or matter entrusted to any one to perform” (“Commission,” def. 9).25 The sense of “entrus[t]” in this definition is essential. A straightforward example of a commission appears in one of Austen’s letters to her sister Cassandra: “If anybody wants anything in Town, they must send their Commissions to Frank, as I shall merely pass thro’ it.—The Tallow Chandler is Penlington, at the Crown & Beehive Charles Street, Covent Garden” (11). Here, Austen asks Cassandra and other relatives to send their requests for purchases (such as tallow candles) to her brother Frank, in advance of his trip to London.26 In another epistle, Austen writes: “I am glad I had no means of sending this

25 “Commission” also had another, related application to business specifically: “Authority given to act as agent or factor for another in the conduct of business or trade; the system of trading in which a dealer acts as agent for another, generally receiving a percentage as his remuneration” (“Commission,” def. 10; emphasis original). This meaning refers not to a shopping order itself, but to either the business commission system as a whole or the authority to act as an agent; also, this type of commission typically involved a percentage remuneration system. Hence, this is not the definition used by Austen in the letters, but this commercial signification—with its associations with business and trade—may have inflected her use of the word. 26 Throughout this chapter, I am indebted to Deirdre Le Faye’s “Biographical Index” for the identities of people mentioned in the letters, and to her “Topographical Index” for the locations of many places. These indexes can be found in Le Faye’s fourth edition of the letters.

32 yesterday, as I am now able to thank you for executing my Commissions so well.—I like the Gown very much & my Mother thinks it very ugly.—I like the Stockings also very much” (53). In the case of this commission, Cassandra went to the store personally to choose items for her sister, then ordered for the goods to be sent through the mail. The letters indicate that the Austen family constantly sent parcels and objects to one another through the post: “The Parcel arrived safely . . . I send 4 pr of Silk Stockgs” (313). Commission lists were often highly elaborate and consumed substantial time and energy: “Fanny has had a Letter full of Commissions from Goodnestone; we shall be busy about them & her own matters I dare say from 12 till 4” (312). Two days later, Austen recounts attending to this “Letter full of Commissions”: “we were very busy all yesterday; from ½ past 11 to 4 in the Streets, working almost entirely for other people, driving from Place to Place after a parcel for Sandling which we could never find, & encountering the miseries of Grafton House to get a purple frock for Eleanor Bridges” (313). While this particular list of commissions was unusually long and laborious, Austen’s dutiful trudging throughout town demonstrates that she nonetheless viewed commissions as an unquestionable duty, as others had entrusted her with their money and needs. Debt constitutes the foundation of commissions because the person carrying out the commission pays for the goods up front, therefore creating a debt owed by the person who initially requested the commission. It is the responsibility of the initial requester to pay back the individual who carried out the commission for them. In addition to a form of debt, commissions were also seen as a favour or kindness enacted by one friend for another.

As economic documents in a private credit system, the letters provide detailed documentations of commodities for ordering purposes, as well as extensive pricing information. The orders are highly specific: “a plain brown cambric muslin, for morning wear; . . . Buy two brown ones, if you please, and both of a length, but one longer than the other—it is for a tall woman. Seven yards for my mother, seven yards and a half for me; a dark brown” (81). In one epistle Austen sends Cassandra a hand-drawn image of a pattern alongside an analysis of the costs: My Cloak is come home, & here follows the pattern of its’ [sic] lace.—If you do not think it wide enough, I can give 3d a yard more for yours, & not go beyond the two Guineas, for my Cloak altogether does not cost quite two pounds . . . A plumb or green gage would cost three shillings;—Cherries & Grapes about 5 I believe (44)

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As the phrase “not go beyond the two Guineas” suggests, the sisters had negotiated a pre- arranged price; such conversations were part of the continual collaboration involved in this collective spending culture. Letters not only kept track of the family debts but also repaid them by sending money through the mail: “[Eliza] will write to you & send you your Money next Sunday” (79); “I enclose the Eighteen pence due to my Mother” (232).

Through borrowing, one individual builds a relationship of trust with another. To have a debt with someone is to have a relationship with that person, a reason for further communication and a reason to write. Since the sixteenth century, the term “bond” has signified either a type of debt (“A deed, by which A . . . binds himself, his heirs, executors, or assigns to pay a certain sum of money to B”) or a union (“A uniting or cementing force or influence by which a union of any kind is maintained”) (“Bond,” def. III.9.a, II.7.a). In Austen’s writings, debt “binds” one person to another in this double sense of fiscal obligation and social union. Under radically uneven social conditions as in Mansfield Park, debt can also tie two people together in a third sense of “bond”: as a “shackle, chain, fetter” (“Bond,” def. I.1.a). Whether fostering a positive intimacy or a troubling restraint, being in debt attaches one individual to another.

Unlike the specific type of indebtedness Fanny experiences in Mansfield Park, the bonds of debt fostered by the commissions economy are most often positive ones of social union. For Austen and her community, credit-based shopping strengthened networks of friendship not only through trust, but also through the collaborative efforts involved in planning, purchasing, and making material things. The commissions economy provides a clear example of the emotional and mnemonic bonding between people and things that lies at the core of this dissertation. Before completion, a single item of clothing would pass through multiple hands, allowing several members of a circle to invest energy, memory, and decision-making into the item at different phases, from the choice of a fabric, to the actual trip to the store, to the eventual working of the purchased fabrics into a garment. As Byrde points out, very few garments were bought ready- made in stores, as the practice was for customers to sew together the clothing themselves (“Dress and Fashion” 131). We can detect the importance of collaboration when Jane Austen instructs Cassandra to buy two brown muslins, but adds that “the kind of brown is left to your own choice, and I had rather they were different, as it will always be something to say, to dispute about which is the prettiest” (81). Austen leaves part of the decision-making up to her sister, and the result of Cassandra’s choice will provide an occasion for further conversation in disputing which fabric is

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“the prettiest.” As Juhasz phrases it, the objects purchased and exchanged by the Austen circle “will help maintain connection over the miles and weeks of separation; so will the words about them” (88-9). Ford likewise articulates: “a garment acquires its own narrative history. A gown over which [Austen] and Cassandra apparently disagree, makes its way through a number of letters during November of 1800, and the opinions collected define a community, humorously exemplifying vagaries of taste and attitudinal shifts” (220). Austen succinctly expresses this communal investment of energy when she remarks that she has “contributed the marking to Uncle H.’s shirts, & now they are a complete memorial of the tender regard of many” (345). This collectivity, derived through joint participation in multiple phases of an economic system, recalls Smith’s conception of the division of labour in The Wealth of Nations. For Smith, mobile economic systems function as media of interconnectivity. The greater the division of labour and mobility of goods, the more commercial objects are shaped by a wide range of workers around the country: Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country!! (bk. 1, ch. 1, par. 11) The commissions in Austen’s letters constitute a miniature version of Smith’s economy, involving an investment of effort with every act of ordering, deciding, purchasing, and sewing together. The reliance of the Austen family on private credit, rather than cash, belongs to an older economy in which bonds between individuals and their belongings remained relatively intact.

While Austen’s letters depict the collaborative structure of the commissions, her novels more explicitly employ the language of trust when depicting credit as a source of intimacy. The

35 novels emphasize two ways in which commissions depend upon faith in another person: confidence in the other person’s ability to spend one’s money honestly and wisely, and confidence in their taste to make the right choices. From among the several instances of commissions in Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey and Emma provide the most useful examples.27 In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney astonishes Mrs. Allen by guessing the price of the fabric of her dress. She replies, “Do you understand Muslins, sir?” “Particularly well; I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a yard for it, and a true Indian muslin.” (16; emphasis mine) As implied by Mr. Tilney’s phrase “my sister has often trusted me,” commissions derive from (and strengthen) relationships of confidence in terms of taste and accountable spending. Mr. Tilney makes a point of establishing his creditability in both of these areas, proving his taste by declaring himself “an excellent judge” of fabrics, and his fiscal responsibility by asserting his capacity to find a “prodigious bargain.”28

Beyond demonstrating the role of trust and creditability in commissions, this exchange between Mr. Tilney and Mrs. Allen begins to suggest a second key point: the commissions were not associated with a particular gender. The letters affirm that both men and women readily participated. As Jane Austen tells Cassandra, family members must “send their Commissions to Frank” (11). Austen’s father was another regular borrower and lender.29 Independently of the women in the circle, men also participated in transactions with one another: “Henry desires Edward may know that he has just bought 3 dozen of Claret for him (Cheap) & ordered it to be

27 The other commissions occur in Sense and Sensibility (70), Persuasion (116, 154), and Mansfield Park (312). 28 Cf. Hughes (188ff), Nigro (53-4), and Wagner (262-3) for other perspectives on this conversation between Mr. Tilney and Mrs. Allen. 29 The letters indicate the involvement of Austen’s father: “My father approves his Stockings very highly—& finds no fault with any part of Mrs Hancock’s bill except the charge of 3s. 6d. for the Packing box” (53).

36 sent down to Chawton” (222-3).30 The transactions that occur between all members of the circle exemplify the perpetual, back-and-forth see-saw of reciprocity that my next section will identify as crucial to Austen’s ethics. Participants continually swap the roles of debtor and creditor, borrower and lender. A debt is created, paid, recreated, added to, lessened—and all the while kept accountable with careful written records.

Austen’s most extended fictional commission occurs in Emma, where it is again executed by a male character. Mr. Elton is honoured with an important shopping quest, this time specifically called a “commission” (39, 55). When Emma Woodhouse draws a portrait of her friend Harriet Smith, the company decides that a frame must now be purchased in London. Eager to foster intimacy and a potential marriage between Harriet and Mr. Elton, Emma entrusts Mr. Elton with this charge. He happily accepts, viewing this as a precious opportunity to become closer not to Harriet, but to Emma, whom he secretly admires: The next thing wanted was to get the picture framed; and here were a few difficulties. It must be done directly; it must be done in London; the order must go through the hands of some intelligent person whose taste could be depended on; and Isabella, the usual doer of all commissions, must not be applied to, because it was December . . . But no sooner was the distress known to Mr. Elton, than it was removed. His gallantry was always on the alert. “Might he be trusted with the commission, what infinite pleasure should he have in executing it! he could ride to London at any time. It was impossible to say how much he should be gratified by being employed on such an errand.” (39; emphases mine) As in Northanger Abbey, the word “trusted” describes Mr. Elton’s acceptance of the charge. The executor of this commission must be “some intelligent person whose taste could be depended on” because they must make important collaborative choices such as “chuse the frame and give the directions” (39). It is because of the powerful ability of private credit transactions to create intimacy that Mr. Elton is infinitely “gratified” to take up this venture. Soon after, he is seen departing for London with a highly satisfied air, telling those he encounters that he has been given “a very enviable commission and [is] the bearer of something exceedingly precious” (55). Unfortunately, this triangular commission also has the desired effect of creating a bond of

30 Another letter relates how Edward has purchased a new watch and gun for George (237).

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(misguided) affection for Harriet. When Mr. Elton returns, admiring the prized portrait, Harriet finds forming in her mind “as strong and steady an attachment as her youth and sort of mind admitted” (55). The Harriet-Emma-Elton triangle demonstrates not only that commissions were undertaken by men but also that the bonds forged by credit at times intensified into romantic relationships. Mr. Elton’s use of the word “errand” also shows that commissions were viewed as favours undertaken by one friend for another.

By overlapping with the larger British retailing economy, commissions came into contact with the payment systems employed in retail transactions. Yet, far from being at odds with the credit system of the commissions, this larger retail economy itself involved systems of private debt and credit. Muldrew, Finn, and Valenze have shown that the paper money economy was preceded not only by metal coins but also by the more abstract medium of private credit, the dominant form of exchange in early modern and eighteenth-century England.31 In part due to coin shortages, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century retailers allowed frequent buyers to purchase using a personal account, sometimes permitting them up to nine months to pay (Selwyn 220). Christina Fowler describes one mid-eighteenth-century retailer who acted as an unofficial banker for local customers, lending out money for interest (n. pag.). Customer accounts were premised upon trust and depended on the shopkeeper’s ability to judge a person’s creditability and capacity to repay the money (Fowler n. pag.). While debt was common, it was not the sole currency: paper money circulated in England throughout the eighteenth century, though still exchangeable with gold until the Bank Restriction Act of 1797, and metal coins also circulated, though they were hard to obtain, unstandardized, and “clipped, bitten, counterfeited, chucked, and generally abused” (Valenze 1). Towards the end of the eighteenth century, urbanization and increases in the number of customers, along with greater availability of coins, initiated a shift towards “ready-money” (cash) payments rather than credit: “As the numbers of customers increased, so the skill of assessing each person’s worth became more difficult. The outward appearance of a customer was not necessarily a good indication of a client’s financial standing. Much depended on the skill of the shopkeeper, as possibly the greatest risk to retailers at this time was bad debt” (Fowler n. pag.). Mui and Mui highlight one shopkeeper’s need to keep “a

31 Historians Hoh-Cheung Mui and Mui have also shown that private credit was “characteristic of commercial relations” in the period (24).

38 weather eye on customers whose credit was shaky,” as dealers became increasingly wary about offering credit to customers, sometimes even requesting an enquiry into a buyer’s character and situation beforehand (215, 25). Retailers responded to these difficulties by either switching to ready-money or devising ways to continue allowing credit with stricter controls, such as pre- printed forms to notify clients of outstanding balances (Fowler n. pag.). Customers ordering items through the mail were still able to purchase with credit (Selwyn 220).

Spanning the period of 1796 to 1817, Austen’s letters indicate that she and her family frequently purchased through the credit system. When executing a commission, a family member sometimes paid for the goods immediately, expecting reimbursement later (“You are only eighteen pence in my debt”), and sometimes sent both the items and the bill directly to the issuer of the commission (Letters 123). “Martha sends her Love to Henry,” Austen writes, “& tells him that he will soon have a Bill of Miss Chaplin’s, about £14—to pay on her account” (168). “Miss Chaplin” was presumably a London retailer, perhaps a lace-dealer,32 with whom, evidently, members of the Austen circle had ongoing “account[s].” “Mr. Herington,” who was likely a grocer, is another shopkeeper with whom the Austens had regular dealings. Austen sends Cassandra an outstanding bill due to Mr. Herington: “I enclose Mr Heringtons Bill & receipt” (222). Like family shopping orders, retail credit operated on the basis of personal relationships. Austen was individually acquainted with these retailers; one letter relates a conversation she had with Mr. Herrington about disappointing currants (218). In Emma, characters chat with Mrs. Ford when visiting “Ford’s,” the fashionable store (184-5). In the retail economy, to have a debt was to have a relationship: with an ongoing account, there would always be reason for another visit, another purchase, another conversation about currants—at the very least, as long as there were dues outstanding, a minimum of one further interaction would be required to settle the account. Debts created social and economic networks both within the family and without, in a larger “nation of shopkeepers.”33

32 Here as throughout this chapter, Le Faye’s “Biographical Index” is my source for the occupations and identities of people in the letters, such as Miss Chaplin and Mr. Herington.

33 We should note that the trust involved in the credit system was by no means infallible. Though borrowing and lending relationships functioned upon the ideal of confidence, that faith was sometimes breached, and not every customer/shopkeeper relationship was a good one. As Fowler indicates, “bad debt” was a constant risk for

39

While Austen’s letters document frequent uses of retail client accounts, they also capture a society at the beginning of a transition, as private credit began to give way to cash. We can observe this change when Austen writes in one of her later letters, from 1813: “Harriot, in a letter to Fanny today, enquires whether they sell Cloths for Pelisses at Bedford House . . . but if it is a ready money house it will not do, for . . . she cannot pay for it immediately” (259; emphasis original). Austen’s underlining of “ready money” implies the newness, and perhaps unfamiliarity, of this term and concept. Fowler affirms that around this time, the “ready money house” was becoming a popular trend, often advertised loudly in newspapers: one 1806 retail advertisement in the Hampshire Chronicle (Hampshire was Austen’s home for much of her life) declared, “N. B. FOR READY MONEY ONLY” (qtd. in Fowler n. pag.). This moment in the letters suggests that soon, these economies of private credit will be replaced by “ready-money” economies of paper cash; this foreshadows the chapters ahead, as we explore perceived ruptures in pre-existing economies caused by paper credit, viewed as a threat to the ways in which individuals invest memories and emotions in things. The change to paper money, the cause of such outrage for Burke in Chapter 2, is just beginning for Austen. While her credit economy remains mostly intact, hints of future change appear sporadically in her letters.

As scholars have noted, this transition from credit to cash necessitated a shift from placing trust in individuals, such as Mr. Herington and the Austens, to putting trust in institutions such as the British state and the Bank of England, whose paper currency was mandatory during the Restriction period of 1797-1821. Patrick Brantlinger has shown that paper currency was itself a form of government debt, in effect a promissory note based in the belief that the state could someday redeem the bills for gold and silver (35). Modern money “originates in debt and is always a statement of debt,” as Brantlinger claims (35), but paper notes represent debts of another kind than those agreed upon by Austen and Mr. Herington. Under the ready-money system, instead of trusting an individual to pay later, a retailer accepted immediate payment through coins or paper money, implying a greater faith in state forms of credit than private ones. Public debt still involved trust and bonding of a sort, but in this case one’s relationship was with the nation and with the “public good” (Roxburgh 16). Natalie Suzanne Roxburgh figures the

shopkeepers (n. pag.). Lynch points out that some shoppers deliberately abused the credit system by purchasing goods without any plan to pay for them (“Counter” 223).

40 change from private to public credit as a move from “a familiar handshake between two trustworthy associates to a belief in the power and authority of the state” (16). Unlike private transactions, public credit was virtual and abstract, and it required “a translation of trust in tangible people to trust in abstractions meant to stand in for people: the Bank, the nation, the state, the public, and so on” (Roxburgh 8-9). Public opinion was the secret to state forms of debt such as paper money, Edward Copeland argues, observing that in the rising public credit economy, “the public were asked to believe in the soundness of public credit (or the national debt), something they could neither see nor understand” (122). England’s rising public debt system, then, was a third credit economy that intersected with the private lending systems of retailing and family commissions. This third economy has been the subject of several literary studies, such as Brantlinger’s Fictions of State, Lynch’s Economy of Character, and Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy.34

A focus on private credit in Austen’s letters, along with selected passages from her novels, demonstrates the positive potential of debt and its ability to form bonds of trust—under the right conditions. However, Austen’s fiction reveals the darker side of debt when these ideal circumstances are missing.

1.2 “Epistolary Debt” and Ethics: Accountable Relationships

For Austen, it is not simply that monetary debts deepen human ties but also that social relationships in and of themselves constitute a form of debt. Personal interactions adhere to the same language, logic, and ethical codes. Thus, in addition to the fiscal lending systems of shopping commissions, British retailing, and the public credit economy, the letters engage with another, interconnected credit economy of social debts. Just as paying a polite visit requires the

34 Brantlinger, beginning his study in 1694 when the Bank of England was established, maintains that the development of public credit was instrumental to the founding and financing of the modern nation state (3). He also turns his attention to private debts in the Victorian chapter of Fictions of State. Lynch explores how literary characters helped mitigate the impersonality of new financial “mechanisms of credit and currency” (13), such as paper bills (97), increasing reliance on credit in the English economy (96), and national debt (201). Finally, Poovey’s study illuminates the roles played by different types of writing (imaginative, economic, monetary) in helping Britons understand novel forms of value in “the new credit economy” (1).

41 other party to repay the call in future (it is to be “a visit in . . . debt” [PP 341]), sending a letter puts one’s correspondent into what Austen calls “Epistolary debt”: the obligation to reciprocate with another letter, ideally one that matches the length, thoughtfulness, and quality of the original (Letters 341). Through her representation of social dues and epistolary obligation, Austen establishes the ethical codes to which relationships ought to adhere—although, as we will see in the next section, they do not always do so. In order to be ethical, all forms of credit transactions—financial, social, epistolary—must be on the one hand governed by firm rules of reciprocity, and on the other hand subjected to a stringent accounting process. Healthy debts are also interest free. The amount given back must not be larger than the original amount given. If an individual receives a letter, they repay it with another of the same length. As with the monetary debts involved in commissions, letters act as economic texts by keeping track of social and epistolary balances. Since so many behaviours require reciprocation, Austen’s social accounting becomes fascinatingly infinite. Sending a letter pays off one’s previous “Epistolary debt” but immediately puts the recipient into that state. The act of writing a letter (which itself acts as an account) inevitably unbalances the accounts. The letters enact an endless borrowing and lending, always accompanied by a detailed accounting of the outstanding dues—accounts which can never fully be balanced, since it is impossible to end the social obligation cycle without ending the relationship. Nor, in the case of loved ones such as Cassandra, would Austen want the account to be balanced, since a debt is a relationship, and to be in epistolary debt means another letter must be written; to be in social debt means another visit must be paid, and the closing of an account signifies the end of a “bond,” in the many senses of this word. However, despite the impossibility (or undesirability) of balancing the debits and credits, the impulse to keep track of these accounts persists. The ethical bond is built on infinite asymmetry, rooted in an endless approach towards balance that is inevitably derailed by the constant switching of the debtor/creditor roles. Establishing the ethics of Austen’s model of relationships-as-debt brings to the foreground what goes awry with obligation in Mansfield Park. Fanny’s radically different, lopsided relationships with the Bertrams and Mr. Crawford in Mansfield Park highlight the difference between, on the one hand, a perpetual asymmetry deriving from the back-and-forth of reciprocity, and on the other hand, an infinite obligation resulting from unpayable debts held

42 solely on one side. Fanny’s debts also grow with time, shadowing the structure of interest. What she owes is often more than what she has been given.35

Austen’s letters keep careful accounts of affective reciprocations and frequently offer gratitude as recompense for social dues. Pointing to the “social and fiscal ‘debt’” that Fanny owes the Bertrams for raising her, Lise Gaston argues (building on William Deresiewicz) that emotions can serve as a form of repayment in Austen’s writings: Fanny offers gratitude as an affective return for what she has received from the Bertrams (n. pag.).36 One of Austen’s letters gives both thankfulness and a longer sheet of paper (and thus a lengthier reply) as a combined remuneration for a particularly pleasant letter: “Your letter was a most agreeable surprize to me to day, & I have taken a long sheet of paper to shew my Gratitude” (16). We can witness Austen’s impulse to keep accurate social accounts when she provides Cassandra a detailed description of a local villager’s gratefulness for her brother’s charity: “The shift is for Betty Dawkins . . . . She is one of the most grateful of all whom Edward’s charity has reached, or at least she expresses herself more warmly than the rest, for she sends him a ‘sight of thanks’” (52). Unable to reciprocate this physical offering of clothing in the same material form (with money or with another object), Betty Dawkins instead gives the affective return of a “sight of thanks”— meaning a “show or display” of gratitude (“Sight,” def. I.2.a). The most striking instance of social account-keeping in the letters, however, occurs when Austen corrects the records regarding the amount of gratitude owing to Mrs. Knight, a rich relation who adopted Austen’s brother Edward as the family heir (Jones xxv). Edward’s situation with the Knight family was not unlike Fanny’s adopted membership in the Bertram family in Mansfield Park. Describing Edward’s inheritance, Austen expresses the importance of keeping stringent records of social dues: “Mrs Knights [sic] giving up the Godmersham Estate to Edward was no such prodigious act of Generosity after all it seems, for she has reserved herself an income out of it still;—this ought

35 For the multiple significations of the word “account” and the link between accounting and ethics, I am indebted to Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. Butler draws on the varying meanings of giving “an account of oneself”: as both a narrative and an ethical act (to give an account of what one has done in order to establish one’s “accountability”). In “On Cruelty,” Butler extends her analysis to include the financial signification of accounting, discussing the connections between counting and ethics, as well as related notions of debt (n. pag.). 36 Gaston proposes that Fanny repays her debts with emotions, social responsibility, and moral strength, stepping outside the Bertrams’ obsession with wealth and marriage and creating her own “economy of reciprocity, based on moral worth and gratitude” (n. pag).

43 to be known, that her conduct may not be over-rated.—I rather think Edward shews the most Magnanimity of the two, in accepting her Resignation with such Incumbrances” (35-6; emphasis mine). Austen’s insistence that “this ought to be known” reveals the ethical significance she placed in keeping accountable records of affective balances. It is a matter of fairness to ensure that Mrs. Knight does not receive too much credit (“her conduct may not be over-rated”), or emotional payment (gratitude) as a result of an accounting error in public opinion that misinterprets the extent of her generosity.

While many commentators on Austen’s correspondence have emphasized the letters’ roles in maintaining friendships and communicating news across distances, these texts must also be understood as financial documents that performed essential, daily accounting work within the Austen family.37 One of Austen’s letters to Cassandra describes how their mother and brother have been “settling [their] accounts and making calculations,” estimating their income and expenses (121). But it is not only Mrs. Austen and Frank who did important accounting work for the family, as Jane and Cassandra engaged daily in social and monetary bookkeeping through their correspondence. “If you will send my father an account of your Washing & Letter expences &c,” Austen writes, “he will send You a draft for the amount of it, as well as for your next quarter, & for Edward’s rent” (33). Mr. Austen’s bank account records confirm an amount of £12.19s. transferred to Cassandra for this purpose (Le Faye’s note, 379), demonstrating that these letters performed real, practical financial roles in the Austen family, acting here as a kind of proto-wire transfer.38

To best understand Austen’s representation of accounting as an ethical imperative, we must turn to her most elaborate project of social bookkeeping: the system of “Epistolary debt” (341). Like the commissions, epistolary debt constitutes a miniature credit economy enacted through letters. This credit system is governed by strict rules, which Austen calls “Justice in Epistolary Matters” (217). Epistolary “Justice” entails the reciprocal lending and repayment of

37 See note 24 for the critics to whom I refer here. 38 Countless other examples of tangible financial work fill Austen’s correspondence: “As to my debt of 3s.6 to Edward, I must trouble you to pay it, when you settle with him for your Boots” (199); “my father wishes Edward to send him a memorandum in your next letter, of the price of the hops” (57); “I enclose the Eighteen pence due to my Mother.—The Rose colour was 6/S, & the other 4/S pr yd” (232).

44 letters. Austen indicates her strict belief in epistolary justice in a letter to her friend Martha Lloyd: “Now I think I may in Quantity have deserved your Letter. My ideas of Justice in Epistolary Matters are you know very strict” (217). Though these lines have the same comic tone that characterizes so much of Austen’s writing, the letters as a whole indicate that her belief in epistolary “Justice” was sincere. “I shall not be so much your debtor soon,” she assures Cassandra, promising to repay the letter she has received (210). Almost every epistle begins with an account of the current balances: who owes whom a reply, what length and quality of letter is due, and what precisely will be needed to reciprocate fairly, including how much “Gratitude,” thanks, or other affective repayments each letter deserves (244). To achieve fair reciprocation by matching the length of a received letter, Austen at one point counts the number of lines on a page: “Dear me! What is to become of me! Such a long Letter!—Two & forty Lines in the 2d Page.—Like Harriot Byron I ask, what am I to do with my Gratitude?—I can do nothing but thank you & go on” (244).39 The letters repeatedly begin in this fashion: by acknowledging the generosity of the letter Austen has just received, stating the impossibility of ever matching its size or excellence, and offering the following modest letter with the compensation of additional affective repayments such as gratitude. “Many Thanks,” she tells James Austen, “[a] thank for every Line” (329). In a clear, one-for-one format, one “Thank” provides the emotional reimbursement for each line. One letter creates the obligation for another indefinitely, perpetuating bonds through exchanges of epistolary debt. Should a failure of reciprocity occur, it is carefully documented in Austen’s accounts as immoral behaviour. Again with her characteristic mixture of comedy and sincerity, Austen informs one of her brothers: “You have never thanked me for my last Letter, which went by the Cheese. I cannot bear not to be thanked” (330).40 The very act of writing a letter unbalances the books by placing the recipient in debt.

39 The same length-matching etiquette appears in Emma (a novel in which letter-writing plays a central role), when Miss Bates apologizes for Jane Fairfax’s short letter: “I really must, in justice to Jane, apologise for her writing so short a letter—only two pages you see—hardly two—and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half” (123). Austen again employs the word “justice” to describe epistolary protocol when Miss Bates defends the short epistle “in justice to Jane.” The repeated use of this term suggests how strongly ethics were bound up with reciprocity for Austen. 40 In another letter, Austen opens with a pointed reminder of her correspondent’s debts: “I think it time there should be a little writing between us, though I beleive [sic] the Epistolary debt is on your side” (341; emphasis original).

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Epistolary debt provides one example of the inseparability of economic and social relationships for Austen. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, letters in and of themselves exemplified this inseparability, since to send a letter was both a personal and a financial transaction. Postage fees were rising steadily in Austen’s time (Le Faye, “Letters” 37), and the amount of the charges depended on the number of pages included (Favret 135). Hence, as Mary Favret and David Wheeler argue, Austen’s continued attention to the size of various letters is in part a product of the high costs of mail (Favret 136; Wheeler 37-8).41 Austen’s epistolary bookkeeping, which tracks in detail the lengths of letters owing, thus not only takes account of social dues but of literal costs as well (Letters 244, 329). Because postage was normally paid by the recipients, the polite action was for the writer to squeeze as much as possible within as few pages as possible (Wheeler 38). When Austen praises Cassandra for sending “[s]uch a long Letter!—Two & forty Lines in the 2d Page,” she expresses appreciation not only for the number of lines but for condensing them into a single sheet, “the 2d Page” (244). Her correspondence underscores the expenses of letter-writing again and again: “The 11th of this month brought me your letter & I assure you I thought it very well worth its 2s/3d” (238). Austen also took advantage of popular money-saving techniques, such as “cross-writing”: including extra lines upside down between the lines or horizontally at right angles across a used page, a technique employed by Jane Fairfax in Emma, who “fills the whole paper and crosses half” (Modert, “Post/Mail” 345; Emma 123).42 Epistolary etiquette demanded that friends and family reciprocate with the same expense-saving measures, the same close handwriting, and the same number of high quality lines condensed into a single page—ultimately, with the same value-for- money as the previous letter. The importance of such one-to-one matching contrasts with the

41 While I agree with Wheeler that expenses are a key motivator for Austen’s references to letter size, I qualify his claim that these references “have nothing to do with penmanship elegance or with epistolary etiquette,” and solely arise from the cost of postage (38). Epistolary etiquette does play a part in Austen’s concerns about the length and quality of letters: a long letter must be matched by a reply of the same nature, an excellent letter full of news requited by another fine epistle. These requirements are for the sake of politeness as well as that of money; they represent an effort to strive towards balancing the epistolary debits as much as possible. This is in fact one of the best examples of the union of the economic and the social in Austen’s work. See also Jones on the economics of postage and the “many kinds of exchange which correspondence involves” (xvi-xvii).

42 For an example of Austen’s use of the “cross[ing] half” technique, also employed by Jane Fairfax, see Modert’s edition of Austen’s letters in facsimile. For example, see 20 June 1808, on pages (F-141-4), or 24 January 1809, on pages (F-189-92). Modert observes that as postal charges increased from 1784-1812, Austen’s handwriting becomes smaller and increasingly condensed, with more crossed lines (Introduction xx).

46 growing, interest-bearing debts in Mansfield Park, whereby a debt must be repaid with something larger than the original.

Epistolary debt thus provides a miniature example of how Austen’s representation of personal bonds—structured by the overarching logic of debt—perpetually oscillates between the economic and the social. Margaret Atwood has proposed that the concept of debt reaches beyond financial transactions to provide the groundwork for numerous cultural conceptions of fairness, justice, and personal relations. Atwood stresses non-monetary forms of obligation (not unlike Austen’s concept of social debts), including debts of honour or revenge, or the notion of “paying your debt to society” (124-5). Tracing the logic of dues and repayment through selected religious traditions, such as the concept of the “scales or balance” in Ancient Egypt (25) and the “spiritual debts” that underlie Christian theology (67), Atwood highlights a “Tit for Tat cosmic law of reciprocity” (28): the idea that moral debts will be repaid, or that “someone or something is in charge of evening up the scores” (34). Atwood’s theories parallel Austen’s construction of epistolary “Justice” as a one-for-one, “thank for every line” exchange (Letters 329).

By emphasizing reciprocity, Austen draws upon, but ultimately reworks, a moral precept central to Enlightenment philosophy. As David Bromwich argues, the idea of “balance or reciprocity” had “much currency in the eighteenth century,” and it was upon this foundation that Smith built his vision of sympathy in A Theory of Moral Sentiments (39). Gratitude plays an essential part in Smith’s moral economy as a form of emotional recompense (Bromwich 39), much as it does in Austen’s letters. Yet, to add to Bromwich’s claims, Smith’s Moral Sentiments is founded not only on gratitude and reciprocity but equally on the related notion of “debt.” Smith envisions gratitude as a binding force; the need to recompense a benefactor is the closest to “perfect and complete obligation” of all duties (92). “We talk of the debt of gratitude, not of charity, or generosity, nor even of friendship,” Smith argues, because gratitude binds us far more strongly than these other ties (92). But gratitude is always coupled with a potent sense of indebtedness: If the person to whom we owe many obligations, is made happy without our assistance, though it pleases our love, it does not content our gratitude. Till we have recompensed him, till we ourselves have been instrumental in promoting his happiness, we feel ourselves still loaded with that debt which his past services have laid upon us. (79-80; emphasis mine)

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To be “loaded with that debt” of gratitude was a positive thing for Smith because it kept the moral economy operating efficiently. Such is the case in Austen’s letters, too, where emotions offer valid returns for correspondents’ epistolary investments—her meticulous accounting of affective balances highlights the moral importance of paying these dues correctly.

However, Austen’s reworking of reciprocity in Mansfield Park complicates Smith’s paradigm by pointing to certain social contexts that prevent reciprocity from functioning. Mansfield Park signals an awareness of the possible excesses of what Smith calls “the debt of gratitude” and its potential to establish bonds of restraint rather than intimacy. The novel explores the consequences of a debt of gratitude that grows and grows until “no feelings could be strong enough to pay [it],” reaching beyond one-to-one reimbursement and demanding repayments larger than the original loans (MP 66). Because this type of debt arises from Fanny’s social positioning—her dependent status in the Bertram household and her gender—the novel thus calls into question the level playing field of exchange assumed by Smith. My final section will ask: if debt structures a relationship, what happens when that relationship is one that is highly unequal? What consequences arise when the debts in question are neither the gender- neutral credit loans of the commissions, nor the letters owed between two sisters, but instead “the debts of one’s sex,” a darker type of obligation associated specifically with women (MP 366)?

1.3 “[T]he debts of one’s sex”: Women’s Debts and Infinite Obligation in Mansfield Park

Awed by her first sight of Pemberley estate, Elizabeth Bennet suddenly feels that “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” (PP 259). In Pemberley, Elizabeth encounters a deeply meaningful material thing in the political landscape of Austen’s time: the English estate. Embodying stability, moral anchoring, and tradition, landed property constituted a crucial part of Burke’s vision of Englishness, a part so integral that the estate became inseparable from its etymological counterpart, the state (“State”). Burke describes the English state as an “entailed inheritance . . . an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom,” which has been handed down to generations of English people since the Magna Carta (29; emphasis original). Landed property was, however, threatened in Burke’s view by debt: specifically, by excessive government deficits, increasing national dependence on credit, and the proliferation of paper

48 money, as Chapter 2 will explore. “Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt,” Burke wrote in 1790 (Reflections 136). He saw the French Revolution as caused in large part by the instability of excessive debt, the paper currency of the assignats, and the “fictitious” wealth acquired by these forms of credit (106-7).

When Fanny arrives at Mansfield Park, a young niece adopted by a rich family of higher social status, what differentiates her experience of Mansfield from Elizabeth’s encounter with Pemberley? I argue that it is debt that makes up a large part of this difference. For Fanny, much as for Burke, excessive deficits imperil one’s ability to ground oneself emotionally and morally in property. While Burke’s concern is that public government debts have weakened the bonds between people and their material anchors, Fanny’s relationship with Mansfield Park is endangered by debts that are private, personal, and gendered feminine. Unlike Elizabeth’s encounter with Pemberley, Fanny’s relationship with Mansfield Park and the objects within it is complicated by these objects’ dark histories—especially histories of debt. The Mansfield estate is financed by slavery in Antigua and also embodies for Fanny a burden of personal obligation for her upbringing. Mrs. Norris continually reminds her that as an adopted visitor to Mansfield Park, she owes the Bertrams an “extraordinary degree of gratitude,” and even servitude (44). Mansfield Park takes the “perfect and complete obligation” entailed by Smith’s vision of gratitude to—and beyond—its limits (Theory of Moral Sentiments 92). Here, as elsewhere in Austen’s corpus, debt forges a powerful tie between Fanny and the Bertrams, but the connection made here evokes a different definition of “bond”: “Anything with which one’s body or limbs are bound in restraint of personal liberty; a shackle, chain, fetter, manacle” (“Bond,” def. I.1.a). Though Fanny does attempt to reciprocate in what forms she can—by taking care of Lady Bertram and by exemplifying the “good behaviour” and “gratitude” that Mrs. Norris demands— the Bertram family continues to indicate to her that full recompense is impossible, as her debt is too vast to be repaid (44). Fanny’s sense of what she owes to her cousin Edmund is that he was “entitled to such gratitude from her as no feelings could be strong enough to pay” (66). While in the letters, “gratitude” and “thanks” were sometimes offered as a type of affective recompense, Fanny’s debts are described as too strong for “feelings” to pay and too deep for “words” to express (308). Fanny’s debts also grow with time, constantly exceeding their original amounts.

As a whole, Austen’s treatment of obligation in Mansfield Park takes on complex political implications. While, as we will see below, she thinks alike with the radical William

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Godwin (“raffish” or not43) in condemning “the debts of one’s sex,” she concurs with Burke in her stress on the cultural stability provided by material anchors, particularly the English estate. Alistair Duckworth has demonstrated that landed property constitutes a resonant political symbol for Austen, a reservoir for inherited wisdom and tradition, functioning as a symbol for society and the state, much as it does in Burke’s Reflections (58, 45). The radical “improvements” of Henry Crawford and Humphry Repton epitomize for both Austen and Burke “emblems of inordinate change” for the estate/state (Duckworth 45). According to Duckworth, one of the gravest challenges facing Austen’s heroines is isolation from the estate: in Persuasion, for example, this distancing is due to the degradation of Kellynch Hall by a selfish owner (4); in Mansfield Park, Fanny begins the novel as an outsider rather than in “the center of her family’s property” (72). However, Austen’s solution is not for the individual to turn away from the estate, becoming self-sufficient without it, but to restore the estate: her “deepest impulse [is] not to subvert but to maintain and properly improve a social heritage” (Duckworth 80). Just as Duckworth has claimed, Mansfield Park does not reject the Burkean estate, but instead points to degradations in society that bar the heroine from properly centering herself in it. I would add to Duckworth’s assessment, though, that it is the spectre of unpayable debt that keeps pushing Fanny to the periphery of Mansfield.

As Gaston has argued, Fanny’s debt to the Bertrams is fiscal as well as emotional, and directly linked to the maintenance of the Mansfield estate (n. pag.). The novel highlights the monetary side of Fanny’s obligation when Sir Thomas plans to send Fanny away after he experiences financial losses on his Antigua estate, and after Tom Bertram contracts excessive debts. This decision is explicitly financial: “it became not undesirable to himself to be relieved from the expense of her support” (54). Acutely aware of all things monetary, the penny-pinching Mrs. Norris engages in a verbal accounting project not unlike the written one that Austen undertakes in her letters. Anticipating Fanny’s arrival at Mansfield, Sir Thomas Bertram insists that proper distinctions of rank be maintained; the family must find a way “to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram” (42; emphasis original). Mrs. Norris follows Sir Thomas’s instructions and engages in spoken bookkeeping of Fanny’s debts, “talking to her the

43 See note 30.

50 whole way from Northampton of her wonderful good fortune, and the extraordinary degree of gratitude and good behaviour it ought to produce” (44). We know from Austen’s letters that accounting is far from a benign act of tracking dues, and actively plays a part in defining social relationships. Mrs. Norris’s recordkeeping establishes the Bertrams’ relationship with Fanny in a fixed way: with the Bertrams as the perpetual creditors and Fanny as a perpetual debtor.

This particular type of debt-relationship in Mansfield Park—one that is perpetually imbalanced on one side—sets into motion multiple unethical actions as the narrative unfolds. Each of the key immoral decisions in Mansfield Park (the theatrics, Edmund’s courtship of Miss Crawford, Fanny’s potential marriage to Mr. Crawford) can be traced back to encounters with objects burdened by debt. An early example is Fanny’s horse—or more accurately, Edmund’s horse, on loan to Fanny. As someone who is “not a Miss Bertram” (42), Fanny is unable to own property, such as a horse, a home, or even a room within a home, and instead must borrow the belongings of others. Rather than having her own horse, she is allowed to ride one that is generally considered to be hers, but is officially “in name as well as fact, the property of Edmund” (66). Though seemingly small, this distinction leads to considerable grief for Fanny when Edmund uses his ownership to take Miss Crawford riding instead of her (93). As a borrower and not a lender (a debtor, not a creditor), Fanny is unable to voice her opinion or control the situation; in fact, since she knows she is not the official owner of the horse, her initial reaction is to be far from slighted, but rather “almost over-powered with gratitude that he should be asking her leave of it” (93). Without riding to provide Fanny’s usual exercise, Mrs. Norris sends Fanny out walking and rose-cutting on errands for her instead, causing Fanny to fall ill from heatstroke (98-9). Minute distinctions in the ownership of property constitute the point of origin for a series of troubling events.

This early episode sets the pattern for the novel’s larger conflicts, which will arise from the same debtor/creditor imbalance. Debt haunts even the “east room,” the one space in the house that somewhat belongs to Fanny. Abandoned by the rest of the Bertrams, this room has come to be “generally admitted” to be her own: “The east room . . . was now considered Fanny’s, almost as decidedly as the white attic” (171). The numerous qualifiers in these descriptions of Fanny’s ownership are telling: the room is “almost” decidedly hers, and “considered” to be hers, but it is not actually—much as in the case of her horse. When Austen specifies that the room is “generally admitted” to belong to Fanny, we are left wondering: if her ownership is only

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“generally” accepted, who are those who disagree with this common consensus? The next sentences reveal that Mrs. Norris is most certainly one of these dissenters, as she is only “tolerably resigned to her having the use of what nobody else wanted, though the terms in which she sometimes spoke of the indulgence, seemed to imply it was the best room in the house” (171; emphasis mine). In Mrs. Norris’s mind, Fanny is simply “having the use” of a room that remains the property of the Bertrams, and she makes this clear by stipulating that Fanny may never have a fire in the east room (171). The always-empty grate thus serves as a constant reminder (a type of symbolic accounting, even) of Fanny’s debtor status.

Such lopsided debtor/creditor relationships open a fault-line in the Bertram household by contributing to one of the gravest episodes of immoral behaviour: the Lovers’ Vows theatrics. Distressed at the pressure placed upon Edmund and herself to participate in the acting, Fanny retires to the east room’s “nest of comforts” for moral guidance (172). The novel’s description of the east room sets up the expectation of a Burkean scene whereby the heroine finds stability in the moral anchors of landed property, the English estate, and the objects within it. The items in the east room have provided Fanny with this type of emotional support in the past: “Her plants, her books—of which she had been a collector, from the first hour of her commanding a shilling—her writing-desk, . . . she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.—Every thing was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend” (171). However, after having encouraged the reader to anticipate this kind of material comfort, the scene takes a sudden turn and “debt” derails Fanny’s quest for guidance: she had begun to feel undecided as to what she ought to do; and as she walked round the room her doubts were increasing. Was she right in refusing what was so warmly asked, so strongly wished for? What might be so essential to a scheme on which some of those to whom she owed the greatest complaisance, had set their hearts? . . . as she looked around her, the claims of her cousins to being obliged, were strengthened by the sight of present upon present that she had received from them. The table between the windows was covered with work-boxes and netting-boxes, which had been given her at different times, principally by Tom; and she grew bewildered as to the amount of the debt which all these kind remembrances produced. (172-3; underlined emphases mine) The language of debt in this passage—“owed,” “claims,” “obliged,” “debt”—reveals the troubling social/economic undercurrent embedded in this apparent “nest of comforts.” The

52 presents from her cousins bewilder her with “the amount of the debt” embodied in them, and this burden influences her train of moral reasoning: “Was she right in refusing what was so warmly asked, . . . [by] those to whom she owed the greatest complaisance . . .?” Fanny’s obligation impresses upon her the idea that it would be improper to speak up or disobey her cousins’ requests to join the play. The psychic burden of debt extends throughout her ensuing conversation with Edmund, who, not coincidentally, knocks on the door in the sentence immediately after this excerpt. Though she begins to voice some indirect concerns, Fanny finds herself unable to speak decisively in protest during the conversation that follows. When Edmund states his intent to join the play, “Fanny could not answer him”; when he asks her outright whether she is against his plan, she cannot say that she is (174-5). She has a clear-cut opportunity to prevent Edmund’s participation: “Give me your approbation, then, Fanny. I am not comfortable without it. . . . If you are against me, I ought to distrust myself” (174). Her inability to speak is not a result of personal weakness of character, but of her financial and social positioning as perpetual debtor. Obligation thus contributes to Edmund’s participation in Lovers’ Vows, which in turn deepens his attachment to Miss Crawford.

Because of the on-loan status of her home, Fanny’s attempts to root herself therein are tenuous, plagued by threats of being forced to leave when Sir Thomas meets with financial losses or Tom’s “extravagance” plunges him into debt (54). Sir Thomas takes advantage of Fanny’s unstable relationship with Mansfield by sending her away from the estate at an influential moment in her decision-making, hoping to force her to accept Mr. Crawford’s proposal by highlighting the insufficiency of her humble home at Portsmouth in contrast to the one she might have by marrying Mr. Crawford (371). Sir Thomas thus exploits debt’s power to weaken Fanny’s material anchors: the home is not really Fanny’s own and can be taken away at any time. Sir Thomas’s efforts have a powerful impact on Fanny. She quickly finds herself unhappy in the chaos of her parents’ house and longs to return to Mansfield. The efficacy of Sir Thomas’s plan arises from Fanny’s character as a deeply rooted individual, who from the beginning of the novel is described as strongly attached to homes and things. In childhood, Fanny is devastated to leave her first home at Portsmouth and come to Mansfield, though in time she learns to “transfer” her “attachment to her former home” to Mansfield (50). When Sir Thomas threatens to send her away the first time (to live with Mrs. Norris), she protests that she “love[s] this house and everything in it” (55). Such material grounding is essential to Fanny’s virtue, as the novel makes

53 clear by contrasting her rootedness with the pernicious mobility of the Crawfords. Mr. Crawford is “so very fond of change and moving about,” with a strong dislike for “anything like a permanence of abode”; likewise, while on an excursion Miss Crawford declares, “I must move,” becoming restless after being stationary for too long (120-1). To be grounded in things and places is at the core of Austen’s moral vision, and a perpetual debtor status stands in the way of this anchoring.

Mr. Crawford attempts to court Fanny through indebtedness, placing himself in the position of creditor and Fanny in that of the debtor. He takes every opportunity to do favours for her: “the shawl which Edmund was quietly taking from the servant to bring and put round her shoulders was seized by Mr Crawford’s quicker hand, and she was obliged to be indebted to his more prominent attention” (262; emphasis mine). This anecdote captures Mr. Crawford’s approach to courtship: while Edmund’s favours are done “quietly,” Mr. Crawford’s attentions are “more prominent,” drawing attention to his gallantry and to his position as creditor. Unlike Edmund, his aim is not to shield Fanny from the cold but to oblige her “to be indebted” to him, a debt which he hopes will be repaid through marriage. His most significant favour is to ensure Fanny’s brother a promotion in the navy. Upon hearing this news, she joyfully praises his generosity and declares herself and her brother “infinitely obliged” to Mr. Crawford (307). But her happiness quickly vanishes when his favour ceases to be done “quietly” (for the sake of her benefit rather than to emphasize his creditor role) and is revealed to be an attempt to pressure her into marrying him. He soon proceeds to tell her that his action “was to be placed to the account of his excessive and unequalled attachment to her,” and proposes marriage (307-8). Fanny, distressed by this impropriety, feels “agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry” (309). The provocative phrase, “infinitely obliged,” is uttered twice by Fanny, and precisely describes the never-ending (infinite) debt that so often characterizes her experiences. She finds herself “more obliged . . . than words can express” to Mr. Crawford, involved in a debt that Mr. Crawford, by making his attentions “prominent” rather than “quie[t],” constructs as exceeding reciprocation by standard means (such as “words,” thanks, and gratitude) and only payable through acceptance of his proposal (308). It is worth noting, however, that Fanny’s phrase, “infinitely obliged,” takes the imposed debt to such an extreme that it almost transcends the realm of the payable and possible. By becoming “infinite” and inexpressible, Fanny’s debt moves beyond the possibility of reimbursement. Fanny’s consistent refusals to succumb to Mr.

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Crawford are part of her strength of character, as she continually declines Mr. Crawford’s proposals despite his attempts to pressure her through debt.

To deepen Fanny’s sense of obligation further, Mr. Crawford uses stealth and deception. In a fascinating episode, he smuggles Fanny an unwanted gift of a necklace, disguised as a present from his sister, through a pre-planned plot in which both siblings collaborated. Fanny feels the burden of “this unexpected acquisition, this doubtful good of a necklace” (271); later, she sees Mr. Crawford’s eye fixate upon the necklace “with a smile—she thought there was a smile—which made her blush and feel wretched” (283).

Mansfield Park is a novel filled with “doubtful good[s]” (271). Taking into account the past lives of these objects has implications for the larger troubled history of the Mansfield estate, supported financially by slavery in Antigua. The references to slavery throughout Mansfield Park draw attention to another example of a situation in which reciprocity utterly fails, when one side simply continues to take and take. Edward Said has claimed that the “casual references to Antigua” in Mansfield Park do not call into question or oppose Sir Thomas’s colonial estate, but rather implicate the novel within the “rationale for imperialist expansion” (93, 84). However, the larger context of vexed economic histories in Mansfield Park runs counter to Said’s assessment. In a novel in which objects continue to be embedded with “doubtful” pasts, such as Fanny’s necklace or the presents in the east room, we cannot skip over the equally doubtful pasts of the Mansfield estate, or of the shawl Lady Bertram requests from the East Indies via a family “commission.” Lady Bertram’s shopping commission comes immediately on the heels of a conversation with Mrs. Norris about children’s perpetual debts for their upbringing: “It is amazing,” said [Mrs. Norris], “how much young people cost their friends, what with bringing them up and putting them out in the world! They little think how much it comes to, or what their parents, or their uncles and aunts pay for them in the course of the year. Now, here are my sister Price’s children;—take them all together, I dare say nobody would believe what a sum they cost Sir Thomas every year, to say nothing of what I do for them.” “Very true, sister, as you say. But, poor things! They cannot help it; and you know it makes very little difference to Sir Thomas. Fanny, William must not forget my shawl, if he goes to the East Indies; and I shall give him a commission for anything else

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that is worth having. I wish he may go to the East Indies, that I may have my shawl. I think I will have two shawls, Fanny.” (312) The indolent Lady Bertram’s vacuity on the subject of the shawls reveals itself through her repetitive, dozy language, which takes on a chiasmic circular structure: “William must not forget my shawl, if he goes to the East Indies . . . I wish he may go to the East Indies, that I may have my shawl. I think I will have two shawls.” Lady Bertram thinks of little else but that she shall have her shawl; she is certainly unaware of the doubtful histories these objects may have, as they derive from a colonial economy that involved radically unequal social and economic relationships, including slave-owning, still legal in British colonies in Austen’s lifetime. One shawl or two, from the East Indies or elsewhere; it is all the same to Lady Bertram. But is Lady Bertram’s thoughtless perspective, which is most certainly an example of the “unreflective” mindset that Said critiques, the same perspective that Austen intends her readers to adopt? This passage itself is Said’s chosen example of the “unreflective” nature of Austen’s representation of Antigua: “the casual references to Antigua, the ease with which Sir Thomas’s needs in England are met by a Caribbean sojourn, the uninflected, unreflective citations of Antigua (or the Mediterranean, or India, which is where Lady Bertram, in a fit of distracted impatience, requires that William should go ‘“that I may have a shawl. I think I will have two shawls”’)” (93). The repetitiveness of Lady Bertram’s language, coupled with her flawed overall character, encourage us to treat her thoughtlessness with ironic distance. This passage does the opposite of what Said proposes: it draws attention to, and criticizes, the lack of reflexivity shown by Lady Bertram, an unaware character who contrasts sharply with Fanny, who is sensitive to objects’ economic histories (thus, it is no surprise when we are told that she asks Sir Thomas about slavery [213]). While Lady Bertram’s citations of Antigua may be “unreflective,” Austen’s are not.

Moreover, what is most fascinating about this East Indies shawl is the juxtaposition of Mrs. Norris’s idea of children’s debts for their upbringing with Lady Bertram’s commission. Lady Bertram’s thoughts flow seamlessly within a single paragraph from her affirmation of Mrs. Norris’s concept of debt to her East Indies shawl. This transition is far from incidental; it foregrounds the fact that coercive social/economic relationships underlie both of these cases. While these two instances of exploitation are radically different, the estate appears in both cases as a key instrument in problematic power structures. Lady Bertram’s language makes clear the disempowerment entailed by the notion of children’s unpayable debts: “poor things! They cannot

56 help it.” Whether strictly overseeing the behaviour of Fanny and his daughters, whom he, his wife, and Mrs. Norris consider in debt for their upbringing, or running his colonial plantations, Sir Thomas Bertram’s management of his estate is premised upon lopsided economic relations. The link that Lady Bertram unconsciously draws between debt and imperialism is a connection that Patrick Brantlinger has also identified: the pattern of western colonial expansion has been for national debts to swell to unmanageable sizes, largely due to imperial wars, and for colonized territories to be “exploited and taxed to service those debts” (Brantlinger 26). “[S]ince Adam Smith,” Brantlinger argues, “the belief that there is something inevitable about the debtor / creditor relationship between colonies and colonizers has been powerful” (27). The link that Austen draws, through Lady Bertram’s train of thought, between this imperial commission and children’s infinite debt (an idea criticized throughout the novel) does not reflect favourably on the colonial economy. Close attention to the theme of debt in Mansfield Park, and to the histories of doubtful goods, encourages us to interpret the novel’s Antigua references as far from uncritical.

Though Mrs. Norris’s idea of children’s debts in this particular passage encompasses both male and female dependents, elsewhere Austen associates the notion of unpayable, one- sided obligation specifically with women. In Romantic-era England, there were indeed other forms of debts associated with masculinity—duels, debts of honour, and gambling debts—and even within Mansfield Park, Tom contracts excessive debts from his extravagant spending. However, masculine debts often involve more choice: while Tom may choose to spend extravagantly, the debts of the female sex arise from the expense of a woman’s upbringing and are not entered into by choice. Marvelling at Fanny’s ability to captivate a man as powerful as Mr. Crawford, Miss Crawford describes this opportunity as, “having it in one’s power to pay off the debts of one’s sex” (366). The state of indebtedness thus becomes a metaphor for the condition of Englishwomen as a whole. Miss Crawford’s feminization of debt contrasts with the financial dues of the commissions, which, as we have seen, were gender-neutral within the Austen family. Miss Crawford endorses Mrs. Norris’s notion that women, usually without financial independence, incur monetary and social debts for their upbringing. Women begin life with these “debts” of the female sex, which must be “pa[id] off” through an advantageous marriage to a wealthy man. Yet, we can discern from Austen’s choice of Miss Crawford to speak this line, and from the immoral actions that stem from perpetual debt throughout the novel, that

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Mansfield Park as a whole resists the concept of “the debts of one’s sex.” The biggest decision Fanny must make in her development is to reject Mr. Crawford’s proposal, thereby limiting debt’s power by refusing to allow the web of obligation he has created to compel her into an unwanted marriage. She does not follow Miss Crawford’s suggestion that she “pay off” her debts through an advantageous marriage. Reciprocation is essential, but should not extend beyond roughly equivalent repayments, such as “words,” thanks, and gratitude for Mr. Crawford’s acts of kindness. By rejecting his proposal, Fanny restricts the scope of obligation and rejects the concept of debts that grow with time.

The idea that women are in financial and social debt to those who raise them was the subject of widespread debate amongst Austen’s contemporaries. In Godwin’s Caleb Williams, a debt for a young woman’s upbringing becomes overtly literalized when the aristocratic Mr. Tyrell takes charge of a dependent orphaned cousin, Emily, who like Fanny has no financial means of subsistence and was raised in her rich relation’s household. Later in Emily’s life, Mr. Tyrell succeeds in imprisoning (and in the end indirectly killing) Emily by calculating a precise sum of eleven hundred pounds, due to him for her life’s board and upbringing (79). “Do not you know that every creditor has a right to stop his runaway debtor?” he demands, and he orders her arrest on the grounds of “a debt contracted for board and necessaries for the fourteen last years” (67; 78). The striking similarity between Emily’s “debt” for her upbringing and Fanny’s “debt” (173) in Mansfield Park does not in and of itself determine whether Mansfield Park directly echoes Caleb Williams—though we do know from the letters that Austen was familiar with Godwin and his ideas, and likely with Caleb Williams.44 Regardless of the question of explicit reference, what this parallel proves is that Austen’s novel grapples with an important question in Romantic England: what are “the debts of one’s sex” (MP 366)? Should women who are financially dependent be considered in debt for their upbringing, and what is the nature of, and appropriate repayment for, that obligation? Political affiliations notwithstanding, Godwin and Austen concur in their answers to these questions, as both expose the dark consequences of the notion of a pre-existing, unpayable female debt.

44 Austen describes one of her acquaintances as “as raffish in his appearance as I would wish every Disciple of Godwin to be” (Letters 93). Le Faye concludes that Austen was “likely familiar with Caleb Williams and St. Leon” (note 6, from Letters 93).

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Catherine Gallagher has shown that this conversation about women’s debt was also taken up by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Fanny’s experiences of women’s infinite indebtedness parallels Gallagher’s analysis of the “universal obligation” of femaleness in the work of Frances Burney (203). Discussing Cecilia, Gallagher identifies the heroine’s never- ending sense of debt, a state “insistently linked to her femaleness” (244). “That single women . . . are just naturally in debt is one of the novel’s most fundamental assumptions,” Gallagher articulates, and she describes (with language not unlike Austen’s) how Cecilia “must pay the debt of her sex” within the novel (244, 247).45 Both Edgeworth’s and Burney’s authorial self- representations revolved around the concept of unpayable debts, to both their fathers, with whom they collaborated in writing and publishing, and their reading publics (xxii). The debate about women’s debt was of vast significance for Austen’s contemporaries, and it is a conversation in which Austen also participates.

The dark implications of obligation in Mansfield Park notwithstanding, we know from Austen’s larger corpus that it would be a mistake to assume debt is an inherently negative construct for Austen, or that the debtor/creditor positionings must necessarily be fixed in place. The letters indicate that debt has the potential to create positive ties, forging intimacy through the commissions and epistolary dues, as well as that debt provides the underlying structure for social relationships as reciprocal exchanges of affects, language, and actions. But of course, not all relationships are positive or equal, nor can reciprocity always function in every context. As Atwood proposes, creditors and debtors are on two sides of a scale, “and exchanges between them—in a healthy economy or society or ecosystem—tend toward equilibrium” (163). Atwood’s adjective, “healthy,” must be stressed. Only in a “healthy economy or society” do the debtor and creditor continue to strive towards balance. An unhealthy bond arises when a character such as Mrs. Norris or Mr. Crawford clings perpetually to the creditor role, constructing Fanny’s debt as beyond recompense. The reverse type of lopsidedness can also result from those who intentionally cling to the debtor role, refusing to recompense their

45 Gallagher’s idea that single women are always-already in debt is echoed by a dry remark made by Austen in a letter to her niece (who was also named Fanny and was the daughter of Edward Austen, the brother adopted, like Fanny Price, into a rich relation’s family): “Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony” (347).

59 creditors by choice. Tom Bertram and Henry Wickham provide quintessential examples of these figures, as they accumulate huge loans with various creditors and offer nothing to repay them. It is the distinction between a one-sided disparity and a balance of imbalances that distinguishes unethical from ethical debts/relationships in Austen’s writings.

Another problem with Fanny’s debts in Mansfield Park arises from interest. In the letters, Austen’s rules of “Epistolary justice” remain distinctly interest free. She insists that a letter be repaid by a letter of similar length and thoughtfulness, or at the very least gratitude be offered to make the answering letter equal to the first. Unlike in the letters, Fanny’s debts grow with time. The amount she must pay back always seems to exceed the amount that she has been given. Her debt to Mr. Crawford begins with a small favour, when Mr. Crawford offers her a shawl, then grows to a larger favour, when he ensures William’s promotion, and grows still larger when Mr. Crawford “gives” her a necklace. While Mr. Crawford has done a favour for Fanny, the amount that he asks in return is much greater than what he has given, as he demands marriage. In the passage when he explains his growing price of repayment, Austen uses language of growth and excess, describing Mr. Crawford’s “excessive and unequalled attachment,” as Fanny becomes “exceedingly distressed” and “infinitely obliged” (307). Mr. Crawford describes his relationship to Fanny as one in which he has the “deepest interest”: His last journey to London had been undertaken with no other view than that of introducing her brother in Hill Street, and prevailing on the Admiral to exert whatever interest he might have for getting him on. This had been his business . . . and he spoke with such a glow of what his solicitude had been, and used such strong expressions, was so abounding in the deepest interest, in twofold motives, in views and wishes more than could be told (307; emphasis original) Austen’s italics suggest the importance of the phrase “deepest interest,” as well as hint at its multiple layers of meaning, which oscillate between the economic and the social. Critics have long identified Austen’s use of such double words with underlying economic meanings. Mark Schorer finds Persuasion full of the language of the “counting house” (559), such as “credit,”

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“tax,” “figure,” “worth,” “value,” and “account” (540-4).46 In this passage, and indeed throughout the novel, “interest” takes on as many as four meanings. While the first is the common sense of “a feeling of concern for or curiosity about a person or thing” (Def. I.7.a), the second meaning is less common, though it appears elsewhere throughout the novel: “Influence due to personal connection” (def. I.6). Austen uses this sense when discussing connections that might lead to William’s promotion—“His nephew’s introduction to Admiral Crawford might be of service. The Admiral he believed had interest” (276)—as well as at the beginning of the book to describe the possibility of Sir Thomas Bertram securing a promotion for Mr. Price: “Sir Thomas had interest, which, from principle as well as pride, ….he would have been glad to exert” (35). In addition to these social meanings, two economic senses also shadow this word. “Interest” could mean “having a right or title to, a claim upon, or a share in” (def. I.1), importing a problematic idea of ownership or “claim” in Fanny’s life. And finally, the common financial meaning of the word also applies: money that accumulates on a debt. According to Mr. Crawford’s logic, Fanny is now indebted to him for this favour, and as we have seen, this debt is not static but continues to grow and swell, demanding payments larger than the original favours offered.

In pointing out potential exploitations of debt, Mansfield Park does not recommend somehow extracting economic logic from the moral and social spheres. Austen’s principles of ethical social behaviour are indistinguishable from the economic practices of accounting, cycles of debt and repayment, and reciprocal exchange. Duckworth’s claim, that “Austen is aware of the confrontation between traditional and economic values in her society, and . . . resists any economic transvaluation of a traditional morality whose roots are ultimately religious,” imposes a boundary between the commercial and the social that cannot be maintained in Austen’s writings (29). This separation between “traditional and economic values”—the idea that there is a pure social and moral sphere outside of the economy—collapses when we examine the letters and find that Austen used the language and structure of debt to describe her most intimate

46 See also Alistair Duckworth on these economic double words (29-30). Duckworth claims that Austen consciously employs words with financial implications, often “to assert that possession of money entails a commensurate moral responsibility” (30).

61 relationships, as in the case of her epistolary spending account with Cassandra. Lynch has articulated a similar challenge to this distinction: noting that in many “contemporary critiques of consumerism, the self is conceptualized as a presocial, prediscursive entity located well outside the marketplace,” she proceeds to investigate the connections, rather than antitheses, between Burney’s explorations of subjectivity and her depictions of eighteenth-century auctions, toy shops, and other sites of economic activity (Economy 169, 168). As in the philosophy of Smith and Burke, commerce and social life are harmonious rather than opposed in Austen’s vision of English society.47 In healthy relationships, reciprocity and accounting provide foundations for ethical bonds. Yet, Austen’s faith in reciprocity was not uncritical, and her fiction explores the complexities that might pose challenges to Smith’s model of social exchange, dramatizing situations in which the moral economy ceases to operate as it should.

47 Pocock argues that for Burke, commerce was “part of the science of human nature” and compatible with monarchy and social hierarchy (xv).

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Chapter 2 Gigantic Economies: Paper Money, Aesthetics, and the Infinite Grotesque

Chapter 1 examined the commissions economy, in which circulating commodities pass through many hands, allowing individuals to invest memories and emotions and build relationships through bonds of debt. The commissions provide an example of affective and mnemonic bonding that functions, for Austen, in a relatively healthy manner. Chapter 2, however, turns attention to what many contemporary thinkers perceived to be a moment of rupture, when economic change threatened Britons’ ability to ground their memories and emotions in objects. The cause of that rupture was paper money. Yet, despite the frequent negativity this rupture inspired, innovative aesthetic ideas emerged from this schism. These innovations are the subject of this chapter, as well as Chapters 3 and 4. In order to represent the new perceived distance between people and things, Burke theorizes a unique aesthetic category that I call the infinite, deathly grotesque.

In 1757, Burke theorized his famous model of the sublime, a powerful and ennobling aesthetic marked by gigantic size, boundlessness, and infinity, among other traits. As an example of such an object, Burke points to a colonnade: with its seemingly endless repetitions of identical pillars stretching out as far as the viewer can see, the colonnade creates an impression of vastness and infinity (Enquiry 139). Yet, in 1790, Burke encountered a new thing that troubled his aesthetics by embodying sublime traits at the same time as it acted as a key ideological symbol of the French Revolution he opposed: the revolutionary paper currency of France, the assignats.48 Late eighteenth-century Europe witnessed not only the “unprecedented” political event of the French Revolution (Paulson 4) but also a new, experimental form of money, a compulsory paper currency (not exchangeable for specie) based on the sale of church lands

48 Bound up with notions of property, church, and aristocracy, the assignats bore an ideological significance far beyond a functional solution to a deficit. The bills came to symbolize the French Revolution as a whole; for many of the currency’s supporters, to accept an assignat was to commit an act of “patriotic faith”—to refuse one, a “national insult” (Spang 161). The vehemence of Burke’s condemnation of assignats (as a “dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation”) derives in part from the heavy symbolic weight of this revolutionary currency (Reflections 92). See also Ian Haywood: “For Edmund Burke, the assignat was the epitome of Jacobin mischief and the arch enemy of the gold standard” (par. 22). Haywood cites Pocock’s opinion that the assignat, rather than the arrest of the Queen at Versailles, was “the central, the absolute and the unforgiveable crime of the Revolutionaries” (Pocock qtd. in Haywood par. 22).

63 confiscated by the National Assembly. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France registers an anxious awareness that French paper money, like the Revolution it represents, embodies the potential to be misread as sublime. The assignats are composed of repetitions of identical parts, stretched out bill after bill like the pillars in Burke’s colonnade, and produced in massive quantities that lead to hyperinflation,49 creating a gigantic, boundless economy—an infinite (perhaps even sublime) entity. While critics have shown that Burke re-categorizes the Revolution as grotesque rather than sublime,50 what merits further attention is how paper money in particular (and its infinity) prompts Burke to theorize a specific subtype of the grotesque. Originating in Milton’s Paradise Lost and further popularized by Burke, this subtype becomes, in the 1790s, part of a discourse used by writers and caricaturists to engage with a larger transformation they perceived in Romantic Europe: a fundamental shift, brought about by recent economic changes, in how value was grounded in material things.

The infinite grotesque, grounded in bodily functions (consumption, vomiting, defecation), and in processing distinct things into formless streams of organic matter, offers Burke a form of infinity distinct from that of the sublime.51 Banknotes become “paper pills” to be “swallow[ed] down” and processed by the body, and church lands become “church mummy” to be consumed as a “universal medicine” (Reflections 210, 206). Burke draws on Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as popular art forms—such as the grotesque performances of “comedians at fairs,” the “burlesque,” and the illegitimate London theatre—to find a third aesthetic mode suitable for representing paper money (Reflections 60). I begin by tracing the origins of the infinite, deathly grotesque in Paradise Lost, a key source text for Burke’s examples in his aesthetic theory. Burke appropriates grotesque images that are not only infinite but also inversions of the life-generating aspects of the grotesque: while the regular grotesque thrives on growth, nourishment, and regeneration, the deathly version inverts these qualities into false

49 Haywood informs us that due to hyperinflation, when the French assignats were retired from circulation in 1796, their value had been reduced by 95% (par. 22). 50 See Ronald Paulson’s Representations of Revolution (168) and Frans De Bruyn’s The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke (170). While Paulson’s primary focus is Burke’s use of the sublime and beautiful, he briefly acknowledges the grotesque nature of Burke’s depiction of the revolution (see page 65 of this chapter). Paulson interprets Burke’s grotesque as a “burlesque sublime” (168). 51 My definition of the regular (not infinite) grotesque draws on the work of Kayser, Bakhtin, Frances Connelly, and Frances Barasch, discussed further on pages 67-9.

64 nourishment, cannibalism, mutilation, and quackery. Finally, I trace the afterlives of Burke’s economic appropriation of the infinite, deathly grotesque in 1790s caricatures by James Gillray and Richard Newton.

Burke’s aesthetic quandary—his need to represent the Revolution and its economy as grotesque rather than sublime—comes into conflict with one of his key political goals: to discredit paper money as a “fictitious” and abstract replacement for the solid, material wealth of gold and land (107). The rise of paper currencies in France and England prompted the unsettling realization that money is not simply a material object but a social construct whose value is determined by people and institutions (banks, the government, and consumers who accept and use the money).52 Although Burke strives, like most opponents of paper bills, to dismiss them as “ideal” (immaterial), his appropriation of the grotesque inspires contradictory images of money as visceral, material, and embodied (Reflections 38). His model of paper money thus oscillates between the body and the imagination, the tangible and the abstract.53 According to Burke and others, Romantic Europe was transitioning from an economy rooted in material things, such as gold and property (perceived as intrinsically embodying their value), to an economy of paper, a symbolic marker. These commentators propose that material things—namely the aristocratic estate and the “solid” wealth of gold money—no longer function as anchors of culture and history (Reflections 38). By uprooting Britons from their material anchors, paper money threatens the type of bonding we have seen in Chapter 1. By implying that the economy had become progressively dematerialized, Burke and others endorse a view of monetary history that has been discredited by recent historians, since abstract economies of private credit, rather than metal coins, in fact preceded paper money.54 Yet, though inaccurate, the history of the economy created by Burke and others deepens our understanding of how Romantic artists use aesthetics to

52 Burke’s worst fear (a mandatory paper currency) would arrive in England soon after the publication of Reflections with the Bank Restriction Act of 1797. The relationship between the differing historical contexts of English and French paper money is discussed further in what follows. 53 The shifting materiality of money in Reflections replicates, in the aesthetic realm, deep fissures in historical debates about paper currencies, as well as a tension inherent in the very nature of money: the tension between object and abstraction, thing and symbol. My understanding of these historical debates about money, as well as the tension between object and abstraction, is indebted to the work of scholars such as Spang, Rowlinson, Walter Benn Michaels, and Shell. See pages 87-90 of this chapter. 54 See pages 11-2 for the arguments of these scholars.

65 grapple with economic and social change. Burke uses aesthetics to engage with questions at the heart of the Romantic period. To what extent must an economy be made up of things? Are all systems of exchange necessarily economies of things, or can they consist of abstractions such as symbols, emotions, promises, or language? And more importantly, how does the presence or absence of material things in economies shape social relationships, particularly notions of trust, intimacy, and hierarchy? For Burke, the perceived removal of things from exchange transforms sociopolitical relationships, leading to the loss of the “binding force” of the nation and the dissolution of hierarchy (Reflections 167). Since money is the “cement” holding a nation together (Reflections 167), a grotesque economy creates, and is created by, what Burke views as a grotesque society: a vast, “swinish multitude” bereft of the shaping forces of hierarchy and class—a formless, boundless mob that has become, as in Burke’s xenophobic description of French revolutionary clubs, “a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations” (Reflections 69, 59). The fundamental power of the infinite grotesque is to destroy distinct, bounded things by dissolving them into shapeless flows of waste matter, and this makes it the ideal aesthetic to describe the perceived loss of things in the economy, the transition from an economy of things to one of symbolic paper.

2.1 Aesthetic Error and the Deathly Grotesque

Criticism treating the connections between Burke’s aesthetics and his politics has often centred on his two core categories, the sublime and the beautiful.55 According to Isaac Kramnick, while the Enquiry implies that the sublime is more essential than the beautiful (though both modes are present in the best of art [94]), the French Revolution caused Burke to “recoil from the horror inflicted by unleashed masculinity” of the sublime and to defend the violated beauty of the

55 Neal Wood, who claimed in 1964 that “no systematic effort” had yet been made to examine Burke’s aesthetics alongside his politics, opened this line of inquiry by arguing that “Burke’s two basic aesthetic categories, the sublime and the beautiful, inform and shape several of his fundamental political ideas” (41, 42). See also the following studies. Arguing that the state and its institutions can function as “objects of aesthetic appreciation,” R.T. Allen highlights the aesthetic dimensions of Burke’s political writings with a focus on beauty in particular (237). Wessel Krul contends that for Burke, beauty guides us socially by governing our interactions with others, while the sublime reveals the limits of the individual and his/her need to accept a subordinate position in a universe governed by unchangeable laws (34-5).

66 aristocracy (151-2).56 Tom Furniss’s essential study traces how Burke’s aesthetic theory in the Enquiry engages with class struggle, particularly the rising bourgeoisie’s efforts to authenticate its middle-class values, developing what Furniss calls a “revolutionary” aesthetics (2), a political power which was later appropriated in 1789 by the radical Price, who used Burke’s sublime to promote the French Revolution (117-8). In response, Burke adjusts his sublime in Reflections and attempts (often unsuccessfully) to distinguish between a true and “false” sublime (Furniss 119). In addition to mapping the connections between Burke’s politics and the sublime and beautiful, some scholars have acknowledged his appropriation of the grotesque. Ronald Paulson claims that to represent the radically new event of the Revolution, perceived at the time as “unprecedented” (4), commentators turned to existing frameworks, including the related categories of sublime and grotesque: “Had Burke been asked if he regarded the French Revolution as sublime, he would have replied: No, grotesque. In his sense the grotesque is a burlesque sublime” (168). Like Furniss, Paulson contends that for Burke the Revolution embodied a “false sublime,” a series of potentially grand events that pressed too close and thus abandoned the safe distance needed to distinguish “delighted horror” from genuine fear and disgust (71-2). When obscurity is removed from a terrifying object, it becomes grotesque (Paulson 168). Frans De Bruyn explores how Burke draws on the theatre: while at times he depicts the Revolution as a tragedy (165), at other moments he depicts it as grotesque, associating it with the “low elements of the street and carnival—an outdoor, urban culture, both

56 Kramnick reads the Enquiry as an expression of Burke’s ideological, personal, and sexual “ambivalence,” his struggle with what he saw as two opposite poles of social, political, and sexual life: the sublime, gendered masculine and aligned with the ambitious bourgeoisie, and the beautiful, gendered feminine and aligned with the elegant, traditional aristocracy (97). Another example of a critic focused primarily on the sublime and beautiful in Burke’s political aesthetics is Brantlinger, who recognizes the powerful sublimity of public debt and credit in Burke’s writings (108). Moreover, Christine Battersby argues that the French Revolution caused Burke to abandon his theory of sublimity (69). For Battersby, while the Enquiry suggests that great calamities such as the fall of an empire produce a combination of delight and terror when viewed from a safe distance—such as on a stage (70-1)—the French Revolution caused Burke to reconsider this link between terror and sublime delight, ultimately leading him to “simply bac[k] away in silence, abandoning the discourse of the sublime as immoral and unfeeling” (Battersby 72). Yet, I would argue that to claim that Burke “backs away in silence” from the Revolution’s sublime potential oversimplifies his complex efforts to grapple with this issue in Reflections. Rather than abandoning the sublime, Reflections allowed Burke to revisit the close relationship (only hinted at in the Enquiry) between the sublime and grotesque. Burke attempts to salvage his aesthetic theory by re-categorizing the revolution as grotesque. By proposing that Burke does not abandon the sublime in his Reflections, my argument aligns more closely with that of Matthew Binney. Although Binney does not discuss the grotesque, he counters critics such as Battersby by contending that the sublime does in fact constitute an essential component of Burke’s politics (644).

67 repellent and fascinating” (170).57 These studies have been foundational in mapping the intertwinement of Burke’s politics and aesthetics.

My argument builds on two claims advanced by the above criticism. First, as Furniss suggests, Burke revised his aesthetics in Reflections when confronted with a potentially sublime Revolution and Price’s sermon, which appropriated the sublime for revolutionary rhetoric. Second, as Paulson and De Bruyn argue, Burke turns to the related category of the grotesque. Yet, what this criticism has omitted is that not only the Revolution but also its currency presented Burke with disturbing sublime potential. Attention to the economic contexts of Reflections reveals that this text participates in the wider discourse of the deathly, infinite grotesque, appropriated in the 1790s to engage with transformations in England’s economy and shifting perceptions of the material roots of money.

In the past two decades, much critical attention has been given to how Romantic literature responds to economic change, including the Restriction Act and the rise of paper money. Dick, Poovey, Mitchell, and Lindstrom have argued that Romanticism was deeply engaged with historical economic landmarks such as the gold standard, the growing credit economy, the Restriction Act and other financial crises, and the rise of the fiat economy.58 This

57 For other critics who discuss the grotesque in Burke’s writings (though not in relation to paper money), see Charles Hinnant, Julie Brown, and Katey Castellano. Like Paulson, Hinnant suggests that in Reflections, the “collapse from obscurity to clarity” replaces the sublime with “its negative counterpart, the ludicrous and the grotesque” (31, 33). Brown argues that in the Enquiry, the affective response triggered by the sublime approximates that evoked by the grotesque: a blend of terror and delight (13). Castellano is one critic who does analyze both economic change and the grotesque in Reflections, but she focuses on the growth of capitalism (with a brief discussion of paper money) and the ways in which the grotesque operates at the level of genre in Burke’s text. In a disjointed, “at times even grotesque manner,” Burke blends diverse genres and styles, from legal jargon to tragedy and the gothic novel (Castellano n. pag.). Grappling with an economy in which ideas of value were in radical flux, “Burke scrambles to grasp fragments of tradition from the past and arrange them in an unsystematic and anti- utilitarian way that will conserve what he understands to be their pre-capitalist, non-relative, and stable value” (Castellano n. pag.). For more on the grotesque in Burke, see also David Collings, “The Monstrous Crowds and Mysterious Incorporations of Edmund Burke.”

58 Dick suggests that after England’s implementation of the gold standard in 1816, the ensuing debates inspired literary experiments with irony, genre, and form, ultimately prompting Romanticism to present itself as an alternative standard, a supplement to “the moral deficiencies and logical contradictions of the economy” (Romanticism 9). Poovey traces how three genres mediated changing ideas of value in Britain’s rising credit economy: monetary writing (coins, paper money), writing about money (economic theory, shipping lists), and imaginative writing (literature) (2). Mitchell argues that crises in state finance, including the Bank Restriction Act (3), “enabled Romantic theories of imagination, sympathy, and identification by providing occasions for discernment of, and theories about, social systems” (5). Lindstrom suggests that the fiat economy—based in “verbal

68 recent interest follows decades of neglect. As Dick indicates, scholarship has only recently begun to comprehend paper money and “its impact on literature and culture” (“British” 696). Although much of this scholarship addresses, at least in part, the connections between paper money and Romantic aesthetics (Poovey’s writings on genre, Mitchell’s work on imagination, for example), Kevin Barry makes this topic his primary focus. He proposes that the Bank Restriction Act bears “a material relation to romantic aesthetics,” since radical disruptions in public credit may trigger related crises in aesthetic practices (169-70). Ian Haywood similarly proposes that the Restriction Act intersected with aesthetics: “By converting currency into ‘imagination’ rather than ‘real value’, the idea of value migrated into the aesthetic realm, the realm of symbolic circulation” (par. 23). For Shell, paper money controversies involved aesthetics just as much as economics, since symbolization—“the relationship between the substantial thing and its sign”—lies at the core of these debates (6). Matthew Rowlinson focuses on the connections between money and the sublime.59 Yet, too little attention has been given in this criticism to the grotesque. This omission overlooks the ways in which, as my final section will suggest, the grotesque structure of paper money in Burke’s writings extends beyond aesthetics and economics and, by changing the relationships between people and things, thereby transforms the underlying structure of social relationships. A grotesque economy, Reflections suggests, creates a grotesque society.

Several core properties of the grotesque make it an ideal vehicle for representing paper money. The term “grotesque” derives from the Italian grottesco, which takes its root from grotta (‘cave’) and was first used to describe ancient cave paintings re-discovered in fifteenth-century Italy (Kayser 19). These images frequently fuse human and nonhuman forms, combining plant parts with human or animal features (Kayser 20). Taking its name from these hybrid images that transgress distinctions between humans, plants, and animals, the grotesque centres on the breakdown of boundaries, transformation, and heterogeneity. According to Frances Connelly, “[t]he grotesque is defined by what it does to boundaries, transgressing, merging, overflowing, destabilizing them” (Introduction 4). In his study of “grotesque realism” in medieval carnival and

maneuvers of ‘let there be,’ [and] ‘let be’”—exerted a profound influence on Romantic notions of poetry and lyric (3). See also Amanda Lahikainen’s article on paper money, in which she suggests that paper money, an embodiment of social relations of trust and confidence, helped to transform Romantic subjectivity (512). 59 For Rowlinson’s arguments, see note 75 of this chapter. For more on the relationship between money and aesthetics, see also Michaels (154-6).

69 folk humour (18), Mikhail Bakhtin argues that “[t]he grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming” (24). For Bakhtin, growth and fertility lie at the heart of the grotesque, as well as images of a body that exceeds its own boundaries through excess and overgrowth, a body constantly depicted as eating, drinking, defecating, dying, or being born (26). These characteristics suit Burke’s representation of paper money, as the never-ending, cyclical transformations of the grotesque mirror the infinite production of paper banknotes, and the fluid state of the grotesque object— always transforming and dissolving its boundaries—mirrors the changeability of the assignats and their value. While grotesque images resurface frequently in the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century texts in this study, these texts do not always explicitly use the term “grotesque.” Burke uses this word only once in the Enquiry. Yet nonetheless, the recurrence of these images, in a genealogy from Milton to Burke, Gillray, and Newton, marks the grotesque as an important category within the period, despite the lack of explicit theorization. Mainstream eighteenth- century aesthetic theory excluded the grotesque from consideration because it jarred with classical and neoclassical aesthetics, which portrayed the body as complete, bounded, and separate from the rest of the world and other bodies (Bakhtin 28-9).60

After the Renaissance, the grotesque persisted as a popular tradition across Europe (Barasch 86). Political cartoons by Gillray and Newton drew extensively on this aesthetic (see figs. 1-5, below). Popular urban fairs in eighteenth-century Europe provided a venue for grotesque comedy (Connelly, Grotesque 94). Fair comedies, often burlesques, featured figures that transgressed boundaries between the human and animal and the insides and outsides of bodies: for example, a monkey dressed as a person and a play entitled “The Merchant of Shit” (Connelly, Grotesque 94-5). Gillray’s cartoon, “Midas” (fig. 2), depicts the classic grotesque pattern of transgressing boundaries—in this case, the boundaries of the body, as money exits a gigantic Prime Minister William Pitt. As we can see from the scatological roots of urban fair performances and Gillray’s “Midas,” bodily process was a crucial feature of eighteenth-century

60 Barasch indicates that theorists such as Burke himself helped perpetuate this exclusion from explicit aesthetic theorization: “A rationalist or neoclassical school, exemplified by Edmund Burke, attempted to establish an aesthetic for heroic and learned matter that qualified as ‘sublime’ or ‘beautiful,’ while it disregarded or rejected the popular, creative grotesque. A theoretical understanding of the grotesque as a serious aesthetic category was as yet impossible given the dominance of such neoclassical views” (86).

70 grotesque art. In Reflections, Burke explicitly references the popular grotesque theatre at fairs by comparing the National Assembly to “the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience” and likening their performance to “a profane burlesque, and abominable perversion” (60).61 In Burke’s time, “burlesque” carried strong associations with the grotesque; the term could designate something “[d]roll in look, manner or speech; jocular; odd, grotesque,” as well as a “[g]rotesque imitation of what is, or is intended to be, dignified or pathetic” (def. A.1, B.2). In addition to urban fairs, the illegitimate theatre of eighteenth-century England provided a venue for theatrical performances often perceived by commentators as corporeal and grotesque, as Jane Moody has shown (12). Illegitimate drama, performed at theatres that did not have a patent to stage “legitimate” dramas in the genres of tragedy and comedy (Moody 1), was frequently associated with the body, and the distinction between “authentic and spurious” forms of drama came to be viewed as the “nightmarish confrontation between quasi-ethereal textuality and grotesque corporality” (Moody 12). Particularly after the French Revolution, anti-Jacobin critics viewed the illegitimate theatre as a place of political subversion (Moody 48). Moody suggests that Burke’s Reflections in particular aligns the Revolution with the illegitimate theatre: “monarchical genres” give way to the “anarchy of ‘profane burlesque’” (53), and the Revolution becomes “an act of generic miscegenation—that ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’” (52). It is from the grotesque, revolutionary performances of the illegitimate theatre, then, as well as the urban fair and Milton’s Paradise Lost (as I will argue below), that Burke draws his model of the grotesque.

The discourse Burke establishes adopts two additional qualities that distinguish it from the conventional Bakhtinian grotesque. Burke’s representation of money partakes in a subtype of this category particularly suited for satires of paper bills: the infinite and deathly grotesque. This particular form has been given too little attention by critics. The infinite grotesque satirizes the inflationary excess of paper currencies and offers an alternative to sublime infinity. Grounded in the body or a similar processing mechanism, such as a machine, the infinite grotesque dissolves

61 Also commenting on Burke’s reference to “comedians of a fair,” Furniss asserts that Burke tries to deflate his readers’ admiration of the Revolution by changing its genre “from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a ‘high’ to a ‘low’ dramatic genre” (124). Furniss adds that “the sublime and the ridiculous may be different readings of the same rather than clear-cut opposites; thus, the need to ridicule might be precisely a measure of an adversary’s sublimity” (124). I would add, however, that Burke’s reference to “comedians at fairs” gestures not simply towards the ridiculous but specifically the grotesque, an aesthetic mode with its own traits, history, and political connotations.

71 solid, formed things into shapeless matter through mutilation, consumption, vomiting, and defecation. This category is particularly useful for critiques of paper money because it centres on the processing and un-shaping of matter, aptly encapsulating the perceived loss of solid material wealth in the economy. Moreover, Burke’s grotesque is not only infinite but also a satanic inversion of the Bakhtinian grotesque. Instead of life-generating images of eating, nourishment, and reproduction, the deathly grotesque involves cannibalism, false nourishment, sterility, and quackery. Burke needs this satanic imagery to separate the revolutionary economy from the positive connotations of the grotesque. Elsewhere in Reflections, Burke implies his awareness of the positive grotesque; he employs this trope to describe a healthy state as “a permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression” (30). The state perpetuates itself through grotesque cycles of death and rebirth, and its body is a combination of heterogenous parts.

In the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin debates of the 1790s, commentators expressed strong opinions on not only what was said about the Revolution but also how it was said. Burke takes issue with Price’s sublime presentation (Furniss 117-8) and thus offers the grotesque in its place. In turn, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man objects to Burke’s grotesque imagery. He criticizes Burke’s excessive, emotional style and accuses him of crafting “horrid paintings,” a phrase that gestures towards the terrifying power of Burke’s grotesque (Rights 100). He likens Burke’s style to the theatre: “As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation” (Rights 100). The theatrical comparison is particularly fitting, since Burke does indeed model his style after the illegitimate theatre and urban fairs. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft likewise criticizes Burke for his “sentimental exclamations,” “turgid bombast,” and “pretty flights” arising from “pampered sensibility” (8, 29, 9).62 Instead of

62 Wollstonecraft expresses a similar view in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: “wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings” (75-6).

72 such rhetorical flourish, she praises simplicity, appropriating Burke’s own terms of the sublime and beautiful for her own aims: “truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and, in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful” (7). The style in which Burke, Paine, and Wollstonecraft described the Revolution was so crucial that Randall Sessler has recently described their conversation as a “media debate”: that is, a debate not only about what genre in which to describe the revolution but even which medium (612). The opening of Reflections, at the same time as expressing anxiety about misperceptions of the Revolution as sublime, also establishes Burke’s project to re-envision the Revolution as grotesque. He stresses the power of revolutionary ideas to break down boundaries and blend everything into a “strange chaos,” a jumble of opposites and confounded distinctions: The French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. . . . Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror. (9) Much as the grotesque brings together disparate, previously distinct forms (such as human and non-human), the Revolution fuses opposites (such as “levity and ferocity,” “laughter and tears,” and “scorn and horror”). Burke’s reference to tragicomedy (“monstrous tragicomic scene”) suggests mixing at the level of genre.63 Burke uses the language of blending and mixing to label Price’s speech as another instance of the revolutionary grotesque: a “very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon” in which some good sentiments were “mixed up in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections; but the Revolution in France is the grand ingredient in the cauldron” (10; emphases mine). Figured as porridge and a witch’s cauldron, the Revolution

63 Also noting the connections between the blending of genres and the grotesque imagery in this passage, Castellano argues that this aesthetic of a “monstrous tragi-comic scene” becomes the model for Burke’s own text, as he seeks to match the form of the Revolution with the form of his own writings (n. pag.). As Kayser argues, the tragicomedy—a blend of two genres normally distinct—has strong ties to the grotesque: “Beginning with the dramaturgic practice of the Sturm and Drang and the dramatic theory of Romanticism, tragicomedy and the grotesque are conceptually related” (54). Kayser indicates that tragicomedy provided Schlegel with a new lens for understanding the French Revolution as a chaotic tragicomedy, “the most awe-inspiring grotesque of the age” (Schlegel qtd. in Kayser 51). Moody has shown the importance of tragicomedy and generic mixing to the illegitimate theatre (52). Burke’s Reflections forges a similar link between the tragicomic, grotesque aesthetics, and the French Revolution.

73 and its ideals jumble things that ought to be distinct into one shapeless mass of matter. The grotesque also dominates Burke’s depiction of the October Days. He describes the Palace of Versailles as “swimming in blood, polluted by massacre and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses,” thus drawing on the imagery of mutilation, which evokes the grotesque by transgressing the boundaries of the body (62). He portrays the revolutionary women in the procession as half-woman and half-fury: “horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women” (63). In classic grotesque fashion, this demon-like portrayal transgresses the boundaries of the human and non-human.

Burke’s concern about the grotesque mistaken for sublime was not entirely unfounded, as the two are related (though ultimately distinct) aesthetic modes. While the relationship between them remained undertheorized throughout much of the eighteenth century, in Romantic-era Europe, literary and aesthetic theorists expressed increasing interest in the connections between these categories. Much of the nineteenth-century conversation about the grotesque followed Victor Hugo’s influential preface to Cromwell (1827), in which he claimed that the defining feature of Romantic writing was a union between the grotesque and sublime: “tout dans la création n’est pas humainement beau, que le laid y existe a côté du beau, le difforme près du gracieux, le grotesque au revers du sublime, le mal avec le bien, l’ombre avec la lumière.”64 For Hugo, modern literature thrives on the “féconde union” of these opposites; it will take “un grand pas” by combining “l’ombre à la lumière, le grotesque au sublime, en d’autres termes, le corps à l’ame, la bête à l’esprit.”65 Hugo drew a stark contrast between the physicality of the grotesque, aligned with “body” and “beast,” and the spiritual immateriality of the sublime, aligned with mind and soul.

Like Hugo’s preface, Burke’s Reflections picks up on the connections between the sublime and grotesque, though with a different purpose. In 1790, decades after the publication of the Enquiry, the multiple points of intersection between the two categories allowed Burke to

64 “[E]verything in creation is not humanly beautiful . . . the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the deformed close to the graceful, the grotesque at the reverse of the sublime, the evil with the good, the shadow with the light” (xi; emphasis original). Translations of Hugo throughout this chapter are my own. 65 “[F]ertile union” (xi); “a big step” (xii); “the shadow with the light, the grotesque with the sublime, in other words, the body with the soul, the beast with the mind” (xii).

74 seize upon the grotesque as a related, but ultimately distinct category from the sublime. Reflections implies that viewing the Revolution as sublime commits the fundamental error of mistaking the sublime for its parodic counterpart.66 Burke himself alludes to the similarities between the grotesque and sublime in the Enquiry when he refers to “odd wild grotesques” in paintings of the temptations of St. Anthony (64).67 Here, Burke hints that the sublime and grotesque are connected, obscurity being a crucial difference between them.68 Since language can paint only an imperfect picture of a terrifying object, literature tends naturally towards the obscurity required by the sublime, whereas painting represents objects more clearly (64). Contrasting a passage from Job (which recounts the appearance of a “spirit”) with attempts to represent phantoms in painting, Burke remarks: When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible ideas, they have, I think almost always failed; insomuch that I have been at a loss, in all the pictures I have seen of hell, whether the painter did not intend something ludicrous. Several painters have handled a subject of this kind, with a view of assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs I have chanced to meet of the temptations of St. Anthony, were rather a sort of odd wild grotesques, than any thing capable of producing a serious passion. (64) Phantoms and spirits are sublime when represented in Job as obscure and mysterious, but they become “grotesques” when depicted with clarity in painting (64). These remarks reveal an awareness that the sublime and grotesque are closely related. Gigantic size—a feature Burke describes as “very compatible with the sublime” (Enquiry 155)—appears repeatedly in grotesque political cartoons such as Newton’s “The Inexhaustable Mine” [sic] and Gillray’s “Midas,”

66 Brown, summarizing the writings of Thomas Mann, also discusses “the grotesque as a parodic sublime” (13). See also Paulson’s claim that for Burke, “grotesque is a burlesque sublime” (168). As Robert Clewis articulates, in 1790 Kant also theorized the grotesque as “negative counterpart” of the sublime (35). 67 Drawing on Kayser’s history of the term “grotesque,” we should note that in this passage Burke uses the term “grotesque” to describe figures rather than an aesthetic mode. As Kayser explains, “grotesque” was not used to signify a literary category until the 1820s (77). Kayser credits an 1827 essay by Sir Walter Scott with the first English usage of “grotesque” to designate a literary category (77). Cf. Brown, who argues that Victor Hugo “coined the neologism ‘the grotesque’ as a singular noun” (11).

68 Hinnant identifies this passage from the Enquiry as an example of how “[t]he ludicrous is an a priori enfolded into the sublime” (31).

75 satires that centre on the massive, oversized bodies of John Bull (England) and William Pitt (fig. 4 and 3). Moreover, while Burke figures “delightful horror” as “the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime” (Enquiry 73), Kayser argues that fear is a crucial aspect of many theories of grotesque, a terror that results from the dissolution of known boundaries (21). Boundlessness itself is another trait shared by both categories. While the grotesque dissolves borders by blending and exceeding, sublimity derives from the boundlessness of obscurity and infinity: “hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing” (Burke, Enquiry 63).69

Yet, while the sublime and grotesque share similarities, they nonetheless possess essential differences: only the grotesque involves transformation, regeneration, bodily process, and unions of heterogeneous parts. The type of boundlessness inherent to each aesthetic is also distinct. While the sublime has no perceptible boundaries (as in an infinite universe), the grotesque disintegrates existing boundaries. As Connelly articulates: “The boundless of the sublime, dynamical or numerical, overwhelms reason and exceeds its powers to contain and define. The grotesque, by contrast, is in constant struggle with the boundaries of the known, the conventional, the understood” (Introduction 5).

Seizing upon these differences in Reflections, Burke constructs a narrative of aesthetic error, undercutting the potential sublimity of the Revolution and its economy by reconfiguring them as misrecognized grotesques. Reflections draws on Milton to theorize the deathly grotesque. Burke’s drama of aesthetic misreading draws on a rhetorical move pivotal to Paradise Lost, a text that played an influential role in Burke’s aesthetic theory and provided the source for some of his primary examples of the sublime. Milton, like Burke, reveals the sublimity of revolutionary politics to be a disguised grotesque: while early in the poem Satan appears “[i]n shape and gesture proudly eminent,” he is later reduced to a “monstrous serpent on his belly prone” (1.590, 10.514). Burke thus exploits an existing discourse of aesthetic and political error

69 See also Paulson, who points out an “area of agreement between sublime and grotesque”: both exceed neoclassical norms, and both share the features of “obscurity, formlessness, and the ugly” (168-9). Following Kant, Paulson argues that “the sublime itself does not depend on form and indeed may require a kind of nonform” (168-9).

76 central to previous representations of revolutionary power and satanic politics. This concept of aesthetic error has been theorized by Stanley Fish in a more general sense, though not through the lens of the sublime and grotesque. He argues that when reading Paradise Lost, the reader forms responses to Satan and his eloquence (among other features of the poem), only to realize later that they have been mistaken, thus exposing the reader’s own corruption and fallibility as a postlapsarian subject (xli). Milton thus recreates, in the mind of his readers, the narrative of the central error in the poem, the Fall of humankind (Fish 1).

In the Enquiry, Burke cites one of Milton’s descriptions of Satan as a demonstration of the sublime: He above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent Stood like a tower. His form had yet not lost All her original brightness nor appeared Less than archangel ruined and th’ excess Of glory obscured, as when the sun, new ris’n, Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams or from behind the moon In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. (1.589-99) Burke remarks of this passage that “[w]e do not any where meet a more sublime description than this justly celebrated one of Milton” (Enquiry 62). Its sublimity derives in large part from the obscurity of the terrifying image presented: “The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images” (Burke, Enquiry 62). The early books of Paradise Lost contain countless depictions of Satan and his followers as superficially sublime. In hell when the fallen angels swarm in masses, Milton stresses their vastness and infinity (sublime traits): they are a “multitude” of “godlike shapes and forms” who resemble “[a] forest of huge spears; and thronging helms… in thick array / Of depth immeasurable” (1.351, 358, 547-9). These images evoke an expansive array of identical parts (“thronging helms” and “huge spears”), which create the effect of infinity, a “depth immeasurable”—an effect which recalls Burke’s theory of the “artificial infinite” as a source of the sublime (discussed further below).

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However, the later books of Paradise Lost reveal that Satan embodies what Furniss and Paulson, in their studies of Burke, call a “false sublime.” Satan operates through display and rhetoric (“[w]ords interwove with sighs”), projecting a “[s]emblance of worth, not substance” (1.621; 529). In Paradise Lost, aesthetic error is deeply intertwined with moral error. Those who mistakenly believe in Satan’s false appearances and rhetoric (such as the fallen angels and Eve in her temptation) are led to errors of disastrous consequences. When describing potentially sublime figures such as Satan and Death, Milton implies the dangers of aesthetic misreading through repeated verbs of “seeming,” “misleading,” and “distinguishing.” When Satan appears in Eden to tempt Eve, he speaks with words “impregned / With reason (to her seeming),” and is compared to a fairy light70 that “[m]isleads th’amazed night-wanderer from his way” (9.737-8, 634, 640; emphases mine). Milton’s description of Death stresses the same language of misperception, distinguishing, and seeming: “The other shape / (If shape it might be call’d that shape had none / Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, / Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, / For each seemed either” (2.666-70; emphases mine). Although in the Enquiry, Burke identifies this passage as “sublime to the last degree” (60), Milton’s repeated verbs of seeming and distinguishing hint that Death’s sublimity is only apparent, the product of confounded distinctions (of “each seem[ing] either”). In Book 10, Death re-emerges as the grotesque figure of a giant nose. After the Fall, Death detects “the smell / Of mortal change on Earth” and uses his nose to lead him there: “So scented the grim feature and upturned / His nostril wide into the murky air” (10.272-3, 279-80).71 Bakhtin has shown that the grotesque stresses the body’s orifices and protrusions, the parts which are permeable or seek to extend outside the body’s boundaries; thus, the nose and mouth are the most recurrent facial features in grotesque imagery (316). As we will see in my second section, Burke appropriates the olfactory imagery of the grotesque in his parody of paper money in Reflections, depicting the revolutionaries and their financial schemes as a mole nuzzling through the earth, guided by smell

70 Teskey identifies the misleading light as “[f]airy light” or “phosphorescent swamp gas that misleads travelers at night” (Paradise Lost, Teskey’s note, p. 214). 71 Cf. Wooten, who comments that “we are encouraged to laugh at this nosing burrower through Chaos” (55). Wooten suggests that Milton draws on the burlesque (related to the grotesque) in order to replace the apparent grandeur of Satan and Death with a series of “burlesque let-down[s]” in Book 10 (56).

78 alone. Gillray, too, picks up on this discourse in his 1792 cartoon, “Smelling out a Rat,” portraying Burke himself as a giant nose sniffing out the revolutionary William Price (fig. 1).

Fig. 1. James Gillray. “Smelling out a Rat; or The Atheistical Revolutionist disturbed in his Midnight ‘Calculations.’” London, 1797. The British Museum. Web.

In Book 10, Milton most firmly undermines the satanic sublime with the grotesque. Satan puts on his final show of false grandeur when he returns from the Garden of Eden, seats himself upon his throne, and reveals himself to his followers, summoning all that is left of his “false glitter” (10.452). But rather than applause, his words are met by “[a] dismal universal hiss” as his audience turns into snakes, and Satan’s own transformation follows: “His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare, / His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining / Each other till supplanted down he fell / A monstrous serpent on his belly prone” (10.508, 511-4). Milton thus exploits the grotesque themes of transformation and permeable boundaries between the human and the animal. Satan is a figure of transmutation, constantly adopting other forms, often those of animals. One moment he is perched “like a cormorant,” and the next he is “[s]quat like a toad” at Eve’s ear (4.196, 4.800). When travelling through Eden, Satan assumes the forms of various

79 animals “himself now one, / Now other,” and when he takes over the body of the serpent, Milton specifies that “[i]n at his mouth / The Devil entered” (4.397-8, 9.187), gesturing once more to the grotesque emphasis on the mouth (Bakhtin 316).72

In his representations of paper money, Burke draws not only on the grotesque in general to undercut the sublime but on the specific model, crucial to Paradise Lost, of the parodic and deathly grotesque, one diametrically opposed to the fertile, regenerative aesthetic identified by Bakhtin. Paper money, Burke suggests, masquerades as nourishment for the body politic of France but in fact starves and poisons it.73 Likewise, in Paradise Lost, after the fallen angels transform into snakes, a grove of trees springs up filled with fruit similar to that of the forbidden tree; yet, when Satan’s followers, “parched with scalding thirst and hunger” (10.555), attempt to eat the fruit, their hopes of sustenance are dashed by the fruit’s sudden change into a parodic, sickly mockery of nourishment: They, fondly thinking to allay Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit Chewed bitter ashes which th’ offended taste With spattering noise rejected. Oft they assayed, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugged as oft, With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws With soot and cinders filled. (10.564-70) This deathly consumption inverts the Bakhtinian grotesque’s themes of nourishment, life, reproduction, and fertility. While death is a part of Bakhtin’s model, it is always accompanied by rebirth: the grotesque intertwines moments of reproduction and decay into a vision of continuous, cyclical time (Bakhtin 24-5). But in the above segment of Paradise Lost the snakes consume the fruit but remain in perpetual hunger, “worn with famine long” (10.573). Milton describes Eve’s act of eating the forbidden fruit as a similar deathly parody of nourishment, as she “knew not eating death” (9.792). Like Satan’s fallen angels, Death experiences “eternal

72 In her study of the grotesque in Paradise Lost, Ivana Bičack similarly charts Satan’s gradual diminishment from angelic grandeur to a “lurking, squatting, and finally slithering thing,” until at last “the angelic becomes utterly subsumed by the beastly,” with Book 10 marking the climax in this transformation (121). 73 Furniss also points out Burke’s use of the “body politic” metaphor, arguing that Burke sees this body as threatened by the disease of revolutionary ideals (122-3). See also Haywood’s quote in my note 28.

80 famine” and engages in cannibalism (a deadly and corrupted consumption) by feeding on humankind in an endless attempt to satiate this hunger (10.597). Sin, another key grotesque figure in the poem, parodies reproduction and inverts the grotesque’s associations with life and fertility. Sin is a hybrid figure, a heterogeneous combination of human and animal forms: “woman to the waste and fair / But ended foul in many a scaly fold / Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed / With mortal sting” (2.650-3). Sin enters the world by springing out of Satan’s head, an apt encapsulation of Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body as “not separated from the rest of the world” and constantly exceeding and transgressing its own boundaries (26).74 In a parody of reproduction, hounds, the offspring of Death’s incestuous rape, “hourly conceived / And hourly born,” continually invade Sin’s womb and gnaw her insides (2.796-7). Cannibalism, incest, and deathly consumption constitute core features of the satanic grotesque.

We can find the positive counterpart to the satanic grotesque in Milton’s prelapsarian Eden, described as a place of abundant overgrowth, “[w]ith thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild” (4.136). As Teskey notes, Milton’s use of the term “grotesque” here alludes to the caves that fill the landscape as well as specifically to the grotesque cave paintings rediscovered in the Renaissance (Teskey’s note, Paradise Lost, p. 81). Ivana Bičack indicates that Milton’s term “grotesque” in this passage invokes this aesthetic in its “playful” sense: “the sportiveness and unrestraint of nature are portrayed in positive terms as his paradise is strewn with profuse vegetation” (113). The Edenic grotesque consists of growth and nourishment, of “trees loaden with fairest fruit” and the healthy, robust consumption that takes place, for example, in excessive feasting when Raphael visits Adam and Eve in Eden (4.147). For Milton, Sin is the inversion of prelapsarian Eve, who is associated with reproduction (“Mother of Mankind whose fruitful womb / Shall fill the world more numerous with thy sons”) and with the regenerative grotesque of Eden’s overgrowth: “She . . . / Her unadornèd golden tresses wore / Dishevelled but in wanton ringlets waved / As the vine curls her tendrils” (5.388-9, 4.305-7). When Satan and his followers appear in Book 10 with their sublime trappings removed, they invert these life-giving bodily processes—and it is this satanic grotesque that Burke appropriates for his depictions of paper

74 Bičack also suggests that Satan dramatizes Bakhtin’s concept of the unfinished, unseparated body: Satan constantly exceeds his boundaries and extends outwards into the world, as in the creation of Sin and Death (118-9).

81 money. Following Paradise Lost, Reflections dramatizes the dangers of aesthetic misreadings of both revolutionary politics and revolutionary currencies.

2.2 Paper Money and the Infinite Grotesque

No other aspect of the Revolution demonstrated more sublime potential than the assignats. Capable of seemingly endless inflationary expansion, these bills epitomized all the qualities shared by the sublime and the grotesque: immensity, horror, infinity, and boundlessness. Infinity in particular gave paper bills a powerful potential for grandeur, since as Burke proposes in the Enquiry, “hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity” (63). Confronted in 1790 by the need to represent an infinite, seemingly sublime economy, Burke turned to popular art and Paradise Lost and mobilized the infinite, deathly grotesque to create a narrative about the loss of material things in the economy and social life. According to this narrative, the “solid substance” of landed property and “real money” dissolve into shapeless matter (Reflections, 38, 167). Rooted in repetitive bodily processes, this type of endlessness transforms distinct, bounded things into never-ending streams of matter, refiguring the formlessness of sublimity as its grotesque counterpart: organic matter made shapeless by process. The sublime infinity of a universe finds a parodic opposite in the endless paper productions of the National Assembly. At the heart of Burke’s infinite grotesque, and the revolutionary society it represents, is the perceived loss of things from economic and social life, the transition from an economy of things to an economy of formless paper.

With the endless, inflationary overproduction of paper bills, the French Revolutionary economy embodied multiple qualities that might be interpreted as sublime. One lengthy passage from Reflections hints at Burke’s awareness of the infinity—a powerfully sublime trait—of the assignats: Is there a debt which presses them?—Issue assignats. Are compensations to be made or a maintenance decreed to those whom they have robbed of their freehold in their office, or expelled from their profession?—Assignats. Is a fleet to be fitted out?—Assignats. If sixteen millions sterling of these assignats, forced on the people, leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever—issue, says one, thirty millions sterling of the assignats—says

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another, issue fourscore millions more of assignats. . . . Are the old assignats depreciated at market?—What is the remedy? Issue new assignats. (206) Burke critiques the boundless excess of paper money. The National Assembly holds the power to produce endless quantities of paper—“thirty millions sterling of the assignats . . . fourscore millions more of assignats”—and this overproduction in turn triggers instability as the assignats’ value becomes uncertain, “depreciated at market” via inflation. The paper money economy is a massive entity with endless identical parts: bill after bill stretched out with no perceptible end.

By turning to the Enquiry, we can locate the precise model of sublimity that the assignats approximate: the “artificial infinite,” an effect produced when an object embodies two qualities: succession (whereby the multiple parts of a thing stretch out and repeat until they appear infinite) and uniformity (whereby the parts of a thing are identical and uniform) (74). For his central example of the artificial infinite, Burke selects a straight line of uniform pillars: let us take our stand, in such a manner, that the eye may shoot along this colonnade, for it has its best effect in this view. In our present situation it is plain, that the rays from the first round pillar will cause in the eye a vibration of that species; an image of the pillar itself. The pillar immediately succeeding increases it; that which follows renews and enforces the impression; each in its order as it succeeds, repeats impulse after impulse, and stroke after stroke, until the eye long exercised in one particular way cannot lose that object immediately; and, being violently roused by this continued agitation, it presents the mind with a grand or sublime conception. (139) The repetition of multiple uniform parts triggers a physiological response by violently agitating the eye and thus impressing the mind with sublimity. A bare wall could never create an illusion of infinity, since a wall represents one idea “and not a repetition of similar ideas” (140). This stress on a “repetition of similar ideas” anticipates Burke’s lengthy passage about assignats in Reflections. As a seemingly endless stream of identical parts, paper money fulfills the requirements of both succession and uniformity, an apt embodiment of the artificial infinite. Pillar after pillar becomes bill after bill. The form of Burke’s passage about assignats also replicates, on a structural level, the repetitive infinity of paper money through the jarring repetition of the italicized word “assignats.” By swelling to massive, unwieldy, and shapeless proportions, paper money epitomizes the sublime qualities of the boundless and the gigantic. We can detect Burke’s anxieties about the vastness and apparent endlessness of the revolutionary

83 economy when he compares it to an ocean. In the Enquiry, the sea—a gigantic, shapeless entity associated with danger and terror—serves as an example of the sublime (58). Reflections describes paper money as “the Euripus of funds and actions” (88)—the Euripus being a part of the Aegean Sea that changes dramatically with the tide (Pocock’s note, Reflections 223)—and Burke uses the metaphor of a sea to describe ballooning debt levels in France: “Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt” (136). The phrase “boundless debt” also highlights the sublime traits of shapelessness and boundlessness. The structural similarities between paper money and sublimity reveal another reason why the assignats posed such a threat to Burke, even representing (to borrow Haywood’s phrase) “the epitome of Jacobin mischief”: they embodied a powerful aesthetic potential, forming the economic core of a revolution which had been, in Burke’s mind, misread as sublime.75 William Cobbett’s Paper Against Gold gestures towards a similar sense of the mystical, perhaps even supernatural, entity of the English system of finance. Cobbett strives to dismantle this mystique, insisting that “the truth is . . . that the Bank of England is a mere human institution, arising out of causes having nothing miraculous, or supernatural, about them” (8).

If the assignats are sublime, however, Reflections suggests that they are so only on the surface, and beneath that lurks a satanic grotesque. When describing the assignats and their process of “continual transmutation of paper into land, and land into paper,” Burke envisions a “monstrous,” formless mass: “By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself and incorporates with it. By this kind of operation that species of property becomes (as it were) volatized; it assumes an unnatural and monstrous activity” (168; emphases mine). Boundlessness appears here not as sublime, but as “unnatural and monstrous.” Melded with the spirit of monied speculation, land itself becomes formless and “volatized,” “incorporate[d]” with paper into a grotesque combination of land and monied speculation. The resulting hybrid entity recalls the part-human, part-animal figure of the centaur, a classic example of the grotesque and its power to dissolve known boundaries.

75 For Haywood’s comments, see my note 48. For more on the sublimity of money, see Rowlinson (28-30). Building on De Bolla and Zizek, Rowlinson argues that money’s “sublimity encompasses its status as an aggregation of units homogeneous with the units of everyday money” (28). Rowlinson questions the distinction between the sublime abstraction of money and its material remainders, or waste matter: “Hidden in the ragged banknote or the worn coin, there is always . . . a piece of the monetary sublime” (28).

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In Reflections, this model of the infinite grotesque provides the underlying structure for the French Revolution. Burke’s images of the Revolution repeatedly evoke cannibalism, dismemberment, consumption, and disease—all of which permeate, transgress, dissolve, or rearrange the boundaries of things and of the body (and by extension, the French body politic). In Reflections, supporters of the Revolution constantly engage in drinking and eating. Dr. Price and his hearers visit the London Tavern after his sermon (58); the French army joins the clubs and confederations in feasting and celebrating (188); and after arresting the King and Queen at Versailles, the revolutionaries celebrate in terms Burke depicts as cannibalistic: “the sufferings of monarchs make a delicious repast to some palates” (63). Moreover, by figuring revolutionary ideals as false medicine, Reflections envisions these principles as substances that permeate the body upon the false promise of healing and regeneration. Referencing a diuretic medicine in particular, Burke suggests that revolutionary ideas are not only taken into one’s person, but also processed and expelled again in streams of matter via the infinite grotesque. He compares the act of listening to radical rhetoric to “taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty” (55). The OED identifies “cantharides” as a beetle that could be used internally as a diuretic, citing this example from Burke in particular (def. 2). Finally, in addition to medicine, Burke associates the Revolution with cannibalism, the dark form of consumption practiced by Death in Paradise Lost. Paris, Burke claims, staged the “spectacle” of the St. Bartholomew massacre in order to excite the masses, “to stimulate their cannibal appetites (which one would think had been gorged sufficiently) by variety and seasoning” (125).

Burke depicts the economy of revolutionary France as a body engaged in the endless consumption of things and their subsequent regurgitation as formless organic matter.76 Forms of

76 Burke draws on a long tradition of associating money with the body and its functions. “He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly,” Zophar declares to Job when describing the fate of a wicked man (The Bible, Job 20.15). Haywood points out the popular figure of the “money devil,” who exposes greed “by raining coins onto people from all his orifices” (par. 25). This character dates back to the medieval period but remained popular in Burke’s time, particularly in eighteenth-century European and Russian caricatures (Haywood par. 25). Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics indicates that “[t]he paper money goes about, by one, and two, and five, / A circulation like the blood, that keeps the land alive” (“A Mood of My Own Mind” 37-8). Moreover, Rowlinson and Haywood have traced a long tradition of associating money with waste matter in particular. Rowlinson analyzes waste and its relation to money and capital: “it is a condition of capital’s existence as a form of value that it may at any moment revert into waste matter . . . the same structure evidently characterizes credit money and may be immanent to money as such” (164). The repeated transformations of money into waste

85 deathly or deceptive nourishment—such as quackery and cannibalism—resurface as metaphors for paper banknotes as Burke depicts the body politic of France swallowing “paper pills” and processing them into infinite formlessness (210). False medicine (particularly drugs swallowed orally) becomes a favoured metaphor for the assignats. Describing the conversion of church lands into paper, Burke asserts, “[w]ith these philosophic financiers, this universal medicine made of church mummy is to cure all the evils of the state” (206). The “medicine made of church mummy” references the practice of consuming mummy flesh for medicinal purposes: “Belief in the medicinal powers of the bituminous liquid which could be extracted from the bodies of ancient Egyptian mummies app[arently] arose because of its resemblance to pissasphalt . . . Later, similar powers were ascribed to mummified flesh itself, which was often used in the form of a powder” (“Mummy,” def. I.1.a).77 The OED cites this particular quotation from Burke as an example of the figurative usage of “mummy”—meaning “[t]he preserved essence of something” (I.1.d)—but if we take into account the larger context of Reflections, which repeatedly portrays paper money as medicine to be swallowed, we see that the literal meaning of “mummy”—as “[a] substance prepared for medicinal use from mummified (usually human) flesh”—also inflects Burke’s use of the word (def. I.1.a). On a literal level, the mummy image denotes a human corpse that has been ingested, but on a symbolic level, the reference to “church mummy” alludes to the practice of the assignats of taking confiscated lands (solid forms) and un-shaping their boundaries by subjecting them to bodily process. Burke’s vision of paper money functions as a satanic parody of regeneration, nourishment, growth, and vitality.

In Burke’s images of assignats as medicines and consumables, we can locate the tension between his competing concepts of money as both material and incorporeal. In a second crucial passage portraying the assignats as medicine, Burke critiques the National Assembly’s lack of

matter, Rowlinson suggests, helped establish the very distinction between abstract and material value (167). Haywood argues that what P.G.M. Dickson calls England’s “financial revolution” used the metaphor of circulation to naturalize convertibility, figuring paper money as blood circulating in the body politic; yet, this flow of money could be endangered by either restriction or excess: “if one nightmare is economic starvation . . . the other danger— as Gillray imagines [in “Midas”]—is the inflationary overproduction of worthless and wasteful currency” (par. 13). Waste and consumables, as transient but still material phenomena, offered Burke a physical embodiment of traits commonly associated with the immaterial—ephemerality, transience, and obscurity—and thus served as an ideal vehicle for Reflections’ representation of the conflicted materiality of money. 77 The OED’s examples for this meaning of “mummy” make it clear that these medicines were often ingested orally: for example, “these dead bodies are the Mummie which the Phisitians and Apothecaries doe against our willes make vs to swallow” (def. I.1.a).

86 clear bookkeeping—their refusal to release clear figures for the value of the assignats that include, for example, the fees for the management of the church lands transferred to the new owners: There is no other prop than this confiscation to keep the whole state from tumbling to the ground. In this situation they have purposely covered all that they ought industriously to have cleared with a thick fog, and then, blindfold themselves, like bulls that shut their eyes when they push, they drive, by the point of their bayonets, their slaves, blindfolded indeed no worse than their lords, to take their fictions for currencies and to swallow down paper pills by thirty-four millions sterling at a dose. (210-1) The National Assembly’s currency becomes a mass feeding forced upon the French people. Burke’s reference to such high quantities (“paper pills” that are “swallow[ed] down” in “thirty- four millions sterling at a dose”) draws attention to the excess and boundlessness of the infinite grotesque; paper money functions here as it does in Gillray’s “Midas,” permeating the boundaries of the body in massive quantities. Burke figures the Assembly as driving “bulls” with bayonets in hand, a grotesque image hovering between the human and the animal. But it is Burke’s final clause in this passage that expresses uncertainty about money’s physicality. Even within a single phrase, “to take their fictions for currencies and to swallow down paper pills,” the assignats fluctuate between the abstract and the concrete, shifting from imaginary “fictions” to “pills” (tangible objects for consumption). The oscillation between these two partakes in a larger tension, throughout Reflections, between the material and the immaterial in Burke’s representation of money.

What critics such as Furniss and Paulson have not discussed is the conflict that arises between Burke’s aesthetic goals—his need to represent the Revolution as neither sublime nor beautiful and his subsequent turn to grotesque—and one of his key political goals: to discredit French paper money as an immaterial, “fictitious” form of speculation that removes things—the solid wealth of landed property and “real money”—from the economy (Reflections 107, 167). The National Assembly, Burke claims, has attempted to replace “the more solid substance of land” with “ideal paper wealth” (38). Torn between conflicting interests, Burke’s conceptions of money shift between airy speculation and a visceral medley of bodies and matter. This uncertainty resurfaces in another grotesque depiction of paper money, when Burke compares the National Assembly’s speculative financial experiments to those of John Law, who in France

87 vouched for the Mississippi Company, a trade venture that led to an investment bubble and drastic crash (Pocock’s note, Reflections, p. 226). According to Burke, even though the French revolutionaries are appalled by such comparisons, Law’s experiments were in fact better founded than the assignats, since they were built not only on speculations about the Mississippi but also on international trade, and they thus aimed for “an increase of the commerce of France” (212). Burke argues that Law’s experiments opened the commerce of France to the whole range of the two hemispheres. They did not think of feeding France from its own substance. A grand imagination found in this flight of commerce something to captivate. It was wherewithal to dazzle the eye of an eagle. It was not made to entice the smell of a mole nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth, as yours is. (212-3) Much like the “church mummy,” the assignats become pieces of the French body politic (and more literally, pieces of church lands) that are cannibalistically force-fed to the French people, thus “feeding France from its own substance.” As discussed above, the nose has strong ties to the grotesque, and here Burke depicts the assignats economy as a mole navigating its way through the earth through “smell,” not unlike the giant nose of Milton’s Death scenting his way through Chaos.78 What is most striking about this passage, however, is the (undesirable) aggressive materiality it assigns to paper money and the (desirable) imaginative airiness it assigns to Law’s financial schemes. Burke contrasts the two senses of sight and smell: while Law’s experiments dazzle the vision of an eagle, the money of the National Assembly is aligned with a mole nuzzling itself in the dirt. Described as a “flight of commerce,” Law’s schemes are airy and imaginative, soaring above the earth’s sordid materiality and distanced by the long-range sense of vision rather than the close-range sense of smell. While at other moments in Reflections, Burke criticizes the fanciful speculation of the assignats, his image of the burrowing mole associates them with the sordidly material and condemns material ventures, instead praising “flight[s] of commerce” that captivate the “grand imagination”—terms which approximate his previous critiques of financial speculation. Burke’s burrowing mole punctures the loftiness of French Revolutionary finance and its abstract imaginings by bringing it back to the material; the mole is thus an instance of what Bakhtin calls “grotesque realism”: “the lowering of all that is

78 Burke’s choice of the mole metaphor in particular echoes Milton’s depiction of Death in Paradise Lost: Wooten points out that when Milton uses the phrase “the mole immense” to describe Death paving the bridge through hell, “mole” refers both to the bridge and to Death himself (Wooten 55; Paradise Lost 10.300).

88 high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body” (19-20). Bakhtin argues that prior to the bourgeois conception of the private body as separate from all other bodies (19), the medieval and early modern grotesque lowered their objects for the positive purpose of regeneration; degrading an object “hurl[ed] it down to the reproductive lower stratum” of the body where birth takes place, since the grotesque is “always conceiving” (21). However, Burke’s Reflections, written in a later period and with different purposes, evokes a grotesque with no hint of regeneration. His use of the material degrades without rebirth. His images of cannibalism, quackery, and false nourishment invert the vitality at the core of medieval and early modern carnival. The vividly material means by which Burke accomplishes this degradation conflict with his objective to depict paper money as ephemeral.

These contradictory images mirror the widespread uncertainty about the materiality of money in Burke’s political moment, a fear which was exacerbated by the French Revolution.79 In Romantic-era Europe, vehement controversies about paper bills exposed the uncertain materiality of money: does value reside in physical things, or is it, as Spang claims, people who “make stuff into money” (6)? More broadly, then, Reflections replicates a tension between thing and abstraction deeply engrained both in debates about money throughout Western history and in the nature of money itself. Walter Benn Michaels identifies a similar problematic of materiality in his study of money; he argues that in late nineteenth-century America, commentators expressed conflicted views about money’s physical status: “at the same time that [money] was insufficiently material, it was too material” (68). Shell analyzes the nineteenth-century American debate between “gold bugs” and “paper money men” and suggests that this controversy centred on the tension between “the substantial thing and its sign” (6). Likewise, Spang’s recent history of revolutionary France focuses on the “stuff” of money and the misperception of value “as a quality inherent in things (rather than a product of relations between people)” (14).80 It is this uncertainty about what Spang calls the “stuff” of money that haunts Burke’s Reflections and generates his spectral, yet vividly material, depictions of paper bills.

79 As Barry suggests, economic fissures often repeat themselves in the aesthetic realm: “A crisis in public credit, or a transformation in the means of exchange, may recur in an alteration of aesthetic practice” (170).

80 Cf. Rowlinson’s claims about abstract value and material substance discussed on page 90 of this chapter.

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Throughout economic histories, the vexed materiality of money resurfaces again and again when normal economic functioning is disrupted by sudden change or crisis.81 Uncertainty about money tends to coincide with uncertainty about governments; as Paine observes in The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, “every case of a failure in finances, since the system of paper began, has produced a revolution in governments,” including the French Revolution (19). Spang has shown that this topic dominated policy debates about assignats within the National Assembly at the time the legislation passed (80). In 1789, the National Assembly first issued the notes as a solution to the state’s “ongoing deficit crisis” and a severe shortage of specie (Spang 74). A compulsory currency to be accepted as legal tender (Spang 9), the assignats represented portions of the biens nationaux, lands formerly held by crown and church put up for sale by the Assembly (Spang 76). This basis in church lands formed the crux of arguments both for and against assignats, as politicians strove to legitimize their favoured currencies (whether specie or paper) by grounding them in physical sources of value (Spang 80). While both parties agreed that no one should attempt to create value from nothing, proponents of specie emphasized the intrinsic, natural value of gold and silver, while supporters of assignats insisted that their value derived from an equally natural, tangible source: the land of the confiscated church properties (Spang 80). Assignats appealed to lawmakers precisely because they “would make state finances material, taking them out of the realm of the fantastic and the man-made and anchoring them firmly in the domain of nature” (Spang 82).

In 1797, a more extended discourse of the infinite grotesque emerges when British graphic satires draw on Burke’s aesthetics to respond to the Bank Restriction Act. In 1797, Burke’s worst economic fear arrived in England: a mandatory paper currency no longer exchangeable for gold. In 1790, Reflections had differentiated between English and French paper money on the grounds that English notes corresponded to physical stores of specie at the Bank of England and could be redeemed for gold at any time: “in England, not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice; . . . the whole has had its origin in cash

81 Spang and Poovey have demonstrated that monetary controversy peaks during times of economic uncertainty, credit crisis, or radical economic change, since it is these disruptions that denaturalize money and bring its social dimensions to the foreground. As Spang proposes, often “a dramatic upheaval”—a revolution, even—is needed to make the unconscious thought processes behind money visible again (2). Poovey suggests that while naturalization normally obscures the heterogeneity of money and its nature as writing, fiscal crises temporarily suspend this obfuscation (3-4).

90 actually deposited; and . . . it is convertible at pleasure” (204). But in 1797, a widespread shortage of cash, high national debt levels, and the costs of war with France prompted the Bank Restriction Act (Poovey 175-6). This legislation revoked Burke’s distinguishing rule that notes be “convertible at pleasure” by decreeing that the Bank of England would no longer exchange its notes for specie. By repealing the convertibility of paper and gold, the Restriction Period (1797- 1821) shattered the alleged link between money and object, between paper and the physical origins of its value. The Restriction prompted an outpouring of reactions, from the satirical cartoons of Gillray and Newton to written responses by Paine, Thornton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Peacock, Lord Byron, Cobbett, and others.82 According to Poovey, this explosive controversy arose in part because “the Restriction rendered the fictitious nature of all paper money visible” (16) and widened the gap between financial tokens and what they represented (62). Supporters of the credit economy endorsed the minimization of tangible monetary tokens in favour of abstractions (Poovey 51). On the other hand, critics of paper currencies depicted them as insubstantial and immaterial. Peacock highlights the insubstantiality of paper currencies in his Paper Money Lyrics, pointing out that “promises of payment / Are neither food nor raiment” (“Pan in Town” 7-8), and depicting modern genius and learning as small, flimsy boats floating “[o]n the stream of paper money / All riding by sheet anchors, / Of balances at Bankers” (“Pan in Town” 19-22). Peacock’s phrase, “sheet anchors,” puns on the literal meaning of “sheet-anchor” as “[a] large anchor” while also highlighting the flimsy physicality of paper sheets (“Sheet- anchor,” def. a). Though paper money was in fact composed of material things, its critics perceived it as immaterial, or at least less material than gold.

82 Paine’s Decline and Fall opposes paper money just as firmly as Burke does. Speaking of “experiments” with paper money in America and France, Paine argues that “the quantity became so enormous, and so disproportioned to the quantity of the population, and to the quantity of objects upon which it could be employed, that the market, if I may so express it, was glutted with it, and the value of it fell” (4). Paine’s language echoes Burke’s (perhaps unintentionally), as he expresses a similar concern about a gigantic (“enormous”) economy that has been “glutted” with paper (a consumption metaphor not unlike the ones used by Burke). Thornton, on the other hand, is one example of a proponent of paper money. See also Coleridge’s essays, “The Bullion Controversy I-VI” (Collected Works 3.2) and “Essay VII: On the Vulgar Errors Respecting Taxes and Taxation” (The Friend, vol. 2, in Collected Works 4.1), as well as Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics, Byron’s comments in Don Juan 12.17-96, and Cobbett’s Paper against Gold. For more on the controversies provoked by the Restriction, see the “bullion controversy” in Dick’s Romanticism and the Gold Standard (36-73). While the gold standard was eventually introduced in 1816 (Dick, Romanticism 1), the full convertibility of cash was not re-established until 1821 (Dick, Romanticism 7-8).

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In England, as in France, debates fixated on the question of money’s status as a thing. Even proponents of paper currencies sometimes fell back on the rhetoric of material solidity to defend credit. Thornton, a famous supporter of paper money, counters the argument that country banknotes have created fictitious capital by insisting that these bills have extended foreign trade and ultimately helped “to bring home the timber which has been used in building, the iron or the steel which has been instrumental to the purposes of machinery, and the cotton and the wool which the hand of the manufacturer has worked up” (167-8). Referencing solid, heavy substances such as “iron” and “steel,” Thornton stresses material objects in his defense of paper money, invoking images of tangible commodities that can be held in the “hand of the manufacturer.” Thornton, like the proponents of assignats in the National Assembly, argued in favour of paper money by linking it to concrete things.

While Burke strives to condemn paper money by positing, like Kurtzman, a shift towards abstraction in Western economies, his attempts to code paper money as simultaneously grotesque and incorporeal complicate this linear progression. Recent scholarship by Spang and Rowlinson has also worked to dismantle the view of monetary history as dematerialization. Spang argues that “even abstractions manifest themselves in a material or corporeal fashion and our perception of an object’s concreteness always depends on culturally shaped expectations” (11). Monetary abstractions—from debts and bills of exchange to modern-day wire transfers—have operated for centuries in tandem with physical tokens such as coins, commodities, objects of barter (Spang 10).83 Rowlinson proposes that all forms of money have symbolic elements and that abstract systems of payment have existed since “money’s earliest history” (10). For Rowlinson, the very distinction between abstract value and “the material substance in which it circulates” emerged in the eighteenth century when paper became the dominant mode of commercial exchange (167). Muldrew, Finn, and Valenze have shown that the paper economy was preceded not by metal coins but by the more abstract medium of private credit, the dominant form of exchange in early modern and eighteenth-century England. While Burke posits a narrative of increasing abstraction in the history of money, I do not intend to repeat his logic. Yet, although historically inaccurate, the rhetoric of economic dematerialization was influential in Romantic England and is thus

83 Poovey similarly notes that paper money did not invent, but exacerbated, a gap that had “always haunted coins,” since even legitimate, unclipped coins always contained only part of the metal equivalent to their face value (62).

92 worthy of scholarly attention. Rather than reinstating Burke’s narrative, I analyze it as a form of rhetoric.

As a response to the Restriction Act of 1797, British political cartoons also pick up on Burke’s narrative of economic dematerialization and satirize paper money in a way that gestures towards his concept of the infinite grotesque. Gillray and Newton depict institutions, such as the government and the Bank of England, as either bodies or machines engaged in the infinite processing of matter and its subsequent emission in new forms. Perhaps no other eighteenth- century British cartoon captures the grotesque endlessness of paper money better than Gillray’s 1797 satire of the Restriction Act, titled “Midas” (fig. 3). In Gillray’s vision, a gigantic Prime Minister William Pitt stands on top of the Bank of England with a stomach full of gold coins, vomiting and defecating infinite quantities of paper money.84 As Haywood argues, “Midas” centres on transmutation, parodying the fluid interchangeability between paper and gold promised by the “myth of convertibility”: “As [Pitt’s] transparent torso shows, this colossus is anatomically far more agile than his scatological predecessors: he is both hoarding and secreting money, an apt image of ‘convertibility’” (par. 24). The gigantic size of Pitt’s body and the endless streams of matter leaving his figure stress the inflationary excess of the paper economy.85 The grotesque energy of “Midas” derives not only from the dissolution of boundaries through flows of matter permeating the body but also from the breakdown of distinctions between money and human. Pitt, with his belly, arms, and neck of gold, appears as a hybrid figure not unlike a centaur or the “volatized” monstrous form Burke describes in Reflections, made half of money and half of land (168). Yet, in “Midas,” Pitt appears to have consumed excessively, filling his massive belly with food (gold), but his arms and legs remain thin and stick-like, implying starvation. Gillray thus suggests that the paper money economy is not a source of sustenance. It nourishes neither the English body politic (symbolized by Pitt’s figure) nor the eager citizens who stand underneath Pitt with open hands, waiting to catch the paper bills that are, in the end, nothing but waste matter. “Midas” thereby aligns paper money

84 See also Haywood’s article for a discussion of these images, and Dick (Romanticism 46-7). 85 Barry similarly points out Romantic England’s fascination with the excess of paper: “Paper had always fascinated by virtue of its excess. That excess was understood, in particular, to be an excess of representation and an excess of ease” (178). The ease with which a banknote was printed made it possible to flood the world with such representative, symbolic papers (Barry 178).

93 with the parodic, deathly grotesque of Paradise Lost and Burke’s Reflections. Prior to “Midas,” Gillray had borrowed once before from Milton’s satanic grotesque in his 1792 cartoon, “Sin, Death, and the Devil Vide Milton” (fig. 3), which portrays Milton’s Sin and Death as starved and emaciated like Pitt in “Midas.” In “Sin, Death, and the Devil,” Pitt appears as Milton’s Death and has legs thin enough to rival those of his counterpart in “Midas.” Queen Charlotte, figured as Sin, is malnourished and emaciated, particularly her breasts, inverting the themes of nourishment and reproduction central to the Bakhtinian grotesque. Five years later, in 1797, Gillray returns to the deathly grotesque for another representation of Pitt, this time as the leader of a paper economy based in false nourishment and waste.

Anxieties about infinite, gigantic economies resurface in Richard Newton’s 1797 cartoon, “The Inexhaustable Mine” [sic] (fig. 4). In Newton’s image, never-ending strings of gold are pulled from the orifices of John Bull, with William Pitt among the persecutors. Much like Burke and Gillray, Newton draws on grotesque traditions representing the breakdown of the body’s boundaries, as well as the theme of absurd excess, as implied by the title, “The Inexhaustable Mine.” Bull’s belly is as massive as Pitt’s in “Midas,” and the mounds of gold pulled from his body and piled in the background appear endless. Newton links excess more directly to paper money in another cartoon, “The New Paper Mill” (fig. 5). John Bull’s body is ground up and processed by a massive mechanism while the raw materials re-emerge as twenty-shilling notes. Newton’s image of gigantic industrial machinery suggests massification and enormous scale, and the speech bubbles indicate a lengthy grinding process: “Ha ha Johnny you’re not half grown down yet”; and “Grind away Billy my boy! I shall soon be back for tother load! Grind away Billy!” Much like “Midas,” then, “The New Paper Mill” critiques the grotesque excess of the paper economy and its ability to transform things into matter. Whereas in “Midas,” paper money transgresses boundaries by permeating the body through orifices, in “The New Paper Mill” it is mutilation that changes a formed body into a shapeless stream of paper bills. Process lies at the core of both cartoons. Both portray paper money as the product of massive systems, whether bodies or machines.

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Fig. 2. James Gillray. “Midas, Transmuting all into Paper.” London, 1797. The British Museum. Web.

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Fig. 3. James Gillray. “Sin, Death, and the Devil Vide Milton.” London, 1792. The British Museum. Web.

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Fig. 4. Richard Newton. “The Inexhaustable Mine” [sic]. London, 1797. The British Museum. Web.

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Fig. 5. Richard Newton. “The New Paper Mill or Mr. Bull Ground into 20 Shilling Notes.” London, 1797. The British Museum. Web.

The use of visceral grotesque imagery to describe money extends even beyond the 1790s. Later examples include George Cruikshank’s imitation banknote, Bank Restriction Note (1819), and Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus (1820). Cruikshank’s satire incorporates grotesque imagery on the surface of an imitation banknote itself, critiquing England’s practice of executing those who forged a false banknote. While rows of corpses hang from nooses in one section of the note, in another a female figure of Britannia engages in cannibalistic consumption of children.86 Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus features frequent grotesque imagery, such as the tyrant Swellfoot’s temple composed of “thigh-bones and death’s-heads” (act 1, scene 2). Shelley associates this

86 My analysis of Cruikshank’s banknote is indebted to Dorothy George’s cataloguing and annotation of this image in the British Museum.

98 grotesque imagery with paper money in particular when one of Swellfoot’s followers declares: “Does money fail?—come to my mint—coin paper, / Till gold be at a discount, and ashamed / To show his bilious face, go purge himself, / In emulation of her vestal whiteness” (act 1, scene 1). Both “bilious” and “purg[ing]” oneself evoke the classic connection between money and vomiting. Yet, in these later depictions of paper money, the boundlessness of the infinite grotesque has disappeared. Because infinity is a key part of the power of the sublime, provoking awe and admiration, later critics of paper money move away from this quality, possibly in an effort to reduce the aesthetic power of banknotes.

2.3 The “swinish multitude” and Burke’s Grotesque Society

For Burke, the implications of paper currencies extend far beyond the economic sphere, and the infinite grotesque offers a vehicle to chart these consequences. In his view, the rise of a compulsory paper currency displaces the importance of the estate and the church, thus encouraging a fundamentally different view of economic value than the one encouraged by his traditional Whig vision of the English nation. Burke’s vision of post-revolutionary society must be understood in the context of a larger shift taking place in Romantic Britain: a transformation in how Britons perceived the relationships between people and things. At the core of Burke’s vision of England is the landed estate, an integral cultural anchor. Land acts as the cement for a nation both within the present moment and across generations, and the English state itself is an estate, an “entailed inheritance . . . specially belonging to the people of this kingdom” and handed down to generations of English people since the Magna Carta (29). Burke supports the wealth of the aristocracy because its surplus funds the creation of permanent material things, which in turn act as reservoirs of culture, history, and national identity: Why should the expenditure of a great landed property, which is a dispersion of the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to you or to me when it takes its course through the accumulation of vast libraries, which are the history of the force and weakness of the human mind; through great collections of ancient records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain laws and customs; through paintings and statues that, by imitating nature, seem to extend the limits of creation; through grand monuments of the

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dead, which continue the regards and connections of life beyond the grave (Reflections 142). These things act as material embodiments of “laws and customs” and “the history . . . of the human mind.” Burke stresses the permanence of these cultural forms, as they “continue the regards and connections of life beyond the grave.” Much like the estates of the aristocracy, the lands of the church constitute other essential material anchors of French society that have been threatened by the assignats. Burke contrasts the permanence and stability of church property with what he perceives as more ephemeral embodiments of value. While the “the majestic edifices of religion” are “sacred works which grow hoary with innumerable years,” the capricious spending of independent individuals tends to be squandered on “momentary receptacles of transient voluptuousness; in opera houses, and brothels, and gaming houses, and clubhouses” (Reflections, 142). The words “momentary” and “transient” stress the impermanence of these cultural forms. By attacking the material foundations of the nation and replacing them with ephemeral paper, paper money threatens the emotional and mnemonic bonds with material things so valued by the authors in this dissertation, from Wordsworth to Clare and Hemans.

Since property constitutes such a key cultural anchor in Burke’s vision of English society, and because money is, as he phrases it, the “cement” that holds a nation together (167), this material disintegration triggers a radical reorganization of social relationships. For Burke, the loss of bonds between people and things leads to a grotesque formlessness that takes on a sociopolitical dimension when, mimicking the shapeless flows of paper, society itself begins to adapt these traits. Burke suggests that the replacement of “solid” wealth with “ideal” (immaterial) paper dissolves hierarchy and blends all social ranks into one “swinish multitude” or “monstrous medley” (38, 69, 59). The power of the grotesque to dissolve boundaries thus replicates itself in the realm of class. When gold and land melt into a “Euripus of funds and actions,” Burke argues, so too do previously bounded, distinct groups of citizens become a dangerous mass of “energy,” or unrestrained intellect bereft of the shaping force of hierarchy (88, 136).87

87 My discussion of Burke’s concept of intellectual “energy” is influenced by Pocock (xxxvii).

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It is the grotesque, and its characteristic breakdown of boundaries, that gives Burke’s famous image of the “swinish multitude” much of its rhetorical force (69). He claims that if revolutionaries upset the traditional hierarchy of the nobility and clergy, who govern over the arts and the academy, learning will be “cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude” (69). Burke’s language implies not only a dirty, visceral materiality (“the mire”) but also the classic grotesque blend of human and animal, as physical characteristics of swine (“hoofs,” “swinish”) merge with the human crowd. Within this shapeless “multitude,” all boundaries—of class, and even of the human—become utterly corroded. Reflections thus registers an anxious awareness of the liberating power of the Bakhtinian grotesque. The medieval carnival promoted the “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 10). Bakhtin implies the revolutionary potential of this aesthetic when he comments that the grotesque frees humankind from “all forms of inhuman necessity that direct the prevailing concept of the world”; thus, “great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way” (49). It is for this reason that Burke, careful to avoid the potential power of the grotesque, seizes upon the satanic, parodic version of this aesthetic to fulfill his ideological aims.

Burke’s recurring fear of crowds throughout Reflections stems in large part from his aversion to confounded class distinctions.88 In the French Revolution, he argues, “the metaphysical and alchemical legislators . . . have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens . . . into one homogenous mass,” and the Assembly has adopted policies suggested by coffeehouses and clubs “composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations” (59, 162). Burke asks, “[a]re all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded” (48)? The sociopolitical effects of the grotesque emerge clearly in Burke’s alignment of the Revolution with fair performances (60). As discussed above, Reflections makes its most explicit reference to the grotesque by comparing the revolutionaries to “comedians at fairs” and the “burlesque” (60). Returning to this passage, we should also note its persistent emphasis on class mixing:

88 Cf. Furniss, whose chapter, “The genesis of the ‘Reflections’: resisting the irresistible voice of the multitude,” discusses in detail Burke’s anxieties about crowds (115-37).

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They [the Assembly] act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous crew of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies direct, control, applaud, explode them, and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them, domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud, presumptuous authority. (60; emphases mine) The language of blending—“mixed mob,” “mix,” “strange mixture”—alludes to the formless aesthetic of the grotesque, as well as the diverse audiences who attended these urban fairs. Performances routinely drew spectators from all class groups, and in the early eighteenth century, members of the French aristocracy drew costumes and characters (often ones of low social status) from the commedia dell’arte to perform shows at their own private parties, further inverting traditional hierarchies (Connelly, Grotesque 94-5). Burke’s description of the “mixed mob” watching fair performances also overturns conventions of gender: the “women lost to shame” seek to rule over the men of the Assembly and “sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them, domineering over them” with both “petulance” and “authority.”

This formlessness of revolutionary society, Reflections implies, is directly linked to the fluidity of paper money and the perceived loss of things from the economy. Burke claims that the Assembly intends to use the assignats as a “cement” to hold together the “several new republics of France,” but while this cement may remain functional for a short time, if, after a while, the confiscation should not be found sufficient to support the paper coinage (as I am morally certain it will not), then, instead of cementing, it will add infinitely to the dissociation, distraction, and confusion of these confederate republics . . . But if the confiscation should so far succeed as to sink the paper currency, the cement is gone with the circulation. In the meantime its binding force will be very uncertain, and it will straiten or relax with every variation in the credit of the paper. (167) Systems of exchange shape social bonds: money acts as the “cement” of a nation, the “binding force” that will “straiten or relax” with every fluctuation in value. In Burke’s political aesthetics, the perceived removal of things from the economy enacts a grotesque disintegration of social relationships. When economic goods lose their status as coherent things (a piece of gold, land) and dissolve into unformed flows of matter, the social world undergoes a corresponding transformation from a formed, hierarchical nation into a “swinish multitude” (38). Burke

102 expresses a deep awareness of the ways in which, as Christopher Tilley and others have claimed, “persons make things and things make persons” (3).

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Chapter 3 Living “with objects and with hopes”: Consumerism and the Portable Imagination

In Chapter 2, a distance between people and things arose from paper money, which replaced traditional pillars of English material culture with the anonymous, transient, and symbolic medium of paper. While paper money did not make the economy less material (paper bills were still things), it did introduce a more anonymous medium than the landed estate or the consumer goods circulating in Austen’s commissions economy. Individuals could invest memories and emotions in, for example, Pemberley estate, but they found it hard to form attachments with paper bills. This sense of distance became exaggerated into depictions of paper money as completely ephemeral and immaterial. The final two chapters turn our attention to the rise of consumerism as another source of this distance between people and things. By encouraging the replacement of old possessions with new ones, consumerism shortened the duration of time spent with particular things. As in Chapter 2, the new gap between people and things proves productive for Romantic aesthetics. Yet in these final two chapters, the aesthetic innovations that emerge are not models of the grotesque but rather models of imagination. Chapter 3 argues that Wordsworth’s vision of creativity operates primarily through emotional and mnemonic bonds with things; thus, when consumerism triggers the loss of these bonds, Wordsworth must theorize an adapted model of the imagination based in portable things: namely, poems and spots of time.89 The poet’s vocation arises as a response to the loss of ties with things.

Wordsworth’s poetry reveals a persistent attention to commonplace, everyday things that, as the narrator cautions in “Michael,” careless observers “[m]ight see and notice not” (16). These include a pile of stones, a fragment of a bowl, a staff, and Sunday clothes hanging behind a door (“Michael” 17; “Ruined Cottage” 91, 432-4). The Prelude, Lyrical Ballads, and “The Ruined Cottage” suggest that these material things play critical roles in the workings of the imagination. Individuals invest memories and emotions in things—a sheepfold becomes, for example, an “emblem” of home, family, and identity—and imagination operates through regular “ennobling interchange” with these physical anchors, leading to elevated, creative perception (“Michael”

89 My concept of portability is indebted to the work of John Plotz, discussed on pages 119-20 of this chapter.

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420; Prelude 12.376).90 Yet, what happens to this model of imagination when changes in the economy promote a fundamentally different relationship between people and things? Throughout the eighteenth century, the “consumer boom” brought about a transition between two modes of interacting with things (McKendrick et al. 11). In pre-consumerist Britain, individuals owned fewer possessions, purchased things primarily for the sake of need rather than luxury, and kept the same belongings for long periods of time. By contrast, the rising culture of consumerism fostered a constant desire for the “irresistible drug” of newness (McKendrick et al. 12), creating a never-ending cycle of “getting and spending” (“The world is too much with us” 2); people bought more than they needed, possessed more belongings than before, and constantly replaced old possessions with new ones. Wordsworth’s poetry reveals an uneasy awareness of this change. In a world in which people and things have become increasingly mobile, the Wordsworthian imagination risks becoming obsolete, as the mind can no longer anchor itself in long-term bonds with “enduring things” (Prelude 1.436).

“Michael” establishes a contrast between two distinct economies of things: the rural, northern English economy of Michael’s valley, and the larger consumerist economy that exists outside of it. When Michael sends Luke to work in trade and free his land of debt, Luke’s tragic inability to imagine his family, home, and identity while away occurs in part because he leaves Michael’s valley, where his imagination is strengthened by deep, longstanding bonds with material things, and enters the world of capitalist exchange, where the rushing circulation of things leaves him with no anchors. Like Burke’s Reflections, Wordsworth’s Prelude describes this new, anchorless economy through the lens of the infinite grotesque. Rather than reading “Michael” as primarily a poem about the loss of home, English tradition, and family, I focus instead on how the poem narrates the loss of Wordsworth’s thing-centred model of imagination. At the core, “Michael” is a poem about a crisis of distance between people and things. Wordsworth describes Michael and Isabel’s life as fundamentally connected to closeness with

90 My concept of the associative nature of the Wordsworthian imagination, as well as my idea of the imagination as a heightened form of perception, is indebted to the work of James Engell, discussed further on pages 107-8 of this chapter. My quotations from The Prelude are from the 1805 edition unless otherwise specified. This edition more clearly illustrates my later comments about the imagination in Book 13: the 1805 version creates a more direct echo of Coleridge in the phrase “endues, abstracts, combines” (13.79), and it connects the imagination more explicitly to “objects” (13.92).

105 things: “the Couple neither gay perhaps / Nor chearful, yet with objects and with hopes / Living a life of eager industry” (122-4).

Yet, “Michael” establishes a contrast between these two economies of things only to complicate this binary by suggesting the need for compromise between them. I argue that “Michael” advocates for the portable commodities of poems, in conjunction with the mobile “spots of time,” as vital components of an alternative imagination adapted to consumerism. Creating and nurturing spots of time within the mind requires specific conditions, ones that are possible primarily in rural environments. These conditions entail a low density of stimuli, as opposed to the “endless stream of men and moving things” in consumerist London (Prelude 7.158). Thus, for urban readers immersed in the overstimulating landscapes of cities, Wordsworth offers poems as an alternative form of portable imagination. Written for readers who did not grow up in nature and thus could not form bonds with “enduring things,” poems guide readers through the steps of the Wordsworthian imagination by creating, through storytelling, the emotional and mnemonic associations with things that their readers lack (Prelude 1.436). While Michael cannot save his land, Wordsworth offers himself as an alternative hero, the author of “these Hills” and the creator of poems—moveable things that preserve place and identity (38).91 Wordsworth’s portable imagination adapts to the tragedy of consumerism by adopting some of the very mobility that makes the new economy so dangerous. His poetry searches for a compromise between, as John Plotz phrases it, “fluid cultural forms which adapt themselves with chameleonic ease to every new setting, and … purely immobile bits of local life” (19). “Michael” articulates the need for an imagination that is neither completely ungrounded nor entirely fixed in place like the material anchors of Michael’s valley. Wordsworth is clearly invested in the preservation of local life: as scholars have shown, he “vigorously opposed” the extension of the railway from Kendal to Windermere because it would change the culture of the Lake District (Rigby 87), and the preface to Lyrical Ballads critiques the forces of modernization—namely urbanization and industrialization—that threaten rural English ways of life. Local places matter deeply to Wordsworth, and he plays a key role in formulating what Kate Rigby has called “the poetics of place” in European Romanticism (13). Yet, while Wordsworth’s

91 Marjorie Levinson has also argued that Wordsworth is the true hero of “Michael.” See page 125 of this chapter.

106 writings reveal this fixation with locality, his response to a new economy based on rapid, ceaseless movement is not to counteract it with stasis, but instead to use mobile things (poems) to conserve local sites at the same time as circulating apart from them. Wordsworth’s response to consumerism is itself a form of consumption: the consumption of poetry.92

3.1 The Material Roots of the Wordsworthian Imagination

My argument is indebted to two bodies of scholarship: first, work that has traced the rise of consumerism in the Romantic period, and second, studies of the Romantic imagination. Campbell deepens our understanding of the relationship between consumption and Romantic literature by arguing that the aesthetic principles of Romanticism, particularly concepts of imagination, played critical roles in the development of modern consumerism. While Romanticism fashions itself as standing apart from “getting and spending” (a key part of what Jerome McGann calls the “Romantic ideology”), Campbell suggests that Romantic aesthetic ideals endorse the “spirit” of consumerism, which he describes as “autonomous, self-illusory hedonism” (“The world is too much with us” 2; Campbell 11, 200-1). Imagination forms the core of Campbell’s theory of consumer behaviour: “in modern, self-illusory hedonism, the individual is much more an artist of the imagination, someone who takes images from memory or the existing environment, and rearranges or otherwise improves them in his mind in such a way that they become distinctly pleasing” (78). More recent work by Morton and Karen Fang has further investigated the connections between consumerism and Romanticism, with specific attention to how consumption patterns shape the representation of other cultures (Morton, Poetics of Spice) and how visions of the “consumer imagination” function as strategies for acquiring cultural capital (Fang, “Empire” 815). These scholars have shown that far from being detached from

92 Alan Liu has also argued that Wordsworth responds to consumerism through consumption: while Wordsworth’s poems repress and deny the new urban, capitalist economy, poetry itself becomes a way of peddling images, stories, and imagination, creating an economy of black market capitalist exchange and an “economy of lyric” (343, 347).

107 historical and material contexts, Romantic aesthetic ideals are deeply embedded in commerce and cultures of getting and spending.93

I also build on the long and widely varied body of scholarship on the Romantic imagination. While early critics such as Geoffrey Hartman and M. H. Abrams place the imagination at the centre of their studies—whether as a vehicle of “apocalyptic” self- consciousness (Hartman 17) or as the “lamp” of creative genius (Abrams 57)—John Whale observes, in 2004, that “[i]n Romantic studies it has now become almost unfashionable to refer to the term [imagination]” (4), citing as an example Alan Liu’s famous statement that “there is no Imagination” (39). McGann’s classic critique of the Romantic ideology, which remains influential, depicts the Romantic imagination as escapist and abstract, displacing human issues from historical time and space into idealized realms (1). My study demonstrates that Wordsworth’s aesthetic ideals emerge not as a reactive attempt to transcend economic context or separate the poet therefrom but rather as a vehicle for adapting to, and living within, consumerism. Since the publication of McGann’s Romantic Ideology, studies of imagination have similarly critiqued his argument by pointing out how deeply consumerism is engrained in Romantic imaginations. Whale maintains that “[i]maginations are culturally and historically specific” rather than inhabiting “an autonomous aesthetic realm,” and he views the imagination as “a strategically deployed category . . . a reflex or a reaction to an epistemological, cultural, or representational crisis” (11-2). Forest Pyle shows that the Romantic imagination, rather than mystifying and obscuring the workings of ideology, can inform us about “the very notion of ideology with which we would presume to understand it” (1).94 Abrams, James Engell, and Pyle repeatedly return to the idea that the imagination acts as an adhesive force, one that addresses the gap between the mind and the material world. As Pyle indicates, imagination is “the figure by which Romantic texts address the disjunction between subject and society as well as that

93 I am also indebted to Alan Bewell’s seminar, “Romanticism and the Rise of Consumerism,” for providing both historical context and the concepts, conversations, and framework from which this project originated.

94 See also Deborah Elise White, who argues that Romantic creativity exposes the very contradictions and instabilities that critics claim it ignores (4). Moreover, other scholars have highlighted the materiality of the Romantic imagination by showing how deeply it is grounded in place and the body. While Rigby traces “the poetics of place” in European Romanticism (13), Richard Sha theorizes a “physiological imagination” (197). For more on the embodiment of the imagination, see Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind and “Reimagining the Romantic Imagination.”

108 between spirit and matter” (1). Abrams argues that Wordsworth’s emphasis on the reciprocal interchange between the mind and the external world represents “an attempt to overcome the sense of man’s alienation from the world by healing the cleavage between subject and object” (65). This “alienation” and “disjunction . . . between spirit and matter” speak to the schism between people and things that opens up when Luke leaves the Lake District and enters the consumer economy.

However, what merits further study is how the question of mobility complicates the vision of imagination offered by Wordsworth. His poems pay careful attention to the ways in which the mind, and the constellation of meaningful things that inspire it, either move or do not move as a result of economic circumstances. The reciprocal interaction between the mind and external world ceases to function when both the individual and things in the external world are in constant motion. In my focus on mobility, I build on the work of Bewell, who emphasizes the mobility of nature in the Romantic period, tracing “a major shift in how the natural world was understood, from a belief in a nature that was universally stable, unchanging, and rooted in place to one in which natures were seen as having histories shaped by mobility, conflict, and change” (xiv). I would add that it is because Wordsworth’s vision of imagination is so crucially grounded in affective and mnemonic bonds with things that mobility poses such a problem for him, and yet, mobility—and mobile things—also offer the solution. “Michael” explores the dark possibility that economic and social forces of modernization will inevitably encroach on England’s rural centres. In such circumstances, mobility and circulation, rather than solely the fixity and preservation of local life, may be the key to conservation. The portable imagination arises as a compromise adapted to consumerism.

Before turning to portable creativity, I would like to establish how crucially Wordsworth’s model of imagination depends on stable, long-term affective bonds with things. Though, as previous scholarship has noted, Wordsworth’s imagination is complex and inconsistent, changing over time,95 The Prelude and Lyrical Ballads make clear the role of material anchors in fostering creativity. The bonds forged between an individual and the permanent forms of nature promote elevated thoughts and perception:

95 Engell, for example, notes the frequent changes in Wordsworth’s writings on imagination (266).

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thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou [Wisdom and spirit of the universe] intertwine for me The passions that build up our human soul, Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, But with high objects, with enduring things, With life and Nature. (1.432-7) The mind invests the material world with “[t]he passions that build up our human soul.” As Engell argues, for Wordsworth imagination is a form of elevated perception that draws on affective investments in things: “imagination is a varied power allowing us to perceive nature and also to infuse our deepest feelings, sympathy, and religious faith through the material forms and experience of the world” (266). The mind requires what Wordsworth calls “enduring things” in which to anchor itself; in other words, it requires objects with the particular qualities of stability and permanence, qualities that (as we will see shortly) are subject to change depending on economic conditions. Wordsworth uses the word “anchor” to capture this stability in “Tintern Abbey,” finding “[i]n nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts” (109-10). Although these quotations imply that imagination relies upon “not the mean and vulgar works of man” but rather nature’s more permanent forms, this marks a moment of inconsistency in Wordsworth’s writings, since, as we will see in what follows, Lyrical Ballads depicts a creative mind anchored not merely in natural things but also in certain special human-made ones, as long as they possess “enduring” qualities by remaining stable and isolated from the consumer economy. Many of the things in Wordsworth’s poetry collapse the distinction between human- made and natural: the sheepfold, for example, is the product of both stones (objects of nature) and human efforts (the labour bestowed in building the sheepfold). Domestic belongings prove particularly crucial in imagining home, place, and identity. In “Michael,” Isabel’s “heart [is] in her house,” in her two spinning wheels and her “cleanly supper-board” (84, 101). Because the Wordsworthian imagination takes root in bonds with things that tend to be permanent and fixed, it is deeply grounded in place, in objects attached to a particular locale.

In mapping the material roots of the Wordsworthian imagination, I draw upon a two-part process that is implicit in Engell’s analysis. While the first step involves the affective and mnemonic bonding with external things mentioned above, the second step entails consistent, regular “interchange” between the mind and these anchors (Prelude 12.376). Engell points out

110 the associationist logic of Wordsworth’s imagination: its earliest operations take place when the infant mind “associates the particulars of the world with inner feelings and sentiments” (268), an act of perception that is also an act of imagination (267). The idea of imagination as perception recalls Coleridge’s famous definition of this faculty: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Biographia 263). In childhood, the mind encounters the grand and permanent forms of nature and associates them with feelings and memories: “To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, / Even the loose stones that cover the highway, / I gave a moral life—I saw them feel, / Or linked to them some feeling” (Prelude 3.124-7). After associating memories and emotions with certain meaningful things, the mind nourishes itself through continued, daily interactions with them.96 Through what Wordsworth calls “ennobling interchange,” external forms enrich the mind with vital energy, stability and permanence (Prelude 12.376). It is this step, more so than early association, which Luke can no longer complete in the latter part of “Michael.” While he has undergone early exposure to nature’s forms and precious domestic belongings like his father’s sheepfold, he later becomes deprived of daily “interchange” with these things, causing his imagination of home and identity to fragment. The Prelude stresses the importance of such regular interaction when the narrator, after describing his youthful experiences in nature, concludes that “such intercourse was mine— / ’Twas mine among the fields both day and night, / And by the waters all the summer long” (1.449-51). The phrases “both day and night” and “all summer long” highlight the frequency of the child’s interactions with nature. The exchange between the world and the observer constitutes “an ennobling interchange / Of action from within and from without: / The excellence, pure spirit, and best power, / Both of the object seen, and eye that sees” (Prelude 12.376-9). As the word “ennobling” implies, this “interchange” plays an active role in nourishing the mind. Wordsworth clarifies this enriching relationship in his letter to Fox. The “statesmen” of the North own pieces of land that serve “as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they would otherwise be forgotten” (“W. W. to Charles James Fox”

96 Engell and Abrams have also theorized this reciprocal dialogue between mind and nature (Engell 269; Abrams 62).

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314-5). Dialogue between the mind and material things intensifies “domestic feelings” and, as Wordsworth suggests in “Michael,” provides the individual with a “living Being” and preserves memories (“W. W. to Charles James Fox” 315; “Michael” 75). Of course, this relationship between mind and nature is founded on what Engell calls “reciprocity,” and imagination not only invests feeling in static objects but also partially creates and transforms them, an active rather than passive power (269). Pyle asserts that Wordsworth’s 1815 preface posits an imagination with “alchemic power” to take pieces of the world and combine them, blending them into something new (67). The imagination is “[a] plastic power” (Prelude 2.381), and the “eye and ear, … half create” what they behold (“Tintern Abbey” 108). “Imagination,” Wordsworth argues, “. . . has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition, governed by certain fixed laws” (“Preface of 1815” 180). Wordsworth’s model of creativity resembles that of Coleridge: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” (Biographia 263). As Wordsworth phrases it in the Snowdon passage, the imagination “endues, abstracts, combines,” and this is the very spirit in which they [higher minds] deal With all the objects of the universe: They from their native selves can send abroad Like transformation, for themselves create A like existence. (Prelude 13.79, 13.90-5)

As we will see in “Michael,” the Wordsworthian imagination plays a critical role in forming concepts of home and identity. Because the imagination thrives on close affective bonds with stable, permanent things, it tends to root itself in a home or particular place. Moreover, imagination involves the investment of an individual’s most cherished memories and emotions, particularly from childhood, and these memories play a crucial role in building a sense of self. Drawing on Leibniz, Engell theorizes identity as a product of the imagination: “self- consciousness . . . is an imaginative act . . . [C]onsciousness of self leads directly to the active production of an image of the self, an identity. This identity comes from connecting time past with time future, from experience that not merely is receptive but also allows the self-aware individual to act and suffer and become. Our identity is a creature of the imagination” (31). In Lyrical Ballads, characters build both their imaginations and their identities through bonds with

112 things, as Wordsworth suggests in the preface: “The Brothers” and “Simon Lee” dramatize “the strength of fraternal, or to speak more philosophically, of moral attachment when early associated with the great and beautiful objects of nature” (176).97

While I build on Pyle’s and Engell’s work in theorizing the close, reciprocal, and transformative bond between imagination and things, I would add that these relations between the mind and “the particulars of the world” (Engell 268) exist in deeply social—and specifically economic—contexts that merit further attention. Interactions between things and the mind transform under the pressure of consumerism, and it is this change that “Michael” dramatizes, with tragic results. To fully understand “Michael,” it is not enough to consider in isolation the relationships between individuals and things. These micro-relations are embedded within the macro-structures of larger social contexts. How people relate to things is inevitably tied to how their culture encourages them to do so. As Arjun Appadurai argues, the ways in which we assign value to commodities—deciding what is worth buying and for whom, when, and where—are not determined by properties of things in themselves but depend on social conditions (1). Economic goods circulate differently according to “regimes of value” produced by “specific cultural and historical milieus” (Appadurai 1, 4). At the core, “Michael” is a poem about a conflict between two different economies of things.

3.2 “Michael”: A Clash Between Two Economies of Things

“Michael” charts a transition between the traditional, rural, northern English economy of Michael’s valley and the rising consumerism transforming the rest of England. The rural economy values things with the qualities of usefulness, longevity, and sparseness, while the consumerist one prizes newness, transience, and plenteousness. Much of the poignancy of “Michael” derives from how it weaves between the vastly different levels on which this change in value-systems operates: England’s large-scale cultural transformation to consumerism affects, on a very personal level, the psyches of three individuals, Michael, Luke, and Isabel. As Rigby

97 For more on the importance of material things to identity, see Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone, who explore the ways that “personal and social identities are bound up with objects” (60).

113 argues, the Romantic fascination with place comes alongside a sense of the loss of local places due to socioeconomic change: “the romantic rediscovery of place was conditioned by the experience of dislocation, both at home and abroad” (12). If the creative interchange between the mind and material anchors proves so crucial, what happens when, because of changing economic conditions, an individual becomes separated from nature’s forms and precious domestic belongings? What if previously stable, “enduring things” become mobile, or people themselves become mobile, drawing them away from their material roots (Prelude 1.432)?

In “Michael” (subtitled “A Pastoral Poem”), the pastoral genre provides the perfect medium for contrasting two social worlds. Since its origins in classical antiquity with Theocritus’s Idylls of the third century B.C., this genre has revealed tensions between opposing spheres of life, such as urban/rural or artificial/natural (Gifford 15). Although pastorals often describe an idyllic rural lifestyle that stands apart from commerce, politics, and courtly manners, works in this genre have usually been written for urban readers who are immersed in these modes of life (Gifford 15). Within the first line of “Michael,” “[i]f from the public way you turn your steps,” Wordsworth draws upon the two-world structure of the pastoral by establishing the separate realms of Michael’s dell and the outside world: the “you” he addresses designates his primarily urban readers, who are busy moving along the “public way,” unaware of the traditional rural microcosm that lies in a “hidden valley” in the “pastoral mountains” (1, 8, 5). Michael’s dell has long remained untouched by the modern changes and political “measures” to which Wordsworth alludes in his letter to Charles James Fox (I will return to this text in what follows [313]). The pastoral allows Wordsworth to compare two distinct cultures of being-with-things and to explore the effects of England’s changeover between them.

As is typical in the pastoral, we can only understand the social and political messages of Michael’s Arcadia in reference to the culture that surrounds it. In both “Michael” and Wordsworth’s letter to Fox, the poet associates this outside world with contemporary capitalist English society, a place in which things are in constant exchange and circulation. When Michael learns that he must sell part of his “patrimonial fields” because of the financial misfortunes of a kinsman to whom he was “bound / In surety,” we are first introduced to the threatening world of “getting and spending” that presses upon his valley from without (234, 220-1). Michael’s lament that his fields will “pass into a Stranger’s hand” introduces the theme of circulation, as his precious pieces of property, prized for their very fixity-in-place, become symbolically mobile

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(241). Later in the poem, too, Wordsworth pronounces that Luke will be sent to a “prosperous” kinsman, who is “[t]hriving in trade” (259-60), and this reference to trade specifically indicates that Luke’s future way of life outside the farm will involve the exchange of commodities. In the story of Richard Bateman provided within “Michael,” Wordsworth also links the external world to trade. Bateman makes his fortune by selling “merchandise / Beyond the seas” (276-7). Finally, Wordsworth’s correspondence with Fox connects the outside world of “Michael” to contemporary consumer capitalism. Alongside his letter, Wordsworth sent Fox a copy of Lyrical Ballads and directed him to “Michael” and “The Brothers” in particular, two poems which he describes as inspired by recent social changes in England. As Marjorie Levinson insists, this letter is essential for any reading of “Michael” because, “with its angry allusions to contemporary life, [it] thrusts the poem into a referential context which must alter the work’s originary and/or formal meaning” (60). Wordsworth’s letter laments the “rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society,” a decline which results from “the spreading of manufacturers through every part of the country,” increased taxes on postage, the growth of workhouses, and a widening gap between “the price of labour and that of the necessaries of life” (313). These changes have weakened the bonds between people and things, and subsequently people and people: “parents are separated from their children, and children from their parents; the wife no longer prepares with her own hands a meal for her husband, the produce of his labour” (314). Items produced by these spreading manufacturers now replace those made by family-members, cutting off the bonds of love and labour that connected families like Michael’s in an older culture. Northern “statesmen,” proprietors of small plots of land similar to Michael, are disappearing, replaced by hired labourers and the manufacturing poor (314). Beyond Michael’s valley lies this surrounding world of detached, mobile commodities.

Wordsworth describes the few but special things that are dear to Michael’s family: Isabel’s two spinning wheels, a “large old Oak,” a shepherd’s staff, and “two brave sheepdogs” (84-7, 175, 190-4, 93). Even Luke’s singleness is repeatedly stressed; he is the “only son” of his parents, who have “but one Inmate in their house” (92, 88-9). Luke’s value, his status as Michael’s “dearest object,” derives in part from his singleness, the fact that there is and will always be only one of him (160). Michael’s meagre belongings recall the pre-industrial household, which McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb describe as “marked for most men and women by a simplicity, an austerity, a sheer lack of possessions” (19). The longevity of things,

115 too, gives them value in Michael’s economy, a quality that resists the modern consumerist thirst for newness. Michael’s lamp, an “aged utensil,” for example, has been the family’s “[s]urviving Comrade of uncounted Hours … from year to year” (120-1). Beyond forming associations and memories for the reader, these things also do so for the other individuals in Michael’s valley, forging a community. Certain things take on names and become symbols for some of the shared memories and associations of the community: the lamp becomes “the Evening Star,” “famous in its neighbourhood, / . . . a public Symbol of the life, / The thrifty Pair had lived” (146, 136-7), and the oak tree becomes “The CLIPPING TREE, a name which yet it bears” (179).

While in the surrounding culture of eighteenth-century England, fashions of clothing, furniture, and housewares were changing more rapidly than ever before (McKendrick et al. 12), Michael and Luke do not replace old belongings with new ones, but instead take the time to sit down in the evenings and “repair / Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe, / Or other implement of house or field” (109-11). In Michael’s Arcadia of immobility, valuable things must have both spatial fixity and temporal continuity, remaining rooted in place and constant throughout time. Michael values these qualities—sparseness and longevity—because they enable him and his family to forge strong affective bonds with things, bonds which, as we have seen, lie at the core of the Wordsworthian imagination, particularly the imagination of home and place.

The pile of stones in Michael’s unfinished sheepfold constitutes the pivotal thing around which the tragedy of the loss of material anchors unfolds. Asking Luke to lay down one of the stones with his “own hands” (397), Michael makes it clear that these rocks are meant to embody and remind Luke of his self, home, and family when he leaves: Lay now the corner-stone, As I requested, and hereafter, Luke, When thou art gone away, should evil men Be thy companions, let this Sheep-fold be Thy anchor and thy shield; amid all fear And all temptation, let it be to thee An emblem of the life thy Fathers liv’d (414-20; emphasis mine) As the word “anchor” implies, the stones represent the rooting-in-place of Luke’s selfhood. Like the rest of the things on his farm, Michael believes that the rocks are powerful because they will stay grounded and immobile (anchored); this sheepfold will be the one thing that will not move

116 when Luke enters the “endless stream of men and moving things” (Prelude 7.158). Yet, the very rootedness of this symbolic contract—its status as an “anchor”—makes it a contract that Luke cannot see, hold, or feel as an “objec[t] of memory” when he leaves the farm. Wordsworth insists, in his letter to Fox, that the pieces of land held by Northern statesmen are “fountain[s] fitted to the nature of social man from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart was intended for, are daily drawn” (315; emphasis mine). The word “daily” displays the importance of regular, close interaction with meaningful things for the nourishment of the imagination, as well as the closely related concepts of home and identity. When Luke leaves the farm, he tears himself away from the “family mold” of the land (380). It is no surprise, then, that Luke ceases to care about saving a piece of land that has been so radically divided from him.

This culture of sparseness contrasts sharply with the consumerist realm of things Wordsworth encounters in London in Book Seven of The Prelude, where he finds himself lost in an “endless stream of men and moving things,” bombarded by “stalls, barrows, porters” and “shop after shop” (7.158-74). In Wordsworth’s description of Bartholomew Fair, we can detect the high density of stimuli that proves so hostile to Wordsworth’s model of imagination. In Wordsworth’s bewildered efforts to capture the scene, we find an aesthetic not unlike Burke’s infinite grotesque, a category to which Romantic artists turn again and again to represent changing economies of things. The passage is worth quoting at length: what anarchy and din Barbarian and infernal—’tis a dream Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound. Below, the open space, through every nook Of the wide area, twinkles, is alive With heads; the midway region and above Is thronged with staring pictures and huge scrolls, Dumb proclamations of the prodigies; And chattering monkeys dangling from their poles, . . . Inviting; with buffoons against buffoons Grimacing, writhing, screaming ......

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The stone-eater, the man that swallows fire, Giants, ventriloquists, the invisible girl, The bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes, The waxwork, clockwork, all the marvellous craft Of modern Merlins, wild beasts, puppet-shows, All out’-th’-way, far-fetched, perverted things, All freaks of Nature, all Promethean thoughts Of man—his dullness, madness, and their feats, All jumbled up together to make up This parliament of monsters. Tents and booths Meanwhile—as if the whole were one vast mill— Are vomiting, receiving, on all sides, Men, women, three-years’ children, babes in arms. (7.661-95; emphases mine) Wordsworth uses the infinite grotesque to grapple with changes in his society, particularly urbanization, that have generated such vast crowds. While Burke uses this aesthetic to grapple with the loss of material anchors through paper money, Wordsworth uses the infinite grotesque to capture the loss of stable, immobile material anchors such as Michael’s sheepfold, as everything in the fair dissolves into one formless, “monstrous” mass. In addition to the adjective “monstrous,” the constant animal imagery evokes the grotesque: “chattering monkeys,” “wild beats,” “parliament of monsters.” Distinct things blend into one shapeless form, as everything becomes “all jumbled up together.” Wordsworth’s vomiting imagery portrays the fair as a “vast mill” that is both “[v]omiting” and “receiving” people, an image that recalls Gillray’s “Midas” vomiting paper money. Moreover, Wordsworth’s mill metaphor reminds us of Newton’s “The New Paper Mill,” a massive machine that processes formed things into infinite formlessness. The infinity of Wordsworth’s Bartholomew Fair comes from the endless stream of people, as “the open space, through every nook / Of the wide area, twinkles, is alive / With heads.” The bodies of individuals are no longer distinguishable and have transformed into a formless mass of heads. By using the infinite grotesque, Wordsworth suggests that in the urban consumer economy of London, no individual things remain separate or stable from the chaos of the new economy.

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“Michael,” then, must be seen as a poem centrally concerned with the loss of a certain mode of being-with-things. But “Michael” is not just a poem of loss. From the story of Luke’s failure comes Wordsworth’s theory of the portable imagination.

3.3 Portable Aides to Imagination: Poems and “spots of time”

While Wordsworth establishes a contrast between the fixity of the increasingly obsolete economy of Michael’s valley and the mobility of the consumerist world, his concepts of poetry and the portable imagination complicate this divide. The spots of time and poetry open up an alternative space for things that circulate, yet still nourish the imagination and embody home and identity. Under certain ideal conditions, “spots of time” may serve as alternative, portable mementoes; individuals can form emotional and mnemonic bonds with the spots of time, yet also carry them along in a mobile lifestyle (Prelude 11.257). However, The Prelude suggests that spots of time require specific conditions to be formed and nurtured to their fullest effect; these conditions are decidedly rural and characterized by a lower density of stimuli than urban experience—conditions like those in Michael’s valley, as opposed to the cluttered overstimulation of city life. What happens, Wordsworth’s poetry asks, to those living in urban areas overwhelmed with experiences, sensations, and things, environments that make it hard to single out select experiences for spots of time? In response to this question, Wordsworth offers poems as a form of what Plotz calls “portable property” for urban readers (1). Memories prove insufficient because forming the special, nourishing spots of time requires ideal conditions that are off-limits to many Britons. Wordsworth’s poems provide emotional associations with things—an unfinished sheepfold, a ruined cottage—for readers who have not been raised in nature and in economies like Michael’s. These readers have not had the opportunity to follow Wordsworth’s process of imagination, grounded first in emotional associations and second in regular interaction with enduring things. Thus, poets step in to fill this role. Poets craft those associations for their readers, imbuing the landscape with meaning. Poems function as portable

119 objects that are mobile, yet still rooted in a particular place.98 By promoting portability, Wordsworth does not celebrate the fluidity of consumerism. Rather, he searches for a way to navigate this disorienting commercial landscape while at the same time maintaining self- rootedness and an imagination that thrives on place. Poetry fulfills the important function of creating, through storytelling, the emotional and mnemonic associations with rural things that Wordsworth’s urban readers lack.

“Michael,” then, expresses a more complex view of economic modernity than that put forth by “The World Is Too Much with Us.” The latter poem relates a more straightforward nostalgic story of loss, lamenting that “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” because we have lost the ability to bond with the material forms of nature: “Little we see in nature that is ours” (2, 3). If there is any compensation in this poem, it is the final turn towards the past, to pre- consumerist times and to classic Greek mythology: I’d rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. (9-12) Yet, “Michael” narrates not a retreat into the past but a way forward into the future. As I will suggest in what follows, the ending of “Michael” hints at how stories about Michael’s valley will move from place to place in the future, taking up residence in different locales and preserving the Wordsworthian imagination.

In my model of the portable imagination enacted through poems, I draw on Plotz’s theory of “portable property” (1). These mobile belongings function as a solution to the problem with which “Michael” grapples: the threat to mnemonic and affective bonds between people and things posed by England’s transition to consumerism. Plotz recognizes that “the portaging of sentiment in beloved objects is a predictable, even a necessary, development in a world of increasingly successful commodity flow”; as trade and exchange accelerate in a global economy,

98 In discussing poems themselves as portable property, I am indebted to Plotz, who also connects portable property to literature, arguing that Victorian novels were themselves mobile things caught between empty exchangeability and precious irreplaceability (1).

120 the need develops for “auratic forms of storing personal or familial memories” (17). In the Victorian period, he argues, things such as jewellery, diamonds, or (most importantly) novels, took on a special resonance because they were both portable and imbued with personal or cultural meaning; they were simultaneously fungible commodities and precious, inalienable reservoirs of sentiment (10). Plotz challenges the binary distinction between the authentic local artefact and the absolutely fluid commodity (an opposition that he claims has shaped many discussions of objects since Appadurai’s work) by adding portable property as a third term (16). This concept of moveable belongings that are neither empty commodities nor “purely immobile bits of local life” sheds a new light on “Michael” (19), in which Wordsworth also searches for an alternative to this dichotomy. For Wordsworth, the portable things capable of enacting this compromise are poems.

Under the right conditions, certain memories become mobile things that travel with an individual and lie dormant until an adult mind activates them later in life. Wordsworth describes such a process unfolding during his childhood experiences in nature: The earth And common face of Nature spake to me Rememberable things . . . ………………………….. ………………… not vain Nor profitless, if haply they impressed Collateral objects and appearances, Albeit lifeless then, and doomed to sleep Until mature seasons called them forth To impregnate and to elevate the mind. (Prelude 1.614-24; emphasis mine) In childhood, the poet-collector acquires “objects” he stores for later, when “mature seasons” might use them to “impregnate and . . . elevate the mind.” Wordsworth’s language paints the memory of the poet as a collector of physical things, which adapts to a mobile lifestyle by picking up pieces of places and experiences and taking them along on the journey. Memories also become material things when the narrator compares reflecting upon one’s past to hanging from the side of a boat, looking down at “many beauteous sights—weeds, fishes, flowers, /

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Grots, pebbles, roots of trees” (Prelude 4.252-4). Wordsworth hints at the participation of these memories in the vital dialogue between the mind and things at the heart of imagination: The scenes which were a witness of that joy Remained, in their substantial lineaments Depicted on the brain, and to the eye Were visible, a daily sight. (Prelude 1.627-30; emphasis mine) The familiar word, “daily”—the same used to describe how statesmen draw emotions from their land, as well as Michael’s interactions with the sheepfold—implies the regular dialogue so essential to imagination. Wordsworth’s famous “spots of time” form the core of his theory of memory: There are in our existence spots of time, Which with distinct preeminence retain A renovating virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight In trivial occupations and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired. (Prelude 11.257-64) The lines referencing the weight of “trivial occupations and the round / Of ordinary intercourse” imply the portability of the spots of time, as they are meant to be taken with the individual into other situations and act as stimuli to imagination amid the turmoil and triviality of daily life. Rigby describes a spot of time as “a profound experience that is embedded in time and place but that interrupts the flow of everyday life and carries over into other times and places” (82). Rigby’s comment captures how a spot of time is both tied to a place (and material things in a place) and yet detachable from it. While the spots of time themselves function as mobile things, they also contain things within them: that is, they frequently centre on memories of particularly meaningful material things, ones heavily invested with emotion and memory. Wordsworth’s first example consists of his recollection of a place where a murderer has been hanged: “The gibbet- mast was mouldered down . . . but on the turf, / Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought, / Some unknown hand had carved the murderer’s name” (Prelude 11.290-3). The gibbet and the marks on the grass anchor the memory and embody, in corporeal form, the thoughts and sensations Wordsworth experienced in that location. The second spot of time takes root in

122 physical things that Wordsworth perceives shortly before his father’s death. As he sits at a crag, he focuses on “[t]he single sheep, and the one blasted tree,” which become portable memories: “All these were spectacles and sounds to which / I often would repair, and thence would drink / As at a fountain” (Prelude 11.377, 382-4).

Spots of time differ from ordinary memories because they have a particular ability to nourish the imagination. They are special because of their “renovating virtue.” Other characteristics also distinguish the spots of time; for example, Wordsworth defines them as moments in which we realize the power of the mind, specifically that “[t]he mind is lord and master, and that outward sense / Is but the obedient servant of her will” (12.271-3). Of most interest to us here, however, is the “renovating” function of the spots of time, which enables them to act as anchors for the imagination even when an individual is mobile. Wordsworth’s use of plural possessive pronouns also suggests that others, and not only himself, have their own spots of time: “There are in our existence spots of time,” which repair “our minds” (emphases mine). However, the right conditions are required to form these special memories, conditions that require a low density of external stimuli. The spots of time tend to centre images of one or two solitary material things against a landscape. The things inhabiting the landscape are separate and distinct, as opposed to the blended multitude of the infinite grotesque in Bartholomew Fair. Wordsworth’s first example of a spot of time exemplifies this tendency: A naked pool that lay beneath the hills The beacon on the summit, and more near A girl who bore a pitcher on her head And seemed with difficult steps to force her way Against the blowing wind. (12.306-9) The lone figure of the girl stands out against the barren landscape. A similar aesthetic appears in Wordsworth’s second example, which takes place near a crag in similar overpowering weather, a Day / Stormy, rough, and wild” (12.358-9), and which again includes only a few, separate, and distinctly defined things in the landscape: “a single sheep” and a “whistling hawthorn” (12.361). By contrast, in Bartholomew Fair, an abundance of things so numerous that they become indistinct and blended together leads to overstimulation, hindering the formation of spots of time.

Yet, if rural economies can foster strong attachments to particular memories, then what caused Luke to forget his home and place? He was raised in the mountains and not amid a busy

123 rush of experiences in the city, and yet he failed to subsist on his spots of time alone. Wordsworth’s poetry suggests that most individuals need more than spots of time to anchor their imaginations. In Wordsworth’s Britain, transformed by recent socioeconomic changes, the imaginations of many individuals had lost their power; thus, Luke and others like him require additional nourishment from poems, a form of portable property tying people to places. The Prelude suggests that maximizing the potential power of spots of time requires refined sensibilities, maturity, and thoughtfulness. The individual must act not only as a collector of memories but also an interpreter who makes use of them later in life. The aforementioned quotation about “mature seasons” hints at the special qualifications required for this model: Collateral objects and appearances, Albeit lifeless then, and doomed to sleep Until mature seasons called them forth To impregnate and to elevate the mind. (Prelude 1.621-4) Capitalizing on the rejuvenating potential of childhood memories requires “mature seasons,” a time that includes the calm, thoughtful reflection that Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads identifies as crucial for a poet: “Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply” (175). Recounting his experiences at Cambridge, Wordsworth describes his “careles[s]” attitude as he drifts through his experiences as in a museum, without taking care to single any out or make long-term attachments with anything: “Carelessly / I gazed, roving as through a cabinet / Or wide museum” (Prelude 3.651-3). While the spots of time may be valuable, they are not without challenges and potential failings, rendering a poem a necessary addition in many cases.

The act of collecting memories and making them into mementoes requires specific conditions, and both poor circumstances and personal failures can prevent the conversion of memories into meaningful spots of time. In Book Three of The Prelude, Wordsworth describes precisely the transient attachments to things that are at the core of this dissertation—except in this case, the things are memories, conceived as physical entities. Wordsworth portrays his memories at Cambridge as things in a “cabinet”: Carelessly I gazed, roving as through a cabinet

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Or wide museum, thronged with fishes, gems, Birds, crocodiles, shells, where little can be seen, Well understood, or naturally endeared, Yet still does every step bring something forth That quickens, pleases, stings—and here and there A casual rarity is singled out And has its brief perusal, then gives way To others, all supplanted in their turn. Meanwhile, amid this gaudy congress framed Of things by nature most unneighbourly The head turns round, and cannot right itself; And, though an aching and a barren sense Of gay confusion still be uppermost, With few wise longings and but little love, Yet something to the memory sticks at last Whence profit may be drawn in times to come. (Prelude 3.651-68) Wordsworth’s dramatization of how the memory “sticks” (“cleaves” in the 1850 edition) to certain things captures the bonds between people and things that Wordsworth values so highly. Yet, while the poet does manage to make some meaning out of this throng of experiences— “something to the memory sticks at last / Whence profit may be drawn in times to come”—he retains little of what he sees, and his retention is tenuous and erratic. Some “profit may be drawn” from these attachments, but the casual, tentative language of this phrase implies an impact less powerful than the vital sustenance provided by the spots of time, which “nouris[h]” and “repai[r]” the mind, and whence the imagination may “drink / As at a fountain” (Prelude 11.264, 11.383-4). The speaker’s difficulty forming attachments arises in part because of his casual, detached attitude, as he glides “[c]arelessly” through life without thinking “long and deeply” or devoting sustained attention to a single, particular thing (preface to Lyrical Ballads, 175). In addition to carelessness, his circumstances also contribute to the problem. He is overwhelmed by stimulation, surrounded by “gaudy congress framed / Of things by nature most unneighbourly,” an excess that recalls Wordsworth’s cluttered depiction of consumerist London. Much as in Wordsworth’s rural economies of things, attachments form by having just a few

125 things and spending long periods of time with them. Thus, most of the narrator’s experiences pass by in a blur.

As a redemptive form of portable property for readers, Wordsworth offers poems: mobile commodities tied to “enduring” things, which can stimulate the imaginations of urban readers. Wordsworth’s writings assist readers in forming the associations with things that they have not been able to form on their own in childhood, stimulating the vital dialogue between external things and the imagination. As is typical in the active, transformative Wordsworthian imagination, the readers become active participants in “half-creat[ing]” the landscape, as their minds, now educated by the poems, transform things like the heap of stones by imparting to them the histories and stories they have learned.

My idea that Wordsworth succeeds in doing what Michael cannot builds on decades of criticism on “Michael.” Hartman notes that both Michael and Wordsworth wish to save the land, Michael for his son and the poet for his imagination (262), and he asserts that because the land “cannot retain its hold on Luke’s imagination,” the poet is Michael’s “true heir” (265-6). Levinson furthers these ideas by arguing that the poet-narrator is Luke “reincarnated and sublimed,” the son who will finish Michael’s sheepfold symbolically, through poetry, and who “supplants Michael as the hero of poetic action” (74-5). Stuart Peterfreund also proposes that while Luke and Michael’s covenant is broken, the covenant between the poet and his audience— to tell Michael’s tale—is fully realized. Most recently, Sally Bushell has shown how Michael’s speech act (the contract he makes with Luke) must fail in order for the literary speech act of the poem to succeed, taking the force of that speech act and redirecting it outwards to readers, now embodying moral strength and a new kind of power (71).

By inserting the role of the poet into the opening section of “Michael,” Wordsworth suggests that poems serve as what Plotz calls a compromise between “fluid cultural forms . . . and . . . purely immobile bits of local life” (19). Much as Plotz argues about novels, so, too do poems serve as tangible, mobile “objects of memory” that take advantage of circulation to accomplish the self- and place-preservation that Michael could not (“W. W. to Charles James Fox” 315). After describing the impact of Michael’s tale on his own mind when he “was yet a boy,” Wordsworth proceeds to announce that his own recounting of the tale will perpetuate the story for poets and readers after him:

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I will relate the same For the delight of a few natural hearts, And yet with fonder feeling, for the sake Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills Will be my second self when I am gone. (35-9) These acts of storytelling nourish the supposedly degenerate imaginations of urban readers by retelling emotional and mnemonic associations with the materials things of the Lake District. The narrator of “Michael” acts as a tour guide and unveils the histories and feelings invested in certain landmarks: Nor should I have made mention of this Dell But for one object which you might pass by, Might see and notice not. Beside the brook There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones! And to that place a story appertains (14-8). Wordsworth implies some wariness about his readers when he suggests that they might skip by Michael’s sheepfold altogether: they “might pass by, / Might see and notice not.” Wordsworth’s story enriches his readers’ imaginations by giving them meaningful affective and mnemonic bonds with the stones. In “The Ruined Cottage,” the Pedlar teaches the narrator how to read the forms of the landscape, informing him that “I see around me here / Things which you cannot see” (67-8). After telling his story he cautions the narrator to “[n]o longer read the forms of things with an unworthy eye” (“Ruined Cottage” 43-4). As Bewell indicates: “‘The Ruined Cottage’ seeks to teach us how to see the human history that lies hidden in landscapes. Although critics often reduce the poem to ‘the story of Margaret,’ Wordsworth clearly intended it to be a narrative about the history of a place” (233). The Pedlar stimulates the narrator’s imagination so that he can perceive nature differently. He now looks upon the landscape with full knowledge of the emotions associated with it: He had rehearsed Her homely tale with such a familiar power, With such a[n active] countenance, an eye So busy, that the things of which he spake Seemed present. (208-12)

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The Pedlar’s perception of nature’s forms has been transformed, and now he alters the landscape with the creative and transformative lens of his imagination.

“Michael” grapples with the paradox of appreciating the rootedness of people and places through the medium of poetry, which, by its very nature, takes symbolic pieces of places and uproots them by setting them into motion. Plotz identifies the paradox that while literature is often “locodescriptive,” it is entirely separable from place, and the more it renders a place palpable to readers, the more it seems to delocalize that locale; yet, portability solves this problem by putting mementoes of local life into circulation without detaching them from their original location (5). Wordsworth hints at his awareness of this paradox in Poems on the Naming of Places, when the narrator describes how he and his companions, when walking in a beautiful place, would often stop to point out, perchance To pluck, some flower or water-weed, too fair Either to be divided from the place On which it grew, or to be left alone To its own beauty. (“A narrow girdle” 29-5) The opening of “Michael” also gestures towards this complexity by describing some of the future locations in which his own story about Michael’s valley will be retold: his tale is one which “is not unfit … for the fire-side, / Or for the summer shade” (20-1). By moving from their original locations to numerous “fire-side[s]” and “summer shade[s],” poems strengthen the rootedness of people and places through their very uprooting.

After Wordsworth describes the importance of Michael and Isabel’s lamp, their long- standing companion and “[s]urviving Comrade” (120), he moves on to remark that the hours going by from year to year had found And left the Couple neither gay perhaps Nor chearful, yet with objects and with hopes Living a life of eager industry. (120-4) The simple parallelism of the phrase “with objects and with hopes” indicates how much being with hopes depends upon being with meaningful things. “Michael” demonstrates how Britons might continue to live with “objects and with hopes” in consumer culture: by embracing an alternative imagination and interpreting the ideas of rootedness and anchoring broadly. While

128 elsewhere Wordsworth celebrates the fixity of nature as an “anchor” (“Tintern Abbey” 110), “Michael” explores the possibility of preserving local places not by maintaining their fixity and stability but by making them mobile through poems. Inevitable change may occasion the need for adaptation. For Wordsworth, this adaptation takes the form of the portable imagination. The method for conserving the Lake District lies not in stability and rootedness but rather in circulation itself.

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Chapter 4 Creative Destruction: Towards a Grotesque, Consumerist Imagination

This chapter continues my discussion of Romantic imaginations and their origins in increasingly transient relationships with things. As in Chapter 3, the cause of this change is the new mobility of things in consumerism. Wordsworth’s imagination functions by anchoring itself in things, ideally ones that are stable and unmoving (though poems are an exception). Together with the spots of time, these special things stimulate and nourish creativity. The Wordsworthian imagination thus depends on longstanding interactions with the material world. Chapter 4, on the other hand, turns to a contrasting consumerist model of imagination grounded not in the preservation of these special, meaningful things but in their destruction.99 De Quincey, the critical proponent of this model, establishes pointed parallels to Wordsworth by echoing his language from the preface to Lyrical Ballads and borrowing his idea of the imagination as healing force that can repair the damaged imaginations of the populace. Yet De Quincey also diverges from Wordsworth through his emphasis on creative destruction. His imagination does not aim to heal gaps between people and things but to embrace them. Moreover, De Quincey’s creativity affirms the very grotesque aesthetic that Wordsworth rejects in Bartholomew Fair and Burke rejects in Reflections. Threaded throughout Burke, Wordsworth, and De Quincey, the grotesque emerges as a pivotal category in Romantic literature, deeply intertwined with the period’s aesthetic innovations. This category becomes essential for representing the change, transience, and loss of distinct material things that commentators perceived in the economy and, by extension, social life.

In Romantic-era Britain, an important economic debate took place about what it meant to produce. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economics defined production as the creation of a saleable material thing, with labourers divided into two categories based on their ability to fulfill this objective: productive workers, such as manufacturers, and unproductive workers, such as servants and musicians, who produce no tangible product that can be sold or accumulated. In the

99 In my idea of a consumerist model of the imagination, I am indebted to Fang’s discussion of the “consumer imagination” (“Empire” 815). However, while Fang focuses on Lamb’s portrayal of the imagination, I discuss a different model arising in the work of De Quincey, based in creative destruction, the concept of bodies as processing machines, and the grotesque.

130 words of Smith, unproductive labour “perishes in the very instant of its production” (2.3, par. 2). While production creates a saleable thing, consumption acts as its opposite, destroying the material goods created by productive labour. Malthus famously claims that human improvement is impossible because consumption stands in the way of progress, the growth of population continually surpassing the rate of food production (1). For Malthus, as for most Romantic political economists, the life-cycle of a thing moves from its creation in productive labour, to its exchange, and finally to its destruction through consumption.

De Quincey’s economic theories, along with his literary writings, propose an alternative model of production premised on the destruction, rather than the creation, of material things. De Quincey, who was well versed in and himself participated in contemporary economic debates about productivity, envisions things as dynamic and changeable, constantly in the process of being destroyed and recreated, consumed and converted into new forms. Since all things partake in larger cycles of creation and destruction, all of them are inherently, as De Quincey puts it, “things that express death in their origin” (Suspiria 94). By offering a model of creation founded on consumption—the act figured as the antithesis of production by the economists he read and admired—De Quincey participates in the ideological work involved in the “consumer revolution” (McKendrick 9). I argue that this transition was still incomplete in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century economic theory, which continued to view consumption as destructive. In a time when many economists defined production as the creation of a material thing, how might productivity be reimagined as the economy became increasingly driven by consumption, an act that destroys the material goods that circulate in an economy of things? What new models of production emerge from this consumerist culture? What does, to borrow Fang’s phrase, the “consumer imagination” look like (“Empire” 815)? Echoing Wordsworth, De Quincey crafts a revised, consumerist version of Wordsworthian creativity.100 In De Quincey’s version, the body of the artist acts as a transformative machine that takes in material input, destroys its material form and converts it into intellectual output. By reconfiguring the artist’s labour as physical and embodied, De Quincey calls into question the very binaries, taken for granted by economic theory, between physical and intellectual work, between productive and unproductive labour. De

100 For the concept of De Quincey’s consumerist re-modelling of High Romanticism, I am indebted to Fang’s work on Lamb’s consumerist reimagining of Coleridge. See pages 135-6 of this chapter for Fang’s argument.

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Quincey thus creates a third, hybrid category of labour, which he calls the “physico-intellectual” (Collected Works 11.428).101

De Quincey portrays his transformative model of things most clearly in his famous palimpsest. The palimpsest derives its richness from acts of apparent destruction and the traces created by erasure; it not only resists but thrives on the consumer economy’s ephemerality and unpredictable fluctuations of value. The palimpsest exemplifies a thing that is changeable and dynamic, constantly being transformed and reused. An analysis of the economic contexts of the palimpsest allows us to come to a new understanding of this metaphor as a fundamentally consumerist model of the creative mind. De Quincey portrays himself as consumption’s “marty[r],” uncovering the disorienting, grotesque truths of new landscapes of consumer excess (Suspiria 145). In Romantic-era Britain’s changing economy, De Quincey embraces the growing transience of bonds between people and things to create a detached, disjointed model of the imagination, rooted in an aesthetic of ephemerality, excess, and heterogeneous clutter. The palimpsest, which De Quincey himself calls “grotesque” (Suspiria 144), implies a fundamentally grotesque view of things: they are constantly in transformation, blending and merging with other things, dying and being born.102 De Quincey affirms what Burke rejects: a grotesque economy of change and transience, mobility and consumption. The periodical form serves as the perfect vehicle for the productions of De Quincey’s transient model of creativity, since it is perceived as more temporary and ephemeral than the book, constantly discarded to make way for new texts and ideas.

De Quincey’s writings thus demonstrate that Romantic-era economies have a peculiarly “Romantic” character. By “Romantic,” I mean that discussions of these economies focus on many of the same issues as literary discourses of Romanticism, such as aesthetics, creativity, the imagination, and the sublime and grotesque. The economic and literary spheres continually intertwine, as economic theory becomes a site for debating models of creativity, while literary texts and aesthetic concepts become vehicles for grappling with changes in the economy.

101 Parenthetical citations of De Quincey’s Collected Works will henceforth appear as “CW.” 102 As in Chapter 2, my understanding of the grotesque is indebted to Bakhtin and Keiser, discussed further in Chapter 2.

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4.1 The Life-Cycle of Things in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Economies De Quincey’s reimagining of things and creativity should be understood in the context of a larger eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conversation about production. De Quincey showed keen interest in the widespread debate about productive labour and the question of whether or not it must create a saleable material product. This section will trace the conversation about productive labour as the creation of a thing—and consumption as the destruction of that thing—in the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists, before turning to De Quincey’s own economic writings to show how he takes up the concept of productivity, at times echoing the mainstream definition of productive labour, and at other times pushing back against the dominant view of consumption as destructive. Tracing De Quincey’s engagement with these topics allows us to explore how his literary writings echo but also diverge from existing models of production offered by economic theory. This larger context reveals that De Quincey’s model of creative destruction was innovative and emerged in contrast to mainstream theory, offering an alternative creativity grounded in consumerism and an alternative model of things as changeable and transforming. Reading De Quincey’s literary texts in conversation with debates about productivity illuminates how he uses his literary works to grapple with the same problem he addresses in his economic writings: the changing relationship to things in his economy. New economic relationships to things shape De Quincey’s detached, disjointed model of creativity, while literary frameworks, such as the grotesque and concepts of imagination, shape De Quincey’s engagement with his economy.

Only a small group of critics has explored the intersections between De Quincey’s economic and literary writings.103 Robert Maniquis makes an important effort to consider De

103 In addition to Robert Maniquis, Josephine McDonagh, and Gordon Bigelow (discussed in detail in the following paragraph), Stuart Tave, Edmund Baxter, and Willie Henderson have also examined De Quincey’s economic writings. In his collection, New Essays by De Quincey, Tave includes some of De Quincey’s essays on political economy along with editorial commentary, although he dismisses De Quincey’s politics as “a failure of imagination” (22). Baxter, on the other hand, suggests that De Quincey’s economic writings are a crucial component of his work (153). He focuses on the politics of De Quincey’s economic theory and argues that De Quincey infused Ricardo’s theories with Tory values (154). Similarly, Henderson provides an account of the ways in which De Quincey modified Ricardo’s theories to fit with his conservative ideology.

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Quincey in his entirety by taking into account his historical and economic works. In his analysis of De Quincey’s political economy, Maniquis focuses on the relationship between De Quincey’s work and that of David Ricardo (“Lonely”).104 Josephine McDonagh’s De Quincey’s Disciplines encourages us to see De Quincey as a deeply interdisciplinary thinker and offers an extensive study of his political economy. McDonagh astutely emphasizes the importance of consumption in De Quincey’s theory, arguing that he departs from Ricardo and others by putting “the consumer at the heart of the economy” (Disciplines 53). “Value,” McDonagh suggests, “is deemed to be caused not by labour, . . . but by the desires of a consumer. At the heart of economy now lie the longings and needs of the consumer” (Disciplines 60).105 McDonagh argues that De Quincey depicts reading as a form of consumption (“literary digestion”) (Disciplines 13), and she recognizes the centrality of the consuming body in De Quincey’s writings: “the end of all economic exchanges is the production of pleasure in the consumer, for the site of production has been transferred to the body of the consumer” (Disciplines 62). Similarly, Gordon Bigelow situates De Quincey’s political economy within a larger shift in nineteenth-century Britain towards figuring consumption as “an abstract and universal outline of human experience” at the centre of capitalism (Fiction 73).106 De Quincey participates in the ideological work involved in this transition by reconfiguring value as “a degree of subjective consumer desire” (Bigelow, Fiction 102). While I concur with McDonagh’s and Bigelow’s emphases on the consumer, neither of these critics has explored in detail how the contemporary debate about productivity shapes De Quincey’s political economy.

This conversation about productivity has received little attention from literary scholars. Heinzelman is one exception: he gives extended attention to this topic, though he does not discuss its relevance to De Quincey. Heinzelman suggests that the idea of artistic labour was not always separate from that of manual labour: prior to Smith’s time, “labour” and “art” were connected, and the term “art” was used to describe forms of “ingenious labour”—in other words, ways to make labour more efficient through technological or procedural innovations (148-9).

104 See also Peter Groenewegen for more on De Quincey’s economic theory and its relationship to Ricardo. 105 Whale similarly recognizes that De Quincey was “a proponent of the consumer whose human desire has the power to transform value” (headnote in CW 14.188). 106 See also Bigelow’s “Inside Out: Value and Display in Thomas De Quincey and Isaac Butt” for a similar argument about the centrality of the consumer in De Quincey and Butt.

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Yet, the classical economists, notably Smith, “classified most imaginative labors as unproductive because they rendered only a momentary service, not a palpable and usable commodity . . . their labor does not result in a permanent object, permanence being equated in Smith’s mind with that which is vendible” (Heinzelman 153). Smith’s theory created a “dilemma” for artists: “in order to be taken seriously from an economic point of view, a literary work would have to demonstrate that its aesthetic permanence was also vendible, that it could sell. Or conversely, art might ‘prove’ its resistance to commerce by affirming the instantaneousness of its happening, by aggrandizing its ability to perish” (Heinzelman 154). De Quincey, I would argue, responds to this “dilemma” by employing the second strategy: his palimpsest affirms “the instantaneousness of its happening”—that is, affirms the ephemerality of a consumer economy. While Heinzelman focuses on how Wordsworth responds to this dilemma, arguing that the poet attempts to validate his literary labour by appropriating images of rural labour (224) and by depicting poetry as equivalent to work done in the fields (198), I suggest that De Quincey’s embodied model of creation collapses the difference between physical and intellectual work, creating a hybrid form of “physico-intellectual” labour (CW 11.428).

If we consider how De Quincey’s model of creativity responds to contemporary debates about productivity, we can reinterpret the palimpsest as a consumerist model of imagination. Most readings of the palimpsest have focused on the ways in which it functions as a symbol for memory, writing, and the unconscious, while the economic dimensions of the palimpsest have been less well studied. Brecht De Groote, for example, argues that “the palimpsest comes to operate as the ultimate metaphor for memory” (109). Psychoanalytic readings of the palimpsest have been common. Maniquis indicates that the palimpsest anticipates the Freudian unconscious (“Dark” 111) and compares it to Freud’s mystic writing pad, though he suggests that the two are not identical (“Dark” 130). Sarah Dillon disagrees with the alignment of the palimpsest with the mystic writing pad but nonetheless approaches the palimpsest through psychoanalytic theory, suggesting that the palimpsest resembles “Freud’s second topography, in which the mind is haunted by the ghostly figures of the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego” (251). A different perspective has been offered by Markus Iseli, who reads the palimpsest through the lens of the modern concept of the “new unconscious” from cognitive psychology (326). Yet, Iseli still

135 remains focused on the palimpsest as a model of the unconscious and the mind.107 One critic who does address the economic dimensions of the palimpsest is Matthew Schneider, who examines how De Quincey’s palimpsest responds to paper money and the bullion crisis. Yet, more could be said about the economy of the palimpsest: certain crucial words in De Quincey’s description merit further attention, such as “value” and “grotesque,” which invite us to read the palimpsest in terms of the infinite, consumerist grotesque, the same aesthetic theorized by Burke’s Reflections (141, 144). De Quincey’s palimpsest bears several key features of Burke’s infinite grotesque, such as infinity, combinations of heterogeneous elements and of opposites, the blending together of things that were once distinct, change, and transformation. De Quincey carves out his own consumerist literary identity by appropriating the same aesthetic that Burke and Wordsworth reject.

This chapter also draws on a long history of scholarship on Romanticism and consumerism, which has laid the groundwork for analyzing the connections between Romantic aesthetics and consumer culture. This important criticism proves a central assumption of this chapter: while Romanticism may self-fashion itself as being apart from consumer culture, this is a false presentation. Campbell’s seminal work argues that Romantic aesthetic concepts, particularly the imagination, inspired and encouraged the rise of the new, modern “spirit” of consumerism (11). Bermingham and Brewer’s collection, The Consumption of Culture, further dismantles high romantic ideas about the separation of commerce from “originality, genius, aestheticism,” by indicating that eighteenth-century consumption of art and “high culture” played pivotal social roles in the formation of identity and community (3, 4). My analysis of De Quincey’s consumer creativity builds in particular on the work of Fang, who argues that Lamb uses consumption as a way to differentiate his own work from the high romantic aesthetic of Coleridge. Lamb presents a China teacup (a consumer commodity) “as a stimulus to ‘imagination,’ and thereby conflates commodity culture with aesthetic inspiration to suggest an inclusive, consumer version of the romantic tradition” (Fang, “Empire” 816). Fang suggests that Lamb remodels the High Romanticism of Coleridge by crafting a “consumerist model of

107 For additional examples of criticism on the palimpsest, writing, and the mind, see the work of the following scholars. Laura Roman argues that the palimpsest functions as a model of writing: the many layers and erasures mime De Quincey’s processes of digression, editing, and revision (107). For McDonagh, the palimpsest is a shifting model for the historical, the autobiographical, and the psychological (“Writings” 209).

136 imagination,” turning to the visionary experiences of “consumerism as the medium of the later romantic voice” (Fang, “Empire” 817, 819). Like Fang, I argue that De Quincey turns to consumerism to craft his version of Romantic creativity, though De Quincey’s key high Romantic figure is not Coleridge but Wordsworth. I depart from Fang by emphasizing the grotesque, as well as the role played by things in the shift to consumerism, and by showing how De Quincey challenges existing economic models of production as the creation of a material thing.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists defined production as the creation of saleable material goods. The topic appears in the work of Smith, Ricardo, Harriet Martineau, Malthus, and crucially, De Quincey himself. The ability of labour to create tangible products formed the basis for the distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labour. To be considered productive, labour must fulfill two objectives: it must have a material result (it must create a thing), and the thing it creates must be saleable and generate profit (it must be a “vendible commodity,” as Smith puts it [2.3, par.1]). In The Wealth of Nations, Smith insists that “[t]here is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive” (2.3, par. 1). While a manufacturer’s labour improves the worth of the materials he works on, a servant’s labour adds no value to an object: the labour of the manufacturer fixes and realizes itself in some particular subject or vendible commodity, which lasts for some time at least after that labour is past. It is, as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion. . . . The labour of the menial servant, on the contrary, does not fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured. (Smith 2.3, par. 1; emphasis mine) Smith’s phrase, “perish in the very instant of their performance,” suggests the ephemerality of unproductive labour, which “fixes” itself nowhere and leaves no material “trace of value.”

While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists considered production as the creation of a thing, they also considered consumption as the death of a thing. After creation through productive labour, the life-cycle of a thing moves from its sale and exchange to its

137 destruction through consumption. Malthus depicts agricultural production as locked in constant struggle with the opposing force of the human appetite. He argues against the possibility of human improvement on the grounds that consumption stands in the way of progress: “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man” (13). If the food supply increases, so too does population at an even faster rate, until it is checked again by starvation and a higher mortality rate (Malthus 21). Moreover, David Chernomas has demonstrated the centrality of the concepts of productive labour and destructive consumption in the work of not only Malthus but Ricardo as well. Chernomas indicates that for Malthus and Ricardo, “[p]roductive labor produces the material out of which the wealth of nations grows, while unproductive labor consumes this material” (82).108 Ricardo viewed unproductive labour as encouraging a “form of consumption which shifts income away from profit,” ultimately slowing economic growth; as such, it must be minimized as much as possible (Chernomas 88). What economists feared most about unproductive labourers was their consumption. The Wealth of Nations reveals this anxiety about the hungry mouths of unproductive labourers, who threaten to consume the funds destined for the more industrious: “Such people, as they themselves produce nothing, are all maintained by the produce of other men’s labour. When multiplied, therefore, to an unnecessary number, they may in a particular year consume so great a share of this produce, as not to leave a sufficiency for maintaining the productive labourers, who should reproduce it next year” (Smith 2.3, par. 30). This vision of unproductive labour does not reflect favourably on De Quincey, who was not only a man of letters (making him, as we will see in what follows, an unproductive labourer according to Smith) but also an opium addict, consuming uncontrollably. The consumption of opium would fall into what Smith designates as the most transient category of consumption: an individual may spend revenue either on “things which are consumed immediately,” or on “things more durable,” such as adorning an estate, statues, pictures, and jewels (2.3, par. 38). The latter form of expenditure is preferable to Smith, since these material forms of wealth will accumulate and continue to increase the affluence of the individual and the nation, as these goods eventually trickle down, second-hand, to the lower

108 Chernomas does, however, paint a more complex picture of Malthus, showing how he later changed his views on unproductive labour. While the later Malthus still largely echoes Smith’s definitions of productive and unproductive labour, he does change the name of productive labour to “personal services” to “avoid the pejorative implication” of the former term, and he does argue that every society needs personal services (Chernomas 82).

138 ranks of society (2.3, par. 38-9). De Quincey, as a writer and an opium-eater, then, represents the worst figure imaginable within Smith’s schema: an unproductive labourer engaged in perpetual consumption of the most transient kind.

Because economics defined productivity as the creation of a thing, intellectual labour was often labeled as unproductive, as it consists of work done within the mind and creates products that are difficult to locate precisely in the material world, such as knowledge, science, music, or poetry. Smith pointedly includes “men of letters of all kinds” in the category of unproductive labour: “In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, &c. . . . Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production” (2.3, par. 2). Smith considers intellectual labour ephemeral, like music or oratory. His inclusion of men of letters in this category ignores the fact that a book is a vendible commodity. This perception of ephemerality applied particularly to De Quincey’s primary medium of the periodical, seen as a more transient form than the book. Moreover, though theories of productive and unproductive labour ostensibly acknowledge the importance of unproductive work, they nonetheless attach implicit value judgements to the two categories. Smith admits that unproductive labour can be necessary and honourable, noting that “[t]he labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value,” and yet throughout The Wealth of Nations his language continually undermines unproductive labour for failing to contribute to society (2.3, par. 2). He associates unproductive labourers with idleness; they are frequently paid through excess revenue spent on luxuries or temporary enjoyments such as a “play or puppetshow [sic]” (3.2, par. 7). The amount of industry and idleness in a nation depends on how much of its money is spent on unproductive versus productive labour (2.3, par. 12). In Illustrations of Political Economy, Martineau attempts to reclaim the honour of unproductive labour while still respecting Smith’s definitions of the two categories; however, even while defending unproductive labour, her text implies that it bore a common stigma. This bias is exemplified by the character Hill, who confesses that he has “been accustomed . . . to think productive labourers more valuable than unproductive” (1.51). While another character refutes this belief, insisting that the union of both kinds of labour proves most beneficial to a nation, Hill voices a popular opinion that Martineau wishes to correct, attesting to the widespread belief in the inferiority of unproductive labour (1.47-8). In De Quincey’s model

139 of production, the distinction between unproductive and productive labour breaks down when he questions the idea that production must involve the creation of a thing. So, too, does the distinction between bodily and mental labour dissolve when he represents the artist absorbing material things into the body and destroying their material form, creating new, immaterial products.

De Quincey himself was a prolific author of political economy, contributing regularly to such periodicals as the Westmorland Gazette, Blackwood’s, and the London Magazine. His writings reveal an obsession with the productivity of labour and the question of whether or not it creates a saleable material thing. He also returns repeatedly to the topic of consumption and its social value. His depiction of productivity is ambivalent: while at some moments he echoes the accepted definition of productivity as material creation, demonstrating his awareness of the conversation and the prevailing models, at other moments he questions the static definition of things in economic theory and the strict definitions of production as material creation and consumption as destruction.

De Quincey engages most directly with the debate about productive labour in Ricardo Made Easy, as well as two of his minor economic writings: an 1818 article in the Westmorland Gazette and an unpublished manuscript, “Vulgar Errors in Political Economy.” In De Quincey scholarship, these latter two texts have been given less consideration than De Quincey’s major economic works, Dialogues of Three Templars, Ricardo Made Easy, and The Logic of Political Economy.109 Yet, these minor texts reveal a crucial context for understanding De Quincey’s depiction of creativity in Confessions and Suspiria. In his 1818 Westmorland Gazette article, De Quincey echoes Smith’s definition of production as material creation. He distinguishes between “productive” and “non-productive” forms of “public works” (a category which includes monuments, bridges, and other forms of public infrastructure) (CW 1.331). In his fictional example, a man tears down an old-fashioned bridge and builds a modern one in its place. Regardless of whether the new bridge is more aesthetically appealing, it is “non-productive” because it creates no new material objects; it “yield[s] . . . nothing—either really or apparently” (CW 1.331). Likewise, a new bridge constructed with a toll booth might appear to generate

109 McDonagh, Bigelow, and Baxter focus on De Quincey’s major works, the Logic and the Dialogues.

140 revenue for the country through the money it collects, but this bridge will “in fact produce nothing” (CW 1.331; emphasis original). The bridge does not, De Quincey explains, “enable any body to pay the toll: but whatever is put into the purse of the country comes out of the purse of some individual traveller: nothing takes place but a transfer of money: Paul has a shilling less, and Peter has a shilling more: but there is no increase of money to society after any number of years—nor of any thing which money represents” (CW 1.331; emphases original). An example of a productive work, De Quincey suggests, would be a new bridge with high arches that replaces an older, lower bridge, thus allowing ships to pass below it and facilitating the importation of goods (CW 1.331). This bridge is productive because, at the end of a lengthy chain of events, it eventually creates material things: within the old system of land transportation, necessary before the new bridge facilitated sea-carriage, a thousand horses were needed for land- carriage; now, the horses will eventually be withdrawn from stock, thereby freeing up land for agricultural production (CW 1.332). Thus, in the end the bridge results in the production of physical agricultural goods; it “does actually produce stock: it pays for itself, and yields besides a great surplus profit of a permanent kind” (CW 1.332). As in the work of Smith, profit of a “permanent kind” must be a physical profit. This bridge will “create, and not merely transfer, money; it shall put a guinea where there was no guinea before—viz. into Paul’s pocket, and yet not take it from Peter’s” (CW 1.331). De Quincey’s image of a guinea placed into Paul’s “pocket” highlights the material result of this bridge by emphasizing the physical form and location of the money.

Yet, De Quincey’s economic writings reveal ambivalence: while at some moments he follows the accepted economic definition of production as material creation, at other moments he argues for the importance of non-producing consumers and asserts their necessity to the progress of the nation. “[N]on-producing consumers,” he argues, may be either “mischievous or salutary” depending on the economic contexts in which they consume (CW 14.67, 14.70). De Quincey’s unpublished manuscript, “Vulgar Errors,” presents a more complex picture of productivity. Here De Quincey engages not with the concept of a productive public work but with that of productive labour directly. While one section of the text largely echoes Smith, defining production as material creation and implying that unproductive labour should be minimized in favour of its more industrious counterpart, other sections push back against Smith’s theories by arguing for the social importance of consumption for the progress of a nation. De Quincey draws, like Smith, upon the same textbook example of a servant to illustrate the unproductive labourer. While a

141 clothier will have cloth to trade after his labor, a servant generates no tangible “issue,” no product to exchange after his/her labour has ceased (CW 3.384). For the unproductive labourer, “there is no surplus: they are the Base—and like any other Base may save here and there out of wages: but there is no issue exchanged at a Profit for other things” (CW 3.384). The less money spent on unproductive labour, the more perfect the system of production becomes: suppose the money spent by rich men on servants were spent on goods, there wd be more goods to that value produced: and the difference between ye numbers of men maintained wd . . . express the producer’s profit. This profit again wd be spent on other goods: and thus the system of production wd be complete: . . . the ends as it were which now hang down look—unorganized—unborn into ye system wd then be taken up, and the fullest use made of them (CW 3.385). De Quincey posits a perfect system of production in which all money is spent on goods rather than servants or other forms of transient labour. The funds spent on unproductive labour are the loose ends that “hang down” and look “unorganized,” and a perfect system eliminates those loose ends.

Yet, after tying up all the loose ends, De Quincey’s perfect system of production would exclude himself. Perhaps aware of this, De Quincey insists elsewhere within this same text upon the importance of the consumption in stimulating demand. He thus inverts the stigma against the consumption of the unproductive labourer and depicts them as beneficial to society. While the perfect system to which he alluded may be better at creating profit, and while consumption may not be productive in and of itself, the demand created by consuming non-producers can be useful for indirectly stimulating productivity elsewhere. De Quincey counters the common argument that a noblewoman, by selling her diamonds, might feed countless starving poor people (CW 3.379). Her jewels have already relieved as much poverty as they can “by maintaining productive industry in many classes both of capitalists and laborers” (CW 3.381). By giving up her luxuries, the lady would damage the manufacturers of jewels (CW 3.381). Thus, while she does not produce anything, the noblewoman’s consumption alone stimulates production elsewhere. De Quincey thus carves out a beneficial social role for the consumer. He concludes that “[c]onsumption must exist, but still consumption is not production”: in other words, while consumption does not equal production, it leads to, or enables production, constituting an essential part of the creative process (CW 3.385). It is worth noting that De Quincey’s defense of consumption in this jewelry example is less radical than his celebration of consumption in the

142 figure of the opium-eating artist. While the noblewoman’s consumption of jewelry is valuable because it indirectly causes material production elsewhere (still leading to the classic economic definition of productivity), the opium-addicted artist redefines creation as an act that destroys material goods in order to produce immaterial output. However, both of these examples partake in the same effort of De Quincey to validate the consumer and depict consumption as productive. The opium-eating artist represents a more radical instance of this effort.

In his later economic treatise, Ricardo Made Easy (1842), De Quincey continues this shift towards creating a positive role for the consumer. Rather than emphasizing, like Smith, the importance of maximizing production, De Quincey insists that “the consumption of a nation must be maintained in some sufficient ratio to its scale of production,” and that a social benefit can come from “a class of non-producing consumers” (CW 14.66, 14.67). Societies naturally progress towards a declining rate of profit because of the limitation of land available for agriculture: farmers are forced to cultivate worse and worse soil, which in turn requires more labour and wages (CW 14.67). Thus, as the cost of production increases, profits decline until all motive for accumulation is annihilated (CW 14.67). The only way to prevent this is by “diffusing a taste for luxurious indulgences”: luxury consumption fights against the decline of profitability by creating additional demand for luxury goods and thereby slowing the production of coarse necessaries; thus, luxury consumption provides “time for the expansion of skill” and for science and technology to develop new ways to counteract the rising costs of agriculture (CW 14.69).110 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb have argued that the “consumer revolution” transformed England in the eighteenth century, but the economic theory of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Martineau suggests that the ideological shift involved in this revolution was far from complete. Many economists still viewed consumption as the destructive opposite of production, a barrier in the way of the nation’s progress and its accumulation of wealth. Tracing this economic debate about production reveals that Romantic-era economies took on a Romantic character by engaging in some of the same debates central to the discourse of Romanticism.

110 De Quincey ultimately remains ambivalent towards the non-producing consumer, as he draws back from fully embracing this figure at the very end of this chapter of Ricardo Made Easy. He hedges that the “class of luxurious consumers” can only be beneficial in certain contexts: namely, when an economy grows too rapidly and needs to stall its rapid rate of accumulation (CW 14.70). “It depends on the circumstances,” De Quincey asserts, “whether such a class is to be viewed as mischievous or salutary” (CW 14.70).

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Theorizing the nature of creativity was not the domain solely of the artists and poets of Romanticism; rather, such topics were debated with equal interest by Ricardo, Smith, and Martineau. While at some moments De Quincey talks about the separation of economics and literature, describing the “literature of power” in abstract terms as “an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten” (CW 16.337), his works cannot be considered apart from economics, particularly in the case of the palimpsest and the figure of the “physico-intellectual” consumer/artist. Nor can the discourse of Romanticism be considered apart from economics, as the critical aesthetic ideas of imagination, grotesque, and sublime emerge in direct relation to these economic contexts.

4.2 “Things that express death in their origin”: De Quincey’s Creative Destruction

Thus far we have seen that in De Quincey’s time, an important economic conversation took place about the nature of creation. According to the economists with whom De Quincey engaged in his periodical writings, things are created through productive labour, then exchanged, then destroyed through consumption. De Quincey, however, adapts to the changing relationship between people and things in his economy by theorizing a different model of production better suited to the ephemeral material landscape of consumerism. Diverging from economic definitions of creation, De Quincey depicts a productivity that arises from the apparent destruction of a thing. Destruction constitutes one step in a larger life-cycle of things, and the consuming body constitutes the site of the transformations. Although intellectual labour may produce intangible products such as ideas, philosophy, and music, the process of their creation is nonetheless physical, resulting in a hybrid model of creativity that De Quincey calls the “physico- intellectual” (CW 11.428). While the “literature of power” may be abstract and ideal in its final form, it is created physically, through the body and through manual labour (CW 16.337). De Quincey thus collapses the distinctions, so crucial to economic theory, between productive and unproductive labour, and physical and intellectual labour.

In Confessions, De Quincey’s model of creation as material destruction occurs when the body takes in matter, destroys its existing form, and reshapes it into something new: an intellectual, immaterial product. De Quincey depicts his engagement in such physical/mental

144 labour when he describes his Saturday opium nights from 1802 to 1814. After consuming opium, he did not “seek inactivity” (Confessions 44) but instead went to the opera to search for “intellectual pleasures” (Confessions 45). Listening to music, if done properly, is a creative act that takes place within the mind of the listener. Though it does not create a material thing, it creates an intellectual product. While most assume that listening to music is a passive endeavour of the ear, this is not so: it is by the re-action of the mind upon the notices of the ear, (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed . . . Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. (Confessions 45) While the material input (“the matter,” or “the raw material of organic sound”) reaches the mind through the ear, it is the “activity” of the mind that must create the “form” of music. Matter loses its original form in the material world, but this destruction leads to the creation of an intellectual product. Mental work is a process of conversion, from physical form (“raw material”) to an immaterial output (“an elaborate intellectual pleasure”). Moreover, in De Quincey’s music example it is the physical act of consumption (of opium) that stimulates mental production. The swallowing (destruction) of a material thing leads to the creation of a new, non-physical entity. Confessions goes to great lengths to prove that moderate opium consumption, and the creative activity it stimulates, are in fact productive endeavours. De Quincey counters the common assumption that opium causes “torpor and stagnation, animal and mental,” insisting that it stimulates the system (Confessions 43). Though De Quincey is what economists call a “[n]on- producing consume[r]”—a parasitical figure who feeds off the products of others—his consumption is nonetheless creative, as it partakes in a larger cycle of production.

In the “Introductory Notice” to Suspiria, as well as “Dinner, Real and Reputed,” De Quincey makes specific references to Wordsworth to align himself with his fellow poet, at the same as differentiating himself. Ultimately, De Quincey positions himself as a consumerist version of Wordsworth, an alternative model whose creativity is grounded in transformation and destruction. Fang argues that Lamb remodels the High Romanticism of Coleridge by creating a “consumerist model of imagination” (“Empire” 817); likewise, De Quincey crafts a consumerist reimagining of Wordsworth. Confessions describes De Quincey sitting in Dove Cottage, but

145 although he occupies a typical Wordsworthian locale, he also has “a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum” at his side (61). Moreover, as Lindop has observed, the “Introductory Notice” to Suspiria echoes Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (xv). De Quincey laments “the continual development of vast physical agencies,” including steam power, early photography, and advancements in the printing press, and he argues that “this colossal pace of advance” must be countered by religion and philosophy to prevent Britons from succumbing to “the vortex of the merely human” and “fleshly torpor” (Suspiria 87-8). De Quincey thus borrows Wordsworth’s idea of the romantic imagination as a healing and redemptive force in the face of rapid social change.

Yet, while De Quincey echoes Wordsworth, he also differs from him to carve out his own literary space and identity. As Chapter 3 has shown, Wordsworth establishes a model of imagination grounded in long-lasting bonds with things, particularly ones which (with the exception of poems) are separate from the circulation and transience of consumerism. His imagination is thus founded on the preservation of material things. De Quincey diverges from Wordsworth by depicting the “machinery” of the dreaming imagination as a body that takes in material input, destroys its existing form, and creates immaterial output: The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connexion with the heart, the eye, and the ear, compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind. (Suspiria 88) Dreaming is a piece of “machinery” implanted in the body (in the “human brain”), and the dreaming faculty is a “great tube,” an “organ” which works together with other organs of the body: “the heart, the eye, and the ear.” Lindop has pointed out that De Quincey’s inspiration for the machinery in this passage was a telescope shown to him by J.P. Nichol in Glasgow (xv), but I would add that this passage also doubles as an image of the body. The sensory organs and dreaming faculty compose the “magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain,” a machine which receives sensory input through the eyes and ears and converts it into immaterial output. As in the opera example, input from the material world enters the body through the senses (the eye and the ear), has its material form destroyed (as the infinite

146 is “forced” into the human brain, an image which implies reshaping and the loss of original form), and emerges as a new, intellectual product (“dark reflections from eternities”). De Quincey’s embodied imagination is an act of creation that is both mental and physical simultaneously. Iseli, who has also argued for the importance of the body in De Quincey’s writings, argues that De Quincey anticipates the modern idea of the “cognitive unconscious” by depicting a mind that is not “metaphysical or purely psychic” but rather “has its roots in bodily processes” (330, 326). Moreover, it is the consumption of “excessive quantities of opium” which, De Quincey tells us, enables him to dream more productively than others (88). His “magnificent apparatus,” with its bodily organs and “great tube,” recalls the process of digestion that underlies his entire opium-based model. The phrase, “forc[ing] the infinite into the chambers of human brain,” parallels the image of mass force-feeding feared by Burke in Reflections, in which French banknotes become “paper pills” forced down the throats of French citizens (210). De Quincey celebrates the infinite grotesque un-shaping of matter that Burke fears.

De Quincey’s 1839 article, “Dinner, Real and Reputed,” further develops the idea of creative destruction, this time figured literally as food consumption. “Dinner” compares social practices of dining and suggests that eating can be either a purely carnal, destructive act, or a productive act based in the union of physical and intellectual labour. The binary De Quincey sets up, then, is not the carnal versus the mental but the merely carnal versus, as he puts it, the “physico-intellectual” (CW 11.428). If practiced correctly, consumption produces intellectual output, generating conversations, ideas, philosophy, and music. De Quincey contrasts the refined consumption of ancient Rome to that of the “[b]arbarous nations” of Britain’s ancestors (CW 11.426). Because the ancestors dined at noon in the middle of a business day, “dinner was an ugly little parenthesis between two still uglier clauses of a tee-totally ugly sentence” (CW 11.427). The ancestors ate solely for the purpose of gaining strength to keep working; they ate quickly and in silence, focused on the biological necessity of food (CW 11.426-7). De Quincey describes this rapid, practical consumption in visceral language: “eating for their very lives, eating as dogs eat; . . . What swelling of the veins in the temples! . . . what intense and rapid deglutition! What odious clatter of knives and plates! What silence of the human voice! What gravity! What fury in the libidinous eyes with which they contemplate the dishes!” (CW 11.426). The intensely physical language depicts eating as an embodied, carnal act: “veins in the temples,” “libidinous eyes,” “rapid deglutition.” Humans become no different from “dogs”

147 because their consumption fails to extend beyond the physical. The “silence of the human voice” upsets De Quincey because under such conditions, no ideas are produced through conversation. If a person dines at noon, sitting down “squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off,” then “to such a canine or cynical specimen of the genus homo, dinner existed only as a physical event, a mere animal relief, a mere carnal enjoyment,” and a human becomes a “fleshly creature” like the “crow, or the kite, or the vulture, or the cormorant” (CW 11.428). De Quincey contrasts this “mere carnal enjoyment” to the roman dinner and the modern English dinner, in which eating generates cultural output such as ideas, art, and philosophy. The venues of Roman dinners often displayed artwork, such as sculptures, trophies, and models of temples (CW 11.430). Throughout Britain’s history, as the time of dinner advanced towards the evening, so too did it “advanc[e] in circumstances of elegance, of taste, of intellectual value”; it was raised to a “higher standard; associated . . . with social and humanizing feelings, with manners, with graces both moral and intellectual . . . [T]he chief arenas for the easy display of intellectual power are at our dinner tables” (CW 11.430; emphasis original). De Quincey insists that if confronted with Britain’s ancestors, a philosopher should say: “Go away, sir, and come back to me two or three centuries hence, when you have learned to be a reasonable creature, and to make that physico-intellectual thing out of dinner which it was meant to be, and is capable of becoming” (CW 11.428). De Quincey’s model diverges from the idea that labour must create a physical object to be productive, theorizing a form of creation better adapted to an emerging consumer society.

In De Quincey’s vision, the physico-intellectual act of consumption fulfills a vital social role in Britain. While for Burke, a parodic, Satanic form of consumption offers a metaphor for the dissolution of the economy into shapeless paper and the subsequent dissolution of society into a formless “swinish multitude” (Reflections 69), for De Quincey, the opposite is the case: consumption is the glue that cements English society together, a crucial “ancho[r]” in a turbulent modern world (CW 11.416). Meals are “the anchors by which man rides in that billowy ocean between morning and night” (CW 11.416). The anchor image echoes Wordsworth, who refers to nature as an “anchor” in “Tintern Abbey,” commenting that he finds “[i]n nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts” (109-10). Yet, while Wordsworth finds an anchor in a permanent material thing from nature, De Quincey finds an anchor in bodily process that dissolves such things. The image of an anchor brings to mind a solid, heavy thing

148 that promotes stability by preventing mobility, keeping something tied to a single place; yet, the tenor of De Quincey’s metaphor is not a thing but consumption itself. Meals offer an antidote to the demands of modern business: When business was moderate, dinner was allowed to divide and bisect it. When it swelled into that vast strife and agony, as one may call it, that boils along the tortured streets of modern London or other capitals, men began to see the necessity of an adequate counterforce to push against this overwhelming torrent, and thus maintain the equilibrium. Were it not for the soft relief of a six o’clock dinner, the gentle manner succeeding to the boisterous hubbub of the day, the soft glowing lights, the wine, the intellectual conversation, life in London is now come to such a pass that in two years all nerves would sink before it. But for this periodic reaction, the modern business which draws so cruelly on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in all but those of coarse organization. Dinner it is . . . which saves the modern brain-working men from going mad. (CW 11.427) De Quincey’s concerns about the modern mind declining due to rapid social change echo Wordsworth’s anxiety about the “savage torpor” of the mind in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (177). Yet, unlike Wordsworth’s “Michael,” where characters seek stability by investing memory and emotion in material things, in De Quincey’s writings the act of material destruction becomes the social glue holding society together.

In the “Introductory Notice” to Suspiria, De Quincey implies that since all things are part of larger cycles of destruction and creation, all of them are, as he puts it, “things that express death in their origin” (94). Inherently ephemeral and changeable, things are born from the dead matter of other things, converted into new forms. Using a double metaphor, De Quincey compares his Confessions to two things: a spear adorned with serpents and other “meandering ornaments,” and a tree stem entwined with “some vagrant parasitical plant” (Suspiria 94). The literal, scientific subject of opium is the “ugly pole”—either the pole from which the spear has been made, or the tree stem that supports the flowering parasitical plant—but the “true subject” of Confessions is its digressions, “those wandering musical variations upon the theme—those parasitical thoughts, feelings, digressions” that climb around the trellis or the spear (Suspiria 94). “[V]iew me,” De Quincey suggests, “as one . . . making verdant, and gay with the life of flowers, murderous spears and halberts—things that express death in their origin (being made from dead

149 substances that once had lived in forests,) things that express ruin in their use” (Suspiria 94). The spears not only “express ruin in their use” (because they are weapons) but also “express death in their origin” (because they are composed of the dead matter of other things in the forest that has been reshaped into a new form). Death gives way to life as De Quincey’s text rejuvenates the “murderous spears” by intertwining them with “the life of flowers,” just as the parasitical plant fills the “arid stock” of the tree stem with flowering life again (Suspiria 94). By referring to his text as a parasite, he suggests an image of a being that feeds off the life of another, draining its life energy to create something new. As in De Quincey’s economic writings, the consumption of one thing leads to the birth of another. While Romantic-era political economy expresses anxiety about the non-productive consumer, a parasite on society who destroys the material creations of others, De Quincey makes this parasitical creature into a beautiful and creative force. Such a shift in thinking revalues the status of De Quincey himself, who was not only an intellectual (unproductive) labourer but also one whose model of creation was grounded in addiction.

4.3 The Palimpsest: De Quincey’s Grotesque Consumer Creativity

De Quincey’s creative destruction, and his emphasis on death, regeneration, consumption, and transformation, evoke key traits of the grotesque. As Bakhtin theorizes, this aesthetic is founded on cycles of death and rebirth and processes that permeate the body, such as consumption.111 De Quincey’s appropriation of the grotesque speaks to a larger importance, throughout Romantic literature, of this aesthetic category as a mode of understanding the new economy and a vehicle for theorizing creativity. The grotesque resurfaces in Burke, Gillray, Newton, Wordsworth, and De Quincey, as well as in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” a classic poem about Romantic imagination. Shelley’s primary metaphor for creativity is the West wind, which leads the earth through cycles of death and regeneration not unlike De Quincey’s creative destruction. Shelley calls the wind “Destroyer and Preserver,” and at the beginning of the poem he associates it with life: it is the “breath of Autumn’s being” and drives away “the leaves dead” (1-2). The wind

111 See Chapter 2 for Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque.

150 drives the dead leaves to their graves, where “they lie cold and low / Each like a corpse within its grave,” but they remain in a state of death only temporarily, waiting until the spring wind will promote new growth, “Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air” (7-8, 11). The end of the poem associates this cyclical, transformative grotesque aesthetic with the poet himself, figuring him as a “dead leaf” lifted upon the wind and as a “lyre” activated by the wind (43, 57). The poet’s creativity changes and transforms, dies and regenerates: “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!” (63-4).

De Quincey’s most pivotal grotesque image, the palimpsest, also serves as his model for the imagination. As we have seen, many scholars have examined the palimpsest as a model for the unconscious, memory, and writing, but De Quincey’s palimpsest has an economic dimension that has received less attention. An analysis of the economic contexts of the palimpsest suggests a new understanding of it as a fundamentally consumerist model of creativity. De Quincey creates a vision of literary production that not only resists but thrives upon the ephemerality of consumer markets. The palimpsest operates through a distinctly consumerist logic of throwaway culture, as old layers of text are constantly discarded to make way for newer, more fashionable ones. Like De Quincey’s parasitical text in Suspiria, the palimpsest prospers by destroying the original form of a thing to make way for a new one. Unlike Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” which preserve only a selected handful of resonant moments from childhood, the palimpsest hoards everything, accumulating memories endlessly until opium or near-death experiences revive them later (Prelude 11.257). The result is a grotesque, heterogeneous miscellany, a picture of consumer excess. Because the true depth of the palimpsest can only be activated by opium, and because the palimpsest provides the content of De Quincey’s opium dreams, it serves by extension as a symbol for De Quincey’s imagination and process of literary production. The palimpsest is a fundamentally grotesque model of a thing, constantly in transformation and shedding old layers for new ones. In Romantic-era Britain’s changing economy, De Quincey embraces the growing transience of bonds between people and things brought about by consumerism in order to create a detached, disjointed model of the imagination that excels in these conditions.

It is important to note the differences between De Quincey’s two primary metaphors for creativity: consumption and the palimpsest. Consumption destroys the material form of a thing to create a new, immaterial one. On the palimpsest, however, nothing is permanently destroyed, but

151 rather temporarily erased and later converted into a new form. Old texts are written, consumed, and then discarded to make way for new ones, but the discarding is temporary, as it leaves traces that can be recovered later. Nonetheless, there are reasons to see De Quincey’s creative destruction through consumption as parallel to the palimpsest, as well as to see both these metaphors as linked to consumer culture. While consumption is clearly related to consumerism, so, too, is the palimpsest distinctly consumerist in its resemblance to throwaway culture. Users of the palimpsest throw away old things to make way for more fashionable ones. Something like destruction still occurs in the palimpsest, even if it is only temporary, in order to enable the creation of a new thing. This transformative aspect underlies both De Quincey’s consumption metaphor and his palimpsest, as a thing loses its original form and converts into another.

In addition to a consumerist nature, the palimpsest also bears a distinct resemblance to De Quincey’s primary literary medium, the periodical. The periodical was considered a consumerist form because it was intended to be read and then discarded; it was allegedly more transient and embedded in throwaway culture. Since the palimpsest displays the same characteristics, it becomes the perfect metaphor for the creativity of De Quincey, who attempts to carve out his own literary identity through the transient form of the periodical, much as Fang argues about Lamb’s involvement with periodical culture (“Empire”).

De Quincey’s “Palimpsest” section of Suspiria includes vocabulary and references that invite us to read the palimpsest in economic terms. The palimpsest embodies the fluctuating desires at the heart of consumerism; something that has value in one moment may cease to have value in the next, when consumer demand shifts. This transience underlies the emphasis consumerism places on novelty and the need to replace old possessions with new ones (McKendrick et al. 4). De Quincey prefaces his discussion by aligning printed texts with money, arguing that the imprints on “coins and medals” should be considered as an early form of printing; he thus suggests parallels between the writing on the palimpsest and the imprints on money (Suspiria 140). More crucial is the way in which De Quincey uses the word “value,” a central term in his economic theory: when once a roll of parchment or of vellum had done its office, by propagating through a series of generations what once had possessed an interest for them, but which, under changes of opinion or of taste, had faded to their feelings or had become obsolete for their understandings, the whole membrana or vellum skin, the twofold product of human skill,

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costly material, and costly freight of thought, which it carried, drooped in value concurrently—supposing that each were inalienably associated to the other. Once it had been the impress of a human mind which stamped its value upon the vellum; the vellum, though costly, had contributed but a secondary element of value to the total result. (Suspiria 140-1) De Quincey’s depiction of literature as “[t]he impress of the human mind” that has “stamped its value upon the vellum” recalls the coin imprints to which he alluded previously, encouraging us to read this passage through an economic lens. The palimpsest derives its very existence from “changes in opinion or of taste” that cause fluctuations in the “value” attributed to a text. As Schneider indicates, “at the center of the palimpsest stands not some intrinsic or substantial value, but the shifting human imputations of value which make it a palimpsest in the first place” (59). Lucy Newlyn similarly suggests that the palimpsest “imagines literature, not as a permanent entity of increasing worth, but as a fashionable commodity . . . whose market value will fluctuate from generation to generation” (302). As De Quincey proceeds to explain, a book may make sense for one generation, then sink into nonsense, then come to make sense again, “and so on by alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day” (Suspiria 141). In De Quincey’s hypothetical example, a tragedy by Aeschylus is considered valuable in its own time, but it is erased four centuries later when the rise of Christianity alters the textual marketplace and existing schemas of value (Suspiria 142). It is replaced by “a monastic legend,” which is in turn erased centuries later to make way for a “knightly romance” (Suspiria 142). De Quincey thus depicts literary texts as commodities in changing markets, their value subject to fluctuations in demand. Bigelow and McDonagh have already shown that De Quincey puts the consumer’s desire at the centre of his economic theory; McDonagh suggests that in De Quincey’s theory, “[v]alue is deemed to be caused not by labour, . . . but by the desires of a consumer” (60).112 The palimpsest dramatizes the power of changes in consumer desire to affect value. It captures the transient relationship to things promoted by the new economy.

We can find suggestive parallels between the aesthetic of the palimpsest and De Quincey’s representations of consumer commodities in Confessions. The palimpsest resembles a

112 See page 133 of this chapter for McDonagh’s and Bigelow’s arguments.

153 human brain gathering memories throughout a lifetime: “Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished” (Suspiria 144). The same aesthetic of infinite excess and hoarding structures the “monstrous scenery” of De Quincey’s commodity-filled dream in Confessions: [T]he main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. . . . I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sophas, &c. soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions: and I stood loathing and fascinated. (74) De Quincey’s dream is cluttered with consumer luxuries from China: “cane tables, &c.” and “tables, sophas, &c.” As international trade expanded in the eighteenth century, the global circulation of consumer goods increased, as did the number and variety of imperial imports in Britain, such as muslin, sugar, and tobacco (Berg 98). De Quincey finds himself surrounded by such imported commodities, mashed together with birds and crocodiles in what he depicts as a grotesque, heterogeneous medley of human and non-human things. The carved feet of the furniture undergo a characteristically grotesque transformation, becoming half animals as they sprout leering crocodile heads. In turn, these animal/furniture hybrids become “multiplied to a thousand repetitions,” suggesting excessive hoarding and clutter. Even the “&c” that De Quincey twice appends to his list of furniture implies mass replications of these commodities: by ending his list with “&c,” De Quincey makes the list literally endless and implies an unspecified number of similar, interchangeable commodities. These multiplications cast a dark infinity over the dream: “Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness” (Confessions 74). As in the palimpsest, this infinity is not sublime but grotesque, an accumulation of infinite but heterogeneous parts. Moreover, the ending of De Quincey’s commodity dream implies another link to consumerism: many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me . . .; and instantly I awoke: it was broad noon; and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bed-side; come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the

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transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces. (Confessions 74-5) I would suggest that this transition disturbs De Quincey not only because of the contrast between the dream and reality but also because of the similarities between them. After his dream of infinite commodities, De Quincey awakes to find his children rejoicing in their “new frocks,” “coloured shoes,” and dress clothes—commodities like the ones that saturated his dreams. The aesthetic of De Quincey’s consumerist dream mirrors that of the palimpsest, which accumulates “[e]verlasting layers” of heterogeneous memories. The jumbled collection of imperial commodities recalls the museum-like aesthetic of imperialist “accumulation and display” that Fang identifies in the Romantic periodical (Romantic 9). De Quincey’s consumer clutter contrasts with the culture of fewness that McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb associate with the pre-industrial, pre-consumerist household, “marked for most men and women by a simplicity, an austerity, a sheer lack of possessions” (19). Such families had only a few modest belongings, such as a coal hammer, a blanket, some spoons, and a small iron pot (McKendrick et al. 18-9).

By adapting to consumer values that are constantly in transformation, the palimpsest is a grotesque model of a thing. Like De Quincey’s tube that “forces the infinite” into the brain, the palimpsest acquires infinite collections of memories, which fall upon the brain in “[e]verlasting layers,” recoverable only by the “infinite review” of opium, near-death experiences, or fever (Suspiria 144, 145). The result is an aesthetic of excess, clutter, and heterogeneity. Jumbling together opposites, the palimpsest consists of a grotesque medley of “heterogeneous elements,” a “tumult of images” (Suspiria 144, 143). De Quincey himself uses the term “grotesque” to describe this aesthetic when he refers to “the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connexion, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll” (Suspiria 144). Although the palimpsest possesses the sublime quality of infinity, it resembles the infinite grotesque of Burke’s Reflections more than the sublime. Like the Bakhtinian grotesque, the palimpsest dies and regenerates again in endless cycles: De Quincey compares it to the Phoenix, since old lines of effaced text return to life again and again after their apparent deaths (Suspiria 143). De Quincey, like Burke, aligns consumption with a grotesque form of

155 infinity, one that involves a miscellaneous jumble of different parts with no clear shape or form. Yet unlike Burke, De Quincey affirms this aesthetic. While De Quincey’s palimpsest may at first appear to leave texts at the mercy of changes in consumer desire, always in danger of being effaced, the palimpsest thrives on this very fickleness, exploiting changing markets to accumulate deeper and deeper layers of complexity. As De Quincey’s nightmare suggests, the aesthetic of infinite clutter is not unambiguously positive; in fact, it is horrifying. But this horror only adds to De Quincey’s self-fashioning as the opium-author, a self-sacrificing “marty[r]” whose dreams can rejuvenate the degenerated society alluded to in the “Introductory Notice” to Suspiria (88). In the case of the palimpsest, the grotesque clutter becomes so overwhelming that the brain blocks it out, masking it with the more pleasing aesthetics of unity and organization. If any jarring combinations result from the “grotesque collisions” of random memories, the “organizing principles” of the mind impose order upon this chaos (Suspiria 144). The brain “will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions” (Suspiria 144). De Quincey associates the recovery of these memories with the violent ordeals of excessive opium consumption, “great convulsions,” and near-death experiences.113 Yet, while De Quincey associates the clutter of the palimpsest with horror and violence, and the unity imposed by the brain with “grandeur,” he nonetheless implies that the grotesque face of the palimpsest is a reservoir of hidden truth, waiting to be discovered when the illusion of unity is ripped away. Describing the revival of these memories through a near-death experience, he asserts: “a pall, deep as oblivion, had been thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet, suddenly, at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent forth from the brain, the pall draws up, and the whole depths of the theatre are exposed” (Suspiria 145). Pall, which means “[a] robe, cloak, or mantle,” here conveys the figurative meaning of “[s]omething that covers or conceals in the manner of a pall or cloak” (“Pall,” def. II.5, III.9a). This figurative cloak, which covers grotesque aspects of life with a protective aesthetic of beauty, recalls Burke’s “decent drapery” in Reflections, but in De Quincey’s logic the drapery must be pulled away to reveal the true “depths” of the mind. De Quincey refers to the removal of the pall as “celestial vision”: when narrating the near-death

113 For more on the violent imagery in De Quincey’s palimpsest, see Maniquis (“Dark”).

156 experience, he tells us that the revival of the true palimpsest “poured a celestial vision upon the brain,” prompting an “infinite review” (Suspiria 145). Few people may access this “celestial vision,” and the martyrs of opium are among those chosen few. The experience of unveiling the palimpsest is “repeated, and ten thousand times repeated by opium, for those who are its martyrs” (Suspiria 145). As an opium-martyr, De Quincey ventures, through dreaming, into the grotesque depths of the mind. His “celestial vision” entails a jumbled miscellany of different, heterogeneous things, from which unity must be ripped away and discarded. This aesthetic of disjointedness and difference contrasts with the Wordsworthian aesthetic of, as Paul Fry calls it, “the ontic unity of all things” (6). Fry asserts that “for Coleridge, imagination makes things one, it is fictive, a shaping spirit; for Wordsworth . . . imagination discovers things to be one” (Fry 13). For De Quincey, imagination removes the oneness and reveals the heterogeneity and disunity underneath it.

Economics and literature become inseparable as we locate the roots of some of the most quintessentially “Romantic” conversations in Romantic-era economies. Romantic imaginations, so often described as transcendent and ethereal, are defined and inspired by economics. The palimpsest offers a solution to the problem of unproductive labour posed by economic theory. While for Smith, unproductive labour is less valuable than its productive counterpart because it “perishes in the very instant of its production” (2.3, par. 2), De Quincey crafts a model of production that depends upon that very act of perishing to acquire its richness. As consumerism promotes more transient relations between people and things, De Quincey invokes a model of creation that embraces the ephemerality of the consumer economy.

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Copyright Acknowledgements

An article based on Chapter 2 of this dissertation will appear in Eighteenth-Century Studies in September of 2019. The material is printed here with permission of the journal.

The figures by Gillray and Newton have been reproduced under the Creative Commons license granted by the British Museum for non-commercial use.