The Victorian Novel and the Legitimization of the Stock Market
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Gambling and/on the Exchange: The Victorian Novel and the Legitimization of the Stock Market Author: Colleen Patricia Lannon Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/991 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of English GAMBLING AND/ON THE EXCHANGE: THE VICTORIAN NOVEL AND THE LEGITIMIZATION OF THE STOCK MARKET a dissertation by COLLEEN LANNON submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2009 © copyright by COLLEEN PATRICIA LANNON 2009 GAMBLING AND /ON THE EXCHANGE : THE VICTORIAN NOVEL AND THE LEGITIMIZATION OF THE STOCK MARKET By Colleen Lannon, Boston College Committee Chair, Rosemarie Bodenheimer “The public know [sic] too much in the days when a stockbroker is essential to every novel and contangos are woven into love-tales. The special knowledge which was formerly hidden in the breast of the financial patrician has now become popularized.” —G. Herbert Stutfield, 1889 In the aftermath of England’s “Railway Mania” in the 1840s, it became commonplace to equate stock market speculation with gambling. Yet opinion had changed so dramatically by the end of the century that the Quarterly Review could confidently declare, “Though speculation may lead to rashness and be censurable, it is not gambling .” This project considers how and why the discourses of gambling and stock market speculation diverged over the second half of the nineteenth century, and the cultural and historical changes this shift encompasses. My inquiry begins with a brief history of the stock market and of gambling practices in nineteenth-century England, followed by a study of the representations of both spheres of activity in the periodical press from 1850 to 1900. Detailed discussions of three Victorian novels—Little Dorrit , Middlemarch , and The Way We Live Now — follow. Each of these novels figures the intersection between gambling and the stock market as the site for complex negotiations around changing perceptions of risk, value, and worth in Victorian society. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens explores issues of culpability and responsibility through the figure of the speculator, Merdle, and his surrogate, Arthur Clennam. By accepting the punishment that Merdle’s suicide threatens to forestall, Arthur not only expiates the guilt he feels over his parents’ rapacious financial practices, he enables speculation to be domesticated and integrated back into the commercial realm. Whereas Little Dorrit provides some broad outlines of the “speculation plot” that gained currency in 1840s and 1850s, my discussion of Middlemarch takes a closer look at contemporary gambling rhetoric, particularly as it is employed by George Eliot to convey the general economic instability experienced during the nineteenth century. Finally, I consider Anthony Trollope’s engagement with the nineteenth-century debate over limited liability in The Way We Live Now . In particular, I examine how Trollope modifies and reworks the conventional rhetoric associated with speculation, adapting it to the changing financial and cultural realities of the late nineteenth century. The resulting text reflects both the extent to which stock investment and speculation had been normalized in mainstream Victorian society and the social convulsions that this integration produced. In each case, I explore how the novel contributed to the acceptance of the stock market as a legitimate social institution in Victorian England, and the ways it betrayed continued ambivalence about both the stock market and its members. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to dedicate this work to my mother, to whom I owe my love of literature and of the written word, and to my father, whom I once (mistakenly) heard say that he had read all of Shakespeare by the time he was 12. I responded by selecting the biggest book I could find—and discovered the manifold pleasures of reading Charles Dickens. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have Rosemarie Bodenheimer as my advisor at Boston College. In addition to the support and guidance she has offered throughout my graduate career, she has provided immeasurable assistance in shaping this project. She has also modeled, through her own research and writing, how to produce thoughtful and engaging scholarship. I am also grateful for the many deeply enriching conversations I have had with Judith Wilt— not only on this project, but covering the course of many years and many novels. Thank you, Judith, for always asking interesting, provocative questions and for teaching me how to do the same. I want to thank my fellow graduate students Lisabeth Buchelt, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Beth Bradburn, and Trevor Dodman for their advice, encouragement, and camaraderie throughout our years together. I am especially grateful to Trevor, Beth, Matt Van Winkle, Amy Witherbee, Jamie Goodrich, and Katherine Kellet for our writing groups, and for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this project. Finally, to my husband, Don, who has provided love, support, and a healthy dose of perspective throughout this project: I’m glad you can finally say “discourse” with a straight face. And to my two most wonderful “obstacles” to finishing this dissertation—Finn and Caitlin. May you be blessed with finding your passion in life, as I have. i CONTENTS Introduction “Stock Gambling” ....................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Diverging Discourses .................................................................................. 9 Chapter 2 Whose Fault? The Speculator’s Guilt in Little Dorrit ................................. 53 Chapter 3 Gambling on/Investing in Others: Middlemarch ’s Human Economy ......... 90 Chapter 4 The Way They Lived . When? Tradition and Revision in Trollope’s Portrayal of Stock Speculation .................................................................... 129 Conclusion Uneven Developments ................................................................................ 178 Works Cited ................................................................................................. 183 Notes ............................................................................................................ 196 ii INTRODUCTION “S TOCK GAMBLING ” “One-half, if not three-fourths, of the business transacted on the Stock Exchange is purely speculative; in other words, it is simple gambling.” —Westminster Review, July 1863 “The public know too much in the days when a stockbroker is essential to every novel and contangos are woven into love-tales. The special knowledge which was formerly hidden in the breast of the financial patrician has now become popularized.” —G. Herbert Stutfield, Nineteenth Century, November 1889 In the aftermath of the 1840s “Railway Mania,” it became commonplace to equate stock market speculation with gambling. “Stock gambling,” as Dickens’s weekly periodical Household Word concisely termed it, “has never stood very high in general estimation. It has always been looked upon as a mixture of Tattersall’s and the betting nuisance in Bride-land” (“End of Fordyce, Brothers” 76; “Phases of the Funds” 344). Yet opinion had so far changed by the end of the century that the Quarterly Review could confidently declare, “Though speculation may lead to rashness and be censurable, it is not gambling” (Boyle 138). And Cornhill magazine, in a series of articles published in 1897 designed to educate the new “investing democracy,” argued that any distrust of the stock market was simply due to a lack of understanding of how it worked: “There is no doubt that the Stock Exchange, owing to the ignorance of its methods on the part of those who employ it, is often credited with sharp practice when it is really doing its work honestly and efficiently” (Withers, “Mechanism of the Stock Exchange” 490-1). At the same time, gambling was increasingly vilified throughout the late nineteenth century as “the most prevalent vice of the age” (Boyle 136). How and why did the discourses of gambling and stock speculation diverge during the second half of the nineteenth century? What larger cultural and social changes did this divergence suggest? How was this shift 1 registered in the novels of that time period? Finally, how did the novel, by popularizing the “special knowledge which was formerly hidden in the breast of the financial patrician”(Stutfield 854) contribute to the acceptance of the stock market as a legitimate social institution in Victorian England, and in what ways did it betray continued ambivalence about both the stock market and its members? This project addresses these questions through an examination of three nineteenth-century novels—Little Dorrit, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now —which figure gambling and the stock market as sites for complex negotiations around changing perceptions of risk, value, and worth in Victorian society. Exploring the interplay between gambling and the stock market in each text, I consider the authors’ engagement with these shifting categories as they thematize contemporary concerns about particular aspects of the changing financial sphere. In order to contextualize my discussion of the novels, I provide a brief history of the stock market and gambling practices in England, followed by an exploration of how