LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS Edited by William E.Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor EUGENIC FANTASIES Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s Betsy L.Nies THE LIFE WRITINGS OF OTHERNESS Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson Lauren Rusk FROM WITHIN THE FRAME Storytelling in African-American Fiction Bertram D. Ashe THE SELF WIRED Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative Lisa Yaszek THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM The Little Magazine in New York Adam McKible THE FIGURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton Jill M.Kress WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud Susanne Skubal THE WASTE FIX Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos William G.Little WlLL THE ClRCLE BE UNBROKEN? Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 John L.Hare POETIC GESTURE Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language Kristine S.Santilli BORDER MODERNISM Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism Christopher Schedler THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM The Economic few in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939 Gary Martin Levine THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market Bradley Deane OUT OF TOUCH Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker Maureen F.Curtin WRITING THE CITY Urban Visions and Literary Modernism Desmond Harding FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens Borislav Knezevic Routledge New York & London Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2003 by Taylor and FrancisBooks, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Portions of Chapter Two have previously appeared in the essay “An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.” Victorian Studies 41:3 (Spring 1998): 405–426. Copyright 1998 Indiana University Press. Portions of Chapter Four have previously appeared in the essays “A Study of Aggression: A Tale of Two Cities.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 36–37 (1991–1992): 251–270; and “Dickens and Civil Society.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 45–46 (2000–2001): 355–372. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knezevic, Borislav Figures of finance capitalism : writing, class, and capital in the age of Dickens / Borislav Knezevic. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-415-94318-3 1. English fiction–19th century—History and criticism. 2. Capitalism and literature—Great Britain–19th century. 3. Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron, 1800–1859–Views on capitalism. 4. Capitalists and financiers in literature. 5. Social classes in literature. 6. Capitalism in literature. 7. Finance in literature. I. Title. II. Series PR878.C25 K57 2003 823'.809355–dc21 2002014229 ISBN 0-203-48513-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-60347-8 (Abobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-94318-3 (Print Edition) For my father Contents Preface xi INTRODUCTION The Novel, the Class System, and Finance Capital CHAPTER ONE A Historian in the Literary Marketplace: T.B. Macaulay, the 44 English Constitution, and Finance Capitalism CHAPTER TWO Gentility, Capitalism, and Mapping the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford 70 CHAPTER THREE The Middle Class and the Novel in W.M. Thackeray’s The Newcomes 91 CHAPTER FOUR Banking on Sentiments: A Melodramatic Civil Society in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities 119 Afterword 152 Notes 157 Works Cited 182 Index 187 Preface IN HIS HlSTORY OF ENGLAND, T.B.MACAULAY STATED THAT THE “FISCAL revolution” unfolding in the 1690s was a crucial part of the settlement of the Glorious Revolution. A statement like this could have reminded his contemporaries that the industrial revolution, which they had the opportunity to witness, was not the first form of capitalism in England. Few Victorian writers of any kind doubted that finance was capitalism, and while most realized that finance capitalism was both different from and necessary to industrial capitalism, quite a few were not sure whether finance was, in the language of much middle-class moralizing about capitalism, “industrious” too, that is, an acceptable and socially beneficial form of endeavor. Other middle-class writers were worried about the class affiliation of finance capitalists, for were they not the most likely candidates to seek co-optation into the patrician elite, that is, to emulate its lifestyle, try to marry into it, and try to assume its social and constitutional privileges? But if finance capitalism had been around for such a long time, why is it that all of a sudden in the mid- Victorian period it becomes so ubiquitous in the novel? Even in those mid-Victorian narratives in which there are no bankers, speculators, and financiers in the narrative foreground, they populate the background so densely that the simple understanding of the Victorian novel as social panorama cannot explain them away. On the other hand, was the interest in finance capitalism merely topical—is the fact of frequent speculation manias during the 1830s and the 1840s a sufficient context for the discussion of this interest? What role did issues of class relations, especially between the middle classes and the patrician elite and especially in the light of the persistence of the patrician elite that held onto power despite industrial revolutions and political reforms, have to play in this narrative interest? Did the fact of industrialization really reform English fiction around mid-century solely and sweepingly? Did the novelistic fascination with finance capital have anything to do with the fact that a mass market for middle-class literature was now formed for the first time in history, and that middle-class writers writing for this market were now in possession of quite a new stock of social authority, allowing them to address what they considered as the fundamental problems of contemporary British society? It is questions like these that I was preoccupied with as I started to work on this manuscript. As I was reading my primary texts, I realized that some of the received wisdom routinely transmitted by Victorian criticism needs to be reviewed, especially the commonly held idea that 19th-century Britain was socially and politically dominated by the middle class, and that the “Victorian” age was all about some rigorously disciplining emanations of middle-class ideologies and proprieties. The historiography coming out of Britain in the last three decades or so, which I rely on to a substantial degree in the book, took on the question of the class system in the 19th century from a fresh perspective. P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, for instance, furnished my analysis with a conviction that industrial capitalism was not the sole director of social change in the 19th century, but at best one of the forces vying for influence. Their notion of gentlemanly capitalism implied that the development of capitalism in England since the late 17th century unfolded under a specific politicoinstitutional and global-economic context, in which a gentlemanly elite functioned as a political and economic manager of this development. In other words, Cain and Hopkins helped emphasize the way in which capitalism in Britain was a specifically British capitalism. In contrast to the commonplaces, familiar to readers of Victorian criticism, that the 19th century saw the definitive rise of the middle class as well as the definitive triumph of a modernizing industrial economy, this book seeks to rediscover the complexities of 19th- century British capitalism and the fragilities of 19th-century constructions of the “middle class,” and to find a way to read those complexities and those fragilities into the economies and textures of 19th-century literature. In presenting my readings and arguments, I draw on a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. I propose, for instance, that the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu could be a very useful resource for students of mid-Victorian literature and culture, especially in trying to examine relations between economic capital and symbolic capital in the contemporary field of culture. The bulk of the study is based, however, on an attempt to integrate into literary analysis the insights and problematizations of recent historiographies of Britain, in which I insist less on their partisan differences than on their conceptual similarities. While the chapters are conceived as close readings of individual novels, in all the readings I try to keep in play the three distinct thematic questions of representations of finance capitalism, the class system, and the social authority of writers. Many people have helped me in the process of writing this book. Ivo Vidan and Sonja Bašić were the important readers of my first attempts in Victorian criticism. During the writing of my dissertation, on which this book is based in part, I benefited greatly from the support and supervision provided by the chair of my dissertation committee, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I would also like to thank Fredric Jameson, who inspired me with an appreciation for thinking literature through history.