CHAPTER TWO
Generic Differentiation and the Naturalization of Money
In the last chapter, I argued that the challenge to the continuum that once linked (what we call) fact and fiction was modeled on a distinction that was always important in the realm of monetary instruments, for the ability of the latter to represent value depended on creating and maintaining a distinction between valid and invalid monetary tokens. I also argued that, even as the Bank of England instituted measures that tried to police this distinction, the currency of its money ( like that of all credit instruments ) also relied on certain constitutive fictions: the fiction that coins contained all or nearly all the precious metal whose sum was stamped on their faces; the fiction that the paper money issued by the Bank represented and could always be redeemed for an equivalent amount of gold; the fiction that the numerical figures written on the faces of bills of exchange and credit notes of all kinds represented their current value, both What was paid for them and what they were worth in exchange.
For the most part, and under normal circumstances, the monetary instruments that originated in the seventeenth century did pass current during the next century, even when coins were clipped or worn, and even though paper instruments were always subject to controversy. Sometimes this currency was limited geographically; sometimes the instruments were privately produced and had no official or nationwide status. Whatever the limits imposed on individual kinds of money, however, the monetary demands of Britain’s rapidly growing economy were simply too great for tradesmen and government officials to object too strenuously to these limitations. Indeed, as we will see at the end of this chapter, much of the writing published during the eighteenth century—both economic and imaginative—reveals a general indifference to the fact that many, often competing kinds of money circulated in Britain. For virtually all Britons, an imperfect monetary system was preferable to none, and, given the near impossibility of creating perfect monetary instruments, it was more important to treat the available money as good than to question the nature of the tokens that circulated. 2
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There were, of course, relatively brief periods during the century in which this generalization did not hold true—months in which the fictions inherent in all credit instruments threatened to undermine public confidence, as at the end of 1720, or years in which the scarcity and debasement of the available monetary instruments provoked demands for some remedy, as in the 1750s, 1770s, and 1790s. But, given the state of British currency—both coin and paper—during the eighteenth century, these periods were remarkably few in number, short in duration, and easily brought to an end. The overall level of public confidence in the British monetary system seems even more remarkable in the context of the nation’s almost constant military engagements, for these wars—with Spain, France, and the Dutch Republic, to name only Britain’s most prominent opponents—led to an unprecedented expansion of the national debt, which, in turn, meant higher taxes for the vast majority of Britons, alongside the increased investment opportunities for the few that I began to discuss in the preamble. G. A. Pocock has famously argued that the growth of the debt, and the extent to which its very existence anchored the nation’s political and economic stability in fantasies and speculations about the filture rather than tangible land or material productivity, created a psychologically volatile situation, in which hopes and fears fed a combustible mixture that some politicians were eager to exploit.3 While I concede that, to modern readers, the combination of this innovative model of state financing and a heterogeneous and inadequate domestic currency might seem potentially explosive, I also want to point out that none of the eighteenth-century politicians who tried to fan the flames of monetary alarmism — not even Edmund Burke—succeeded in galvanizing much public outrage. Throughout the century, religious and political leaders were able to arouse more passion among their followers when they addressed nearly any subject other than the national debt, the state of British coins, or the varieties and nature of paper money.
In part, of course, the relative indifference of eighteenth-century Britons to monetary and economic issues, compared with the interest many of our contemporaries (periodically) express in these matters, is a function of the different kinds and amounts of information available to each audience. As late as 1843, a British writer who wanted to stir up concern about the escalating national debt deployed a graphic (and imprecise) verbal picture of carts of gold lined up between Land’s End and John O’Groat’s House in Scotland rather than citing numbers. 4
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This reminds us that, even with the eighteenth-century expansion of financial publications that I outlined in the preamble, economic and especially monetary information was often indigestible and primarily attracted the attention of readers already concerned about commerce or the probity of government. The vast majority of Britons were content to use Whatever monetary instruments came to hand, to let the administration finance the nation’s wars with the permanently funded (and growing) debt, and to Worry primarily about making ends meet, keeping personal credit intact, and paying down debts with whatever small sums could be set aside after purchasing the necessities of everyday life.
In this chapter, I argue that this general acceptance of Britain’s credit economy—from its most grandiose incarnation in the national debt to its most minute manifestation in everyday credit instruments—was furthered by the two other kinds of writing with which this book is concerned. More specifically, I argue that one of the effects of the differentiation between economic and imaginative writing—along with the concomitant differentiation between fact and fiction—was to naturalize the peculiarities of the credit economy and the monetary instruments on which it depended so that ordinary people would take all this for granted. By so doing, naturalization helped manage the problematic of representation that periodically emerged into visibility. The gradual process of naturalization was made possible by two interrelated, but not parallel, adaptations of the dichotomy that governed monetary instruments (valid/ invalid): in the realm of fiction, the negative connotations associated with invalid money were neutralized by the claim that imaginative writing did not have to refer to anything in the actual world; in the realm of (economic) theory, the fictive elements intrinsic to credit instruments were neutralized by the introduction of abstractions, which could claim simultaneously to be true and not to be referential. Each of these adaptations helped manage the problematic of representation inherent in the credit economy in a different way. Fiction, which was not held to a standard of referential accuracy, did so by helping readers practice trust, tolerate deferral, evaluate character, and, in a general sense, believe in things that were immaterial; theory, which also bore an indirect relation to reality, did so by making abstractions seem like credible accounts of a market economy whose manifestations were inescapable but that, as a whole, was impossible to see.
In discussing the naturalizing function of this generic differentiation, I do not want to imply that economic and imaginative writers deliberately or intentionally divided up their topics or generic features so as to address concerns about monetary and economic issues.
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The generic differentiation I describe here, as I have already said, was part of the more general social process of specialization by which Britain acquired prominence in the new hierarchy of Western nation-states that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. From one perspective, in fact, the function I highlight here—naturalization or normalization—seems incidental to the more general process of specialization by which Britain seized the initiative in international finance. From another perspective, by contrast, the naturalization of the credit economy seems essential (even if we cannot assign agency for it), for, if ordinary Britons had not been willing to use whatever money was available, to accept the growing national debt, and to take the financial arrangements that funded Britain’s economic expansion for granted, British brokers and bankers would not have been poised to step in when the international money markets in Amsterdam and Paris collapsed at the end of the century, British merchants would not have been able to expand their domestic and international markets so dramatically, and British investors would not have been willing to risk their savings on the joint-stock ventures that proliferated in countries where the physical and economic infrastructures, administrative arrangements, and political conditions were less elaborate or less stable than their counterparts in Britain. 5
The naturalization of the credit economy was intimately tied to the mediation of value, of course, for writing that embodied, interpreted, or made (what counted as) value comprehensible helped individuals accept deferral, slippage, substitution, and obscurity, which are constitutive components of any credit economy, and abstraction, which is a feature of the capitalist system in particular. During the first two decades of the century, these twin offices—naturalization and mediation—generally occurred within what I have been calling the fact/fiction continuum—that is, in kinds of writing that, like their seventeenth-century counterparts, did not explicitly or consistently differentiate between objective data, which seemed simply to reflect the natural world, and imaginative or rhetorical representations, which clearly elaborated or transformed the observable world. Even though it is possible to find earlier attempts to develop genres and formal features that could institute this differentiation (seventeenth-century bookkeeping and reports of natural philosophical experiments, e.g.), by and large, the distinction between our modern senses of fact and fiction—and between the formal and the generic features by which an educated reader could immediately recognize this difference—was a product of the middle decades of the eighteenth century.6 Along with this generic differentiation, as we are about to see, the always complex concept of value also came to be more decisively differentiated—to be divided more precisely into one kind of value that could always be adjudicated by the market and another that was, by definition, considered immune from market considerations.
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To trace these changes, I divide this chapter into three sections. Generally speaking, the first two focus on the gradual breakup of the fact/fiction continuum through the interrelated processes that I call fictionalization and factualization, and the third focuses on the way that imaginative writing contributed to the general cultural drift that eventually made the writing on monetary instruments invisible as writing—that is, as mere artifice or representation. More specifically, in the first section, I use some of Daniel Defoe’ s writings to illustrate in greater detail than I was able to do in the last chapter the nature and some of the tensions that developed within the fact/ fiction continuum. I argue that Defoe is an exemplary figure for understanding this continuum, partly because his early writings so clearly reveal some of the generic features that characterized it, and partly because, as some contemporaries began systematically to distinguish between fact and fiction, Defoe resisted making this distinction in a simple or straightforward way. I argue that Defoe’s resistance to breaking up the fact/fiction continuum was part and parcel of his fascination with the extent to which the relatively new technology of print could generate belief. The capacity of print to make readers believe was not an abstract matter in the early eighteenth century, for belief—like its corollaries, trust and creditworthiness—was essential both to fueling the market for all kinds of imaginative writing and to the efficient operation of liberal governmentality, which Defoe championed throughout his life. Experimenting with print’s ability to generate and sustain belief, Defoe helped cultivate in readers the mental habits they needed to negotiate the credit economy. At the same time, and without fully articulating the modern category of fiction, he also explored the possibility that print could generate belief in events and characters that had never existed but that were, nonetheless, valid. I conclude the section on Defoe’s writings with a brief survey of the way that eighteenth-century booksellers altered the title and ending of one of his late works, the text we call Roxana, in order to make the editions of this work published after Defoe’s death conform to the criteria that had been developed to evaluate this nonreferential but nonetheless valid realm, which, after the 1740s, had clearly become fiction, in our distinctive, modern sense.
In the second section, I further explore the generic differentiations that began to distinguish economic from imaginative writing in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
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The introduction of these features did not occur all at once, nor can we say that their use always expressed a deliberate or conscious attempt to create two separate kinds of writing. Indeed, as we will see, the agendas that gradually came to organize the features of (what we call) economic writing—the delivery of factual information and the production of theoretical models—was often pursued through features that also appeared in (what we call) imaginative writing, and the agendas that had long governed imaginative writing-the conveying of instruction and entertainment—were sometimes pursued through features that incidentally conveyed information or modeled theory. Only gradually, and only through the elaboration of the theoretical principles and institutional supports that we associate with professionalization, did economic and Literary writers articulate self-consciously the differences between their modes of writing and the kinds of value each produced.
In order to illuminate some of the continuities and differences that characterized this early phase of generic differentiation, I focus in this section on three midcentury texts. The centerpiece of my analysis is Sir James Steuart’s Principles of Political Economy, a long treatise that was researched and written while Steuart was an exile from his native Scotland and published, on his return to Britain, in 1767. When scholars place this text within the history of economic writing, they generally present it as the first theoretical system of political economy, but it also conveys the factual information, both historical and contemporary, that Steuart collected during his decades on the Continent. By placing Steuart’s Principles alongside Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), I show that it shared a surprising number of features with the variant of fiction that Fielding called the novel. Even if these two texts did share features, however, by considering the texts together we can also see that Tom Jones and Steuart’s Principles organized these features according to the different agendas that were beginning to be associated with two distinct kinds of writing. When I add Adam Smith’ s Wealth of Nations (177 6) to this constellation, I can more clearly demonstrate that Steuart’s Principles did not fully subordinate its fictional features to its informational or theoretical agendas and highlight the kind of formal adjustments that Smith made in order to do just that. Smith’s Wealth of Nations—not Steuart’s Principles— became the model emulated by subsequent economic writers, and, as those writers imitated Smith’s work, they helped codify not just Smith’s ideas but also the generic conventions by which generations of readers would recognize economic facts and identify economic value as strictly a function of market relations.
In the brief final section of this chapter, I consider one of the side effects of the breakup of the fact/ fiction continuum.
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While the splitting apart of the rationales associated with economic writing, on the one hand, and imaginative writing, on the other, may seem inevitable or natural to modern readers, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century many texts pursued both agendas simultaneously. As fewer of them tried to provide both information and theory, on the one hand, and the kind of aesthetic pleasure increasingly associated with imaginative writing, on the. other, and as they began to judge the two kinds of writing by two separate sets of criteria, writers sought to narrow the expectations of readers in a corresponding way: by the end of the century, writing that was recognizably fiction was being treated in a different way—by critics and reviewers at least—than was writing that explicitly provided information or theoretical models. This split in expectations and kinds of writing corresponds to the emergence of a recognizably segmented market for print, of course; but it also helps explain the phenomenon I describe in the opening paragraphs of this chapter: even though a bewildering variety of monetary instruments circulated in eighteenth-century Britain, contemporaries who were not involved in trade seem not to have sought or provided guidance for understanding or evaluating these instruments. In this section, I begin to link the generic division I have just described to what seems to me like tolerance for a certain kind of ignorance. More precisely, I begin to argue that the generic division I describe in this book encouraged the majority of readers to believe that not understanding the details of Britain’s increasingly complex economy in any terms other than those ofiered by imaginative writing had no consequences. Such ignorance might seem to have no consequences precisely because, as one effect of the proliferation of imaginative genres, another kind of value was seen to circulate alongside monetary value, just as another kind of probability circulated alongside referential accuracy. While the text I examine in this section—Thomas Bridges’s Adventures of a Bank-Note—is a slender reed on which to hang such a momentous argument, I return to this point repeatedly in the course of this book, with evidence intended to bolster a claim I can only initiate here.
Inciting Belief through Print
The writings of Daniel Defoe (1 660— 1 7 3 1) provide a particularly interesting perspective on the fact/ fiction continuum, both because his early texts in particular seem so oblivious to the generic and ontological distinctions that seem self-evident to us and because the critical treatment that this writing received after Defoe’s death reveals that defining these categories has been central to the differentiation of the disciplines with which this book is concerned.
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I will take up the mid-eighteenth-century treatment of Defoe’s writing in a moment, but, by way of beginning, it is useful simply to note how challenging the mixture of factual and fictional elements has made Defoe’s work for modern scholars, who are, for the most part, fully schooled by their (our) disciplinary training. Thus, even though Defoe wrote many treatises that deal with economic issues, economic historians rarely consider Defoe’s writing at any length;7 and, when Literary historians write about Defoe, they tend both to isolate the six works we call novels and to marginalize any features that depart from the norms that began to be stabilized for this genre in the 1740s. 8 In this section, I want initially to approach some of Defoe’s writings by showing how they depart from our generic norms and how they might have looked to contemporaries. Doing so allows us to see both why these works now look strange and why they were perfectly recognizable to contemporary readers.
All the publications I examine in this section—Defoe’s pamphlets and essays on credit, his pseudo-documentary on Mrs. Veal, and the prose work we call Roxana - can be considered, in general terms, parts of a single project, if we use the term project as Defoe did. "The true definition of a project,” he explained in 1702, "is. . . a vast undertaking, too big to be managed.”9 The "vast undertaking” to which these works belonged was an apparatus that could incite in members of the public a voluntary willingness to engage in behaviors that simultaneously enhanced commerce and virtue. When I discussed this project in A History of the Modern Fact, 1 connected it to the challenge posed by liberal governmentality, the mode of government that emerged after the demise of absolute sovereignty and as part of the emergent market society; liberal governmentality requires that most individuals “freely” conform to social norms without requiring coercion from a central authority.10 The project of encouraging such voluntary compliance was "too big to be managed” both because so many people were involved and because the mechanisms of the apparatus were so diverse and unmanageable. As I argue in this section, these mechanisms included the routinization of certain habits of mind (belief, trust) and the technology of print (which helped cultivate belief and trust). Here, I also want to make it clear that, as I consider these texts as part of this project, I am approaching them as guides or handbooks. That is, I argue that Defoe treated print as a technology that could incite belief and cultivate trust, but I cannot say that enough readers read these texts—or read them in this way - actually to bring about the changes in attitude and behavior that Defoe’s guides sought to naturalize.
One of the subjects that preoccupied Defoe in his early writings was credit. 11
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This topic was important to the journalist, tradesman, sometime spy, and chronic debtor for reasons that were simultaneously personal and patriotic, practical and political. As a manufacturer and tradesman (of brick and tile), the young Defoe depended on credit for his often-precarious private business (as did almost all his contemporaries); and, as an early defender of William III and the financial arrangements William brought with him from Holland, Defoe had a professional and political stake in promoting the system of public credit anchored by the national debt. While most of Defoe’s publications on credit clearly engaged this topic as an economic matter, however, their generic features do not always conform to the features we associate with economic writing. Repeatedly, for example, Defoe used elaborate systems of metaphors and personifications to describe economic activities and an explanatory method that depends on association and amplification rather than analysis or abstract models. One of his first allusions to credit provides a rudimentary example. This appears in the 1701 pamphlet entitled "The Villainy of Stock-Iobbers Detected and the Causes of the Late Run upon the Bank and Bankers Discovered and Considered.” In this pamphlet, one of many turn-of-the-century attacks on Stockbrokers, Defoe introduced credit with two figures to which he frequently returned, credit as both the "moon" and the "soul of trade”:
Trade in general is Built upon, and supported by two essential and principal Foundations, Viz. Money and Credit, as the Sun and Moon in their Diurnal Motion alternately Enlighten and Envigomte the World, so these two Essentials maintain and preserve our Trade; they are the Life and Soul of Trade, and they are the support of one another too. Money raises Credit, and Credit in its turn is an Equivalent to Money. 12
As the title of the pamphlet implies, Defoe was led to address credit by a specific event, the run on the Bank of England sparked (in Defoe’s account) by competition between the old East India Company and its newer offshoot, the new East India Company. According to Defoe, the old company’s directors had incited the run either by employing stockjobbers to manipulate the price of shares or by manipulating these prices them— selves.13 Given the chronic shortage of capital available for investment at the turn of the century, if the old company directors had been able to generate enough demand for their shares, they could, presumably, have drained London of its ready money and, thus, undermined their upstart competitors, who were also trying to attract capital. The description I have just offered does not accurately capture the way Defoe narrated these events, however, for his account is couched in language that, by modern standards, seems to obscure both the actual events and what caused them.
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Instead of a straight forward narrative of what happened and an analysis of underlying causes, which we might find in a modern economic history, the pamphlet offers a combination of details that only seem precise and rhetorical figures that offer primarily elaboration:
The Old East India Stock by the arts of these unaccountable People, has within 10 Years or thereabouts, without any material difference in the Intrinsick value, been Sold from 300 l. per Cent. to 37 1. per Cent. from thence with fluxes and refluxes, as frequent as the Tides, it has been up at 150 l. per Cent. again; during all which differences, It [sic] would puzzle a very good Artist to prove, That their real Stock (if they have any), set loss and gain together, can have varied above 10 per Cent. upon the whole; nor can any Reasons for the rise and fall of it be shown, but the Politick management of the StockJobbing Brokers; whereby, according to the Number of Buyers and Sellers, which ’tis also in their Power to make and manage at will, the Price shall dance attendance on their designs, and rise and fall as they please, without any regard to the Intrinsick worth of the Stock. (”Villainy,” 75)
The numbers given in this passage suggest precision, but this quasi precision coexists with—indeed, is subordinate to—the tropes Defoe was beginning to develop: the figure of the sea with its moon-driven tides and the metaphor of the stockjobbers as puppet masters. In a subsequent passage, Defoe elaborated the latter by segueing from a metaphor that compares stockjobbing to the artistry of the puppeteer to one that associates stockjobbing with a military campaign:
These People can ruin Men silently, undermine and impoverish by a sort of impenetrable Artifice, like Poison that works at a distance, can wheedle Men to ruin themselves, and Fiddle them out of their Money, by the strange and unheard of Engines of Interests, Discounts, Transfers, Tallies, Debentures, Shares, Projects, and the Devil and all of Figures and hard Names. They can draw up their Armies and levy Troops, set Stock against Stock, Company against Company, Alderman against Alderman; and the poor Passive Trades men, like the Peasant in Flanders, are Plundered by both sides, and hardly knows who hurts them. ("Villainy,” 92)
Compare this to a modern explanation of stockbrokers and fluctuations in share prices: "Brokers handle buy and sell orders placed by individual and institutional clients in return for a commission....The price of the stock moves up or down depending on how much you and other investors are willing to pay for it at the time.” 14
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In the modern account, the authors link their description to no specific occasion or setting, they use no rhetorical figures or personifications, and they attribute the fluctuating prices to buyers, not brokers. In Defoe’s description, by contrast, the explanation that is provoked by a particular historical event proceeds by an elaborate cluster of figures, which includes artistry, poisoning, and warfare. These figures are related to and build on each other—they all describe work conducted invisibly, and all these activities somehow enlist the victim in his own ruin—but they do not precisely describe the activities of the stockjobber. Apart from the list of "Engines" the jobber uses, which, like the numbers in the previous passage, merely simulates precision (without providing definitions), Defoe does not offer any details about what the jobber actually did. He pursued his case that jobbers caused the fluctuations in share prices largely by creating an aura of mystery and by choosing rhetorical figures that provoke ominous connotations: invisible poisoners and unseen generals command "strange and unheard of Engines” and "wheedle Men to ruin themselves.”
Even though these passages do not look like the explanations that appear in a modern work of economic explanation, they functioned as explanation for Defoe and his readers. The rhetorical figures that modern readers might consider merely ornamental or extraneous were not decorative or incidental to Defoe, in other words: they were essential to explanation because, according to the conventions that prevailed at the beginning of the eighteenth century, explanation required the writer to engage the reader imaginatively, not to break down and convey information in simple, discrete parts, as modern explanation requires. A modern reader might also say that the conclusion Defoe reached—that stockbrokers, not buyers, control prices—is incorrect; but this conclusion (or, more accurately, assumption) is of a piece with Defoe’s rhetoric: Defoe held the jobbers responsible because he viewed market transactions in terms of puppetry, poisoning, and military campaigns; he viewed market transactions in these terms because, in the absence of abstract concepts, which might have enabled him to transcend the particular situation he witnessed, and precise information, which might have enabled him to specify share prices and to name market instruments, he supplemented what he could actually see with his belief that villainy was afoot. Thus, it is not particularly helpful to say that his explanation is wrong, nor would it be accurate to say that it is a fiction. Instead of being errors or fictions, his conclusions and assumptions belong to a mode of understanding the world that did not distinguish clearly between fact and fiction, and, in this instance at least, they did not do so because the generic conventions he used asked readers to imagine invisible actions and believe the author’s account.
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The kind of explanation that governed Defoe’s narrative looks strange to us because its logic derives from classical rhetoric, which is a mode of analysis with which most modern readers are unfamiliar. To Defoe and his contemporaries, it would have seemed normal to conduct an argument in this way, for such argument by amplification drew on one of rhetoric’s fundamental devices, elaboration or copia.15 In classical rhetoric, which was an oral art, the purpose of such elaboration was to persuade listeners to believe by drawing them imaginatively into the speaker’s flight of eloquence, then to prolong and direct their engagement by means of numerous interpretive variations. In such disquisitions, in other words, explanation was a subset of elaboration, not the other way around, and elaboration was enlisted in the general aim of persuasion, which was the overall goal of the communicative act. When argument was transferred to the printed page in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, elaboration was often retained because the intensity it provided could help compensate for the absence of the speaker’s body and voice. Thus, even as explanation began to rival persuasion as the goal of printed pamphlets like Defoe’s, elaboration continued to play a critical role, for its emotional and imaginative potential helped the writer engage the reader despite the absence of the embodied voice. Defoe’s elaborate metaphors—and, equally important, his elaboration by metaphor—thus performed the function once carried out by the speaker’s presence and voice: they drew the reader into an imaginary situation that built on, but then departed from, what the reader might personally have known and then enticed the reader to make another imaginative leap into a quasi-imaginary realm where the writer’s own beliefs held sway. Unlike modern explanation, then, which appeals to the reader’s judgment by subdividing, simplifying, and clarifying a phenomenon at a relatively abstract level, Defoe’s rhetorical mode appealed to the imagination and to belief through amplification, association, and metaphor.
We can see how this mode of explanation works more clearly in another of Defoe’s engagements with credit. In this essay, which appeared in the Tory Review in 1706, Defoe gestured toward Renaissance figures like fomma and occasione, but he used these to launch an even more complex family of explanatory tropes.16 By quoting this passage at length, I can show how Defoe elaborated familiar figures until his tropes seem to inhabit a world of their own, then used the autonomy of this imaginary world to draw his readers into situations that were wholly imagined:
Money has a younger Sister, a very useful and officious Servant in Trade, which in the absence of her senior Relation, but with her Consent, and on the Supposition of her Confederacy, is very assistant to her;
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frequently supplies her place for a Time, answers all the Ends of Trade perfectly, and to all Intents and Purposes, as well as Money herself; only with one Proviso, That her Sister constantly and punctually relieves her, keeps Time with her, and preserves her good Humour: but if she be never so little disappointed, she grows sullen, sick, and ill-natur’d, and will be gone for a great while together: Her Name in our Language is call’d CREDIT, in some Countries Honour, and in others, I know not what.
This is a coy Lass, and wonderful chary of her self; yet a most necessary, useful, industrious Creature: she has some Qualification so peculiar, and is so very nice in her Conduct, that a World of good People lose her Favour, before they well know her Name; others are courting her all their days to no purpose, and can never come into her Books.
If once she be disoblig’d, she’s the most difficult to be Friends again with us, of anything in the World; and yet she will court those most, that have no occasion for her; and will stand at their Doors neglected and ill-us’d, scorn’d, and rejected, like a Beggar, and never leave them: But let such as have a Care of themselves, and be sure they never come to want her; for, if they do, they may depend upon it, she will pay them home, and never be reconcil'd to them, but upon a World of Entreaties, and the severe Penance of some years Prosperity.
Tis a strange thing to think, how absolute this Lady is; how despotickly she governs all her Actions: if you court her, you lose her, or must buy her at unreasonable Rates; and if you do, she is always jealous of you, and Suspicious; and if you don't discharge her to a Title of your Agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live; and if she does, ’tis with long Entreaty and abundance of Difficulty. 17
Once more, this passage is not exactly fiction, in our modern sense, for, even though it describes events that did not actually occur, the characters are not like the characters that populate later novels, and the situation is not wholly imaginary. Nor is the passage an account of facts, in our sense. In some senses, Defoe’s elaborate family drama resembles allegory,18 but he was asking his readers not simply to invoke allegory’s stock figures but also to remember what they knew about real sisters (and women in general), then to think about what a "coy Lass” might do, and then to accept an account that “explains” why credit is so fickle without using either concrete examples or abstract models. The culminating account is abstract in one sense, of course—it describes a personified abstraction. But it is not abstract in the sense that modern economic writing is—it does not analyze or generalize in order to construct a formal model.
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What an early-eighteenth-century reader would have gained from reading this passage was not a more particularized understanding of credit, or a formal model of this abstract mechanism, but an imaginative experience of the passivity and wonder Defoe says the tradesman felt. As with my last example, this experience is a function of the way that Defoe develops his account; that is, it is a function of the passage’s tropes and syntax, which cast credit as the charming, enigmatic dominatrix. Whereas the feminized (and typographically marked) Credit regularly occupies the subject position of Defoe’s sentences and takes active verbs ("court,” “pay,” ”govern”), only two human beings are referred to in his discussion—and they are invoked without proper names or capital letters. Designated simply as "those. . . themselves” and "you," these (implicitly masculine) figures twice occupy the object position ("she will court those most,” "let such as have a Care of themselves”), and, when the latter commands a verb, as it does three times, its agency is revoked by the syntactic reversal entailed by "if. . . then” ("if you court her, you lose her,” etc).
Even though contemporaries would, presumably, have recognized such accounts as explanations, they would not have considered them to be either factual or fictional accounts. Such categories simply do not apply to these descriptions, just as one could not say that they either provided or failed to deliver information or to construct a theoretical model. Such accounts were intended to entertain and instruct in order to incite virtuous behaviors that would enhance commercial success, but what they could tell a reader about how to maintain creditworthiness was ethical or psychological rather than informational or theoretical. By the same token, even though these two pieces helped mediate the reader’s relationship to the credit economy, they did so not by promoting a rational understanding of particularized or abstracted data but by eliciting imaginative engagement with individualized and interpretive personifications and tropes. Because Defoe’s explanations begin with specific historical situations, then move from them—via elaborate metaphors and personifications—to imaginative pictures that depict complex interrelations among imaginative personifications, his accounts tend both to target the individuals he could actually have seen and to project on them (via the tropes they inspired) motives and relationships he could only have imagined. Defoe’s emphasis encouraged contemporan'es to revile the individuals who performed this service (the stockjobbers), not to blame—or even see—an abstract market system that we might saywas replacing state-directed trade, of which (a modern economist would say) competition, price fluctuations, and Stockbrokers were merely outward signs.
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By the same token, presenting credit as a mysterious, dominating female, as he did in the Review essay, encouraged tradesmen to both accept and—to a certain degree—enjoy their inability to control their cial fates, not to engage actively in analysis that could produce rational responses to market conditions. This explanation-by-amplification, moreover, helped interpret the obscurity that Defoe found in the practices of stockjobbers and that appeared in all early attempts to explain the credit economy, including Defoe’s own. What we might interpret as Defoe’s failure or inability to explain why share prices rose or how credit worked, in other words, might well have looked to readers who did not have our expectations about explanation like a credible account precisely because it captured the obscurity they too experienced. In both conforming to the rules of classical rhetoric and repeating their own experience of the inexplicable tides of credit, Defoe’s account might well have been effective because readers did not see the market as an abstraction that they could hope to understand by analyzing its underlying laws.
In a somewhat later pamphlet, the Essay on Public Credit (1710), we can see at least one of the reasons why Defoe might have preferred this mode of explanation to its modern counterpart. I stress that Defoe’s reliance on copious rhetoric did constitute a choice because, by the early eighteenth century, classical rhetoric coexisted with modern explanation-by-analysisand-synthesis, the mode that had been refined by late-seventeenth-century natural philosophers. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, this mode of analysis was regularly being used by members of the Royal Societyi and, as they used the features that characterized this kind of writing to authorize their own credibility, Society members gradually helped distinguish the fact as a particular kind of knowledge and rendered facts credible by separating them from conjectures, assumptions, and a priori assertions (not by distinguishing facts from fictions).19 The Essay on Public Credit suggests that, even though explanation-by-analysis-and-synthesis was available to Defoe, and even though he was not specifically creating fictions, in our modern sense, the old rhetorical mode of explanation remained attractive because it offered a political advantage: it enabled him to avoid the partisan disputes in which his peers were so bitterly embroiled.
Like ”The Villainy of Stock-Iobbers,” the Essay on Public Credit was a response to a panicular situation, the fallout from the Whigs’ defeat in the general election of 1710.20 The Whigs, whom Defoe had previously supported, were thrown out of office in part because of popular hysteria aroused by the conviction, in March, of the High Church Reverend Henry Sacheverell, who supported the restoration of the Stuart monarchy.
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In June of that year, Queen Anne further alarmed the Whigs when she replaced the secretary of state, the Earl of Sunderland, with Lord Dartmouth and appointed Robert Harley, who was also rumored to support the Stuart cause, chancellor of the Exchequer. In response, some Whigs began to withdraw money from the funds (the national debt), and this both exacerbated the financial depression already under way in England and made it clear that wealthy Whigs posed as great a threat to the nation’s well-being as did the Stuart supporters, who wanted to challenge Britain’s commitment to the Protestant religion. Even though self-interest was pulling him toward the victorious Tories, Defoe still wanted to protect Britain from the Stuart (Catholic) Pretender. To do so, he argued that the system of public credit that the debt represented was a national resource that was—or ought to be—immune from party interests.
To encourage his readers to think of credit as a national property that was public in being good for everyone, Defoe argued that particular individuals should always subordinate themselves to—and be considered subordinate to—general principles. In his account, this held true even when the individuals involved were the most powerful people in the nation—in this case, the queen and members of Parliament. In the events that had recently saved the nation’s credit, Defoe explained, the particular individuals who held the positions of monarch and lawmakers mattered less than did their willingness to adhere to general principles of honesty and good faith:
Neither does our credit depend upon the person of the queen, as queen, or the individual House of Commons, identically. . . . But it will remain a truth, that every queen or every king, and every parliament succeeding the present, that shall discover the same justice in government, the same care in giving sufficient funds, the same honesty in supplying the deficiencies, if they happen, the same concern for the burthen of the subject, and the same care to put the treasure into the hands of faithful and experienced officers; shall keep up the same character, have the same credit, and restore all these declinings to the same vigour and magnitude as ever,21
Defoe obviously formulated this argument specifically to reassure Whigs who were skeptical about the new ministers; but, in doing so, he also presented credit not simply as an enigmatic trope but also as the predictable product of a bureaucratic process overseen by rules and principles. Theoretically, if his readers could have seen public credit in these terms—not as a personification but as the predictable outcome of principles faithfully followed—they would have renounced their party interests in favor of the principles that supported the rules.
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Thus, Defoe briefly turned away from the figurative language that was more common in his engagements with private credit (and that also opens the Essay on Public Credit) and moved toward a mode that approaches modern explanation. His account in this pamphlet is more analytically detailed, and it moves toward more general principles (if not an abstract model): the queen, he tells us, "threw in” a hundred thousand pounds to prop up the securities market, and members of Parliament agreed to put the national interest before party interests (Essay, 6).22 Such a particularized narrative that breaks down events and emphasizes general principles rather than relying on elaborate tropes represents a significant departure from his characteristic mode of explanation, and, if he had pursued it, it might have generated an account of credit that resembles a modern sociological (if not quite economic) explanation. It is clear from the way he introduced this account, however, that Defoe did not intend to replace explanation-byamplification with such analytic, generalizable accounts. Instead, when he apologized for his "descendfingl to particulars,” he revealed that he associated descriptive particularity with divisive, party interests. "This nice case requires me a little to descend to particulars, and touch matter of fact nearer than was intended,” he wrote "I shall do this as modestly as I can; for it is not the present work to open sores, but to heal them, to prevent more from breaking out” (ibid.).
Thus, Defoe seems to have thought that "touch[ing] matter of fact” —that is, citing observable particulars—threatened to exacerbate political divisiveness and that this constituted an adequate reason for continuing to use explanation-bv-amplification, even though a rival mode of explanation was available to him. Using the older generic conventions, of course, also preserved the continuum that linked fact to fiction. Positioning accounts of economic issues on this continuum, rather than modeling them, as later writers would do, on natural philosophical conventions—and doing so for political reasons—also helped Defoe keep economic issues and politics aligned, rather than separating them, as later economic writers did. Defoe’s writings on the subject of credit, then, resisted what we might call factualization—the attempt, pursued by natural philosophers in particular, to devise conventions of writing that would clearly signal that certain kinds of statements expressed apolitical or disinterested facts, instead of articulating opinions or a priori assumptions.
If Defoe’s writings on credit did not support factualization, many of his other writings—including the ones we now call novels—can be seen to have approached, without wholeheartedly participating in, another specification, one that was just beginning to be made in the first decades of the eighteenth century.
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Even though contemporaries did not use this term, we might call the process that produced this new category fictionalization, for its ultimate product was the realm of fiction, in which characters and events can be plausible (or probable) without either referring to real people (truthfully or libelously) or simply reworking familiar tales. Although it did not develop, strictly speaking, in chronological stages, fictionalization can be broken down into two parts: in one, writers (and readers) distinguished facts from other kinds of statements; in another, and on the basis of this distinction, they began to invent and appreciate wholly imaginative characters and situations without referring them to real referents or familiar fables. When in 1 71 9 Charles Gildon demanded that Defoe reveal whether
Robinson Crusoe was a “fable” or “a just history of fact” (as Defoe called this story), he was taking the first of these steps, for, by insisting that a "fable" was different in kind from a "history of fact, he was imagining a distinction not possible while the fact/ fiction continuum prevailed.23 It does not seem that Gildon was finding a third term to complicate the resulting opposition, however, for his use of the word fable does not allow for the new fictional realm that scholars have identified in writing from the 17 40s.24 Gildon, that is, was imagining an alternative to the fact/fiction continuum, but not one that necessarily accommodated the kind of nontruth/nonlie we call fiction.
Defoe’s place in this development is particularly complex, for, while he resisted the distinction Gildon wanted to make—between a "fable" and "a just history of fact”—he did repeatedly experiment with writing’s capacity to inspire belief in events that were, strictly speaking, neither true nor false. This capacity—and the writer’s ability to cultivate it—was essential to the kind of wn'ting we call fiction, of course, just as it was essential to the working of liberal governmentality and the credit economy in particular. Defoe’ s various forays into the ambiguous domain thatwould eventually be opened alongside fact, then, can be seen as extensions of his writings on credit, for, in all these texts, he sought to explore the dynamics by which credit can be produced as well as managed. In the text I take up now, which forms one of his many treatments of the supernatural, Defoe explicitly explored the possibility that credit might be a function of print—that is, that printed texts might be able to generate belief even when a reader could not determine whether the events they narrated were true. Even though one cannot say that, in this text, Defoe was self-consciously delimiting an arena of fiction, as Richardson and Fielding were later to do, one can identify in it strategies that suggest that he was exploring haw print worked as a medium.
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After such explorations, it would prove relatively easy to cut the ties between the medium or technology of print and its referents, whether these were actual events and people or previous versions of familiar tales.
The title of this early pamphlet, "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal the Next Day after Her Death to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September 1705,” immediately foregrounds the issue of credibility and, hence, belief: the account is a "true relation” of the appearance of a ghost. Just as the title uses precise details—specific names, places, and dates—to authenticate the relation’s veracity, hoWever, its insistence that the “relation” is true allows doubt to linger. After all, the relation may be true—in the sense that someone told this story—even if the events the story describes did not actually occur. That a “relation” might simultaneously be "true, in the sense of authentic, and generate content that is undecidable, or impossible to verify, is precisely the possibility that seems to have fascinated Defoe.
As a modern editor notes, Defoe was not the only writer to chronicle the events narrated in "The Apparition.” At least one early-eighteenth-century letter also told Mrs. Bargrave’s stOry, and other documents suggest that the account circulated as a popular tale, not unlike countless other testimonials to a life hereafter.25 Defoe’s version of this tale, however, differs from its other incarnations in at least one significant regard: Defoe’s “Apparition” immediately and repeatedly calls attention to its status as a printed text. Print plays a central role in the contents of the pamphlet, for, in Defoe’s version of Mrs. Bargrave’s story, the conversation that took place between the two women named in the title-Mrs. Bargrave and the "apparition" of the friend from whom she has been estranged, the “pious” spinster Mrs. Veal— repeatedly returned to the books they had read.26 Even more striking is the fact that Defoe’s version of Mrs. Bargrave's account is framed by an introduction, supplied by an unnamed editor, that specifically describes how the tale made its way into print. While this introduction might seem to authenticate the ”relation”-in the sense that it documented the fact that someone told the story—it also raised questions that complicate the veracity of the narrated events, even as the editor seemed to authenticate them.
The events narrated in "The Apparition" can be easily summarized. A respectable resident of Canterbury named Mrs. Bargrave opens her door one day to find her old friend Mrs. Veal on her doorstep. Mrs. Veal, who had moved away from Canterbury some years before, tells Mrs. Bargrave that she wants to rekindle their friendship before embarking on a long voyage.
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The two women discuss several books about death and friendship, Mrs.Veal asks Mrs. Bargrave to write a letter to Mrs. Veal’s brother naming some bequests she desires to make, and Mrs. Veal reveals that she has left a purse of gold in her locked cabinet. Mrs. Bargrave admires her friend’s dress, then, when Mrs. Bargrave offers to kiss Mrs. Veal, the latter turns her face away. At Mrs. Veal’s request, Mrs. Bargrave steps out to call her daughter, but, when she returns, she finds Mrs. Veal already outside the door, preparing to leave. After Mrs. Veal’s departure, Mrsi Bargrave searches for her friend at the home of the relative with whom Mrs. Bargrave thought Mrs. Veal was staying. At this point, she is told that Mrs. Veal had died the day before the visit, and the remainder of the narrative details various efforts to persuade Mrs. Bargrave to tell her story, the principal claim of which never varies /’She appeared to be as much a substance as I did, who talked with her,” Mrs. Bargrave explains (265).
The narrated events of "The Apparition” thus turn on the ontological ambiguity of the apparition: she seems to be "substance," but, being already dead, she must not be. This ambiguity is repeated and amplified by the epistemological ambiguity introduced by the “relation” itself. For, as the preface informs us, this "relation" made its way into print by a complicated route, which involved many hands. "As it is here worded," according to the preface, the relation proper was written by "a gentleman, a justice of peace at Maidstone, in Kent,” who first heard the story from his "kinswoman," who was a neighbor of Mrs. Bargrave. But the composer of the relation, the gentleman "justice of peace,” was not the author of the preface, which is the textual sign that the relation passed from manuscript to print; an editor, who presumably both wrote the preface and arranged for the tale to be printed, is never named, and he reveals his own point of view primarily in his concluding comments about the pious "use which we ought to make of” this story (251). Just as the "relation" passed through the editorial hands of the preface’s author, so it passed through two other sets of hands on its journey from Mrs. Bargrave’s mouth to print: the justice of the peace in Maidstone sent the (presumably handwritten) "relation" to a friend, who lived in London; this unnamed friend then presumably gave it to the editor, who presumably gave it to a wholly invisible, because unrnentioned, printer. Thus, in Defoe’s version of Mrs. Bargrave’s story, numerous male hands wrote up, conveyed, and then set in print the chronicle of a conversation that originally occurred between two women. By framing the event itself—the conversation—with this elaborate tale of gendered mediation, Defoe made print simultaneously the medium that authenticated the relation of the story and the barrier that now makes it impossible for a reader to know whether the events it describes actually happened.
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Veal asks Mrs. Bargrave to write a letter to Mrs. Veal’s brother naming some bequests she desires to make, and Mrs. Veal reveals that she has left a purse of gold in her locked cabinet. Mrs. Bargrave admires her friend’s dress, then, when Mrs. Bargrave offers to kiss Mrs. Veal, the latter turns her face away. At Mrs. Veal’s request, Mrs. Bargrave steps out to call her daughter, but, when she returns, she finds Mrs. Veal already outside the door, preparing to leave. After Mrs. Veal’s departure, Mrsi Bargrave searches for her friend at the home of the relative with whom Mrs. Bargrave thought Mrs. Veal was staying. At this point, she is told that Mrs. Veal had died the day before the visit, and the remainder of the narrative details various efforts to persuade Mrs. Bargrave to tell her story, the principal claim of which never varies /’She appeared to be as much a substance as I did, who talked with her,” Mrs. Bargrave explains (265).
The narrated events of "The Apparition” thus turn on the ontological ambiguity of the apparition: she seems to be "substance," but, being already dead, she must not be. This ambiguity is repeated and amplified by the epistemological ambiguity introduced by the “relation” itself. For, as the preface informs us, this "relation" made its way into print by a complicated route, which involved many hands. "As it is here worded," according to the preface, the relation proper was written by "a gentleman, a justice of peace at Maidstone, in Kent,” who first heard the story from his "kinswoman," who was a neighbor of Mrs. Bargrave. But the composer of the relation, the gentleman "justice of peace,” was not the author of the preface, which is the textual sign that the relation passed from manuscript to print; an editor, who presumably both wrote the preface and arranged for the tale to be printed, is never named, and he reveals his own point of view primarily in his concluding comments about the pious "use which we ought to make of” this story (251). Just as the "relation" passed through the editorial hands of the preface’s author, so it passed through two other sets of hands on its journey from Mrs. Bargrave’s mouth to print: the justice of the peace in Maidstone sent the (presumably handwritten) "relation" to a friend, who lived in London; this unnamed friend then presumably gave it to the editor, who presumably gave it to a wholly invisible, because unrnentioned, printer. Thus, in Defoe’s version of Mrs. Bargrave’s story, numerous male hands wrote up, conveyed, and then set in print the chronicle of a conversation that originally occurred between two women. By framing the event itself—the conversation—with this elaborate tale of gendered mediation, Defoe made print simultaneously the medium that authenticated the relation of the story and the barrier that now makes it impossible for a reader to know whether the events it describes actually happened.
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The way Defoe frames Mrs. Bargrave's story thus directs the reader’s attention not primarily to its content but to its transmission—that is, to mediation. From its apparently unambiguous first sentence, the editor’s preface insists that the story should inspire belief: "This relation is matter of fact, and attended with such circumstances as may induce any reasonable man to believe it” (“The Apparition,” 251). Yet the way the editor frames the story makes it clear that it is not the story itself that inspires belief but the circumstances that attend its "relation." Initially, it seems that the reputation of those who have passed the tale along will suffice to authenticate the events, but, as he names these people, the editor increases the doubt that he seems intent upon banishing. In the quotation that follows, I supply in brackets the probable antecedents of various pronouns, but note that, without my editorial amendments, these antecedents are not always clear. The editor tells the reader that the "relation"
was sent by a gentleman, a justice of peace at Maidstone, in Kent, and a very intelligent person, to his friend in London, as it is here worded; which discourse is attested by a very sober and understanding gentlewornan and kinsman of the said gentleman’s [the justice], who [the kinswornan] lives in Canterbury, within a few doors of the house in which the within-named Mrs. Bargrave lives; who [the justice] believes his kinswornan to be of so discerning a spirit as not to be put upon by any fallacy, and who [the kinswoman] positively assured him [the [ustice] that the whole matter as it is here related and laid down is what is really true, and what she herself had in the same words, as near as may be, from Mrs. Bargrave’s own mouth, who, she [the kinswornan] knows, had no reason to invent and publish such a story, nor any design to forge and tell a lie, being a woman of much honesty and virtue, and her whole life a course, as it were, of piety. (ibid.)
In this account, both the authenticity of the "relation" and the credibility of Mrs. Bargrave rest on the belief of the justice’s unnamed kinswornan; her credibility, in turn, rests on the justice’s belief in her; and his credibility rests on the editor’s belief that the justice is "a very intelligent person.” The ambiguity of the pronouns allows for an even more unstable system of verification, however. If the second who refers not to the justice but to Mrs. Bargrave (the most proximate noun), then the basis for the justice’s kinswoman’s belief in Mrs. Bargrave is Mrs. Bargrave’s belief in her.
Whether the logic of authentication in the preface is circular or simply torturoule distended, it is further compounded by the “relation” itself. The author of the “relation,” who is presumably the justice of the peace,
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seconds his kinswoman’s belief that Mrs. Bargrave is reliable by the authority of his own experience: the narrator tells us that Mrs. Bargrave is "my intimate friend, and I can avouch for her reputation for these last fifteen or sixteen years” ("The Apparition,” 253). This narrative frame, which asks the reader to believe in Mrs. Bargrave because the narrator does, almost immediately recedes, and, by the fourth paragraph of the "relation," Mrs. Bargrave becomes the focalizer of the narrative. For about half the tale, her story of the events proceeds without comment from the narrator, with the result that it is impossible for the reader to determine whether any given detail originated with Mrs. Bargrave or with the justice of the peace. This matters because it is precisely these details that now seem to authenticate the tale‘ In other words, the authority initially ascribed to the reputation of the various characters—the justice, his kinswoman, and Mrs. Bargrave—is now being propped on another kind of authority—that of the formal features associated with (what we call) fact. These features include the use of specific dates and place-names, the almost complete absence of rhetorical elaboration or amplification by metaphor, the use of a chronological narrative that enables the reader to be a virtual witness to the events related, and an absence of editorial commentary. A brief passage will give a sense of this: "In this house, on the 8th of September last, viz., 1705, she was sitting alone, in the forenoon, thinking over her unfortunate life. . . . [She] took up her sewing-work, which she had no sooner done but she hears a knocking at the door. She went to see who it was there, and this proved to be Mrs. Veal, her old friend, who was in a riding-habit: at that moment of time the clock struck twelve at noon” (255).
The narrator announces his mediating presence (which is implied by the use of the third-person pronouns) only when the narrative reaches Mrs. Veal’s departure, at "three-quarters after one in the afternoon” ("The Apparition," 260). At this point, the narrator informs the reader that Mrs. Veal had died on "the 7th of September, at twelve o’clock at noon” (ibid.), and describes the initial transmission of the story (Mrs. Bargrave told Captain Watson’s family, Mrs. Watson "blazed all about the town, and avouched the demonstration of the truth of Mrs. Bargrave’s seeing Mrs. Veal’s apparition; and Captain Watson carried two gentlemen immediately to Mrs. Bargrave’s house to hear the relation from her own mouth. And then it spread so fast that gentlemen and persons of quality, the judicious and sceptical part of the world, flocked in upon her” [261]). Then the narrator bolsters his earlier positive assertion of belief in Mrs. Bargrave's credibility with a rebuke to those who doubt: "To suppose that Mrs. Bargrave could hatch such an invention as this from Friday noon till Saturday noon (supposing that she knew of Mrs. Veal’s death the very first moment),
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Veal’s death the very first moment), without jumbling circumstances, and without any interest too, she must be more witty, fortunate, and wicked too, than any indifferent person, I dare say, will allow” (264). The narrative concludes with the narrator’s definitive verdict, which rests on the two bases of feeling and faith: "This thing has very much affected me, and I am as well satisfied as I am of the best grounded matter of fact. And why should we dispute matter of fact because we cannot solve things of which we have no certain or demonstrative notions, seems strange to me Mrs. Bargrave’s authority and sincerity alone would have been undoubted in any other case” (265).
This compact tale, which, including the preface, is only fourteen pages long, claimed to be an efficient mechanism for generating belief, but it was also a medium for exploring what made a narrative credible in the first place. Because of the editor's preface, the belief that the tale aimed to inspire—the conviction that Mrs. Bargrave was telling the truth—is placed in the service of another belief, the conviction, as the editor phrases it, "that there is a life to come after this” ("The Apparition,” 251). But the elaborate framing, with its repeated emphasis on the credibility (or lack thereof) of the tale’s handlers suggests that this narrative was not simply an endorsement of apparitions or an afterlife. Even if it was commonplace in the early eighteenth century to link religious piety to belief in spirits, this combination still provided a rich vein for a more radical project: an experiment that tested the medium itself to see whether print could inspire belief for its own sake, not belief in anything in particular.
I place my emphasis on print because, in Defoe’s presentation of this material, print is what finally confers credibility on the relation (and, less certainly, on the events described therein). Only when a series of men had shepherded the "relation" from the domestic sphere and the ephemeral realm of orality into the autonomous and semipermanent world of print could it be authenticated, and only as printed material could the tale circulate beyond Mrs. Bargrave’s immediate audience. As we have seen, printed texts also play a central role in the events, for books constitute the focus of much of the two women’s conversation, And each member of the story’s chain of custody (the justice of the peace, his London friend, the author of the preface) can attest only to the "matter of fact” nature of the printed “relation,” not to the accuracy of Mrs. Bargrave’s report. In fact, once the focalization shifts away from Mrs. Bargrave and back to the justice-narrator, the latter informs us that the conversation Mrs. Bargrave reported was not accurate, at least with regard to the actual words Mrs. Veal used: "The apparition put [this discourse] in words much finer than Mrs.
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Bargrave said she could pretend to, and was much more than she can remember (for it cannot be thought that an hour and three-quarter’s conversation could all be retained, though the main of it she thinks she does)” ("The Apparition,” 258). Thus, print has fixed Mrs. Veal’s words more reliably than Mrs. Bargrave was able to do, for, even though Mrs. Bargrave actually heard Mrs. Veal’s words, she could not retain them in the same way or to the same extent that print was able to capture hers.
Because they were delivered orally, Mrs. Veal’s actual words are now lost. What we have instead—what was preserved and fixed by Defoe-is a printed substitute for those words (and the events they describe) that authenticated itself precisely because it was printed, because it had been printed by men willing to vouch for each other and then to disappear into the production of this text. As a medium, that is, print seems not to require authenticating by its most immediate agent (the printer) because, as mediation, it seems to disappear, to require no hands. Print becomes invisible as it becomes familiar, of course, but, as it does so, it has the ability to neutralize the problem of authentification altogether.
"The Apparition of One Mrs. Veal,” then, constitutes a complex and self-reflexive test of the ability of print to generate belief. In the process, it also hints at—though it does not explicitly create—a new generic possibility: a form of writing that might make events that were neither verifiable nor refutable plausible and that might enable a writer and a reader to imagine that events that were neither truths nor lies were, nevertheless, persuasive. The product of this kind of writing, which we now call fiction, required and cultivated a version of the same belief that enabled worn coins and worthless paper to function as currency in the early eighteenth century, of course, for both fiction and representative monetary instruments directed their users’ attention away from the medium itself and toward that for which each token might be exchanged: pleasure, instruction, or commodities. In learning how to use the medium of print to generate such belief, then, Daniel Defoe was also revealing what his contemporaries demanded of both media: the instruments themselves should disappear so that what they seemed to represent could circulate (as) value.
The process I have been describing, which I have called fictionalization, has recently been linked to the distinctively modern differentiation between the public and the private. In making this compelling argument, Michael McKeon has helpfully named and described the special textual effect that helped facilitate this split. Calling it "concrete virtuality,” McKeon identifies Fielding as the author who initially theorized this effect as part of his attempt to distinguish satire from libel:
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Fielding as the author who initially theorized this effect as part of his attempt to distinguish satire from libel:
In confining itself to the realm of the general, satire does not necessarily lose touch with the particularity of private individuals. Rather, it engages that particularity by offering readers a concrete individual, a fictional character, from whom they can learn through an equalizing process of identificationholding the glass to thousands of private readers in their closets—which depends on and is enabled by generalizing from the realm of the actual to a realm that is virtual but also concrete. . . .The effect of Fielding’s rationale is
to separate out two aspects of particularity, actual and concrete particularity, whose difference had lain dormant in traditional ways of thinking about that category in the absence of the unprecedentedly normative force of empirical actuality in early modern experience. . . .The emergence of these doctrines amounts to the emergence, not of fiction, but of our kind of fiction, which openly proclaims its fictionality against the backdrop of its apparent factuality. Only through the modern valorization of the actual—0f the factual, the empirical, the historical—does the ancient and equivocal whole of "fiction" become resolvable into separate and unequivocal parts: falsehood and fiction, deceit and the aesthetic mode of truth, what is made up and what is made.”
McKeon’s argument operates at a more abstract—and, thus, inclusive— level of analysis than I can pretend to attain, but our projects are compatible: we both aspire to illuminate what he calls the modern "division of knowledge,” which contains (but also exceeds) the generic and disciplinary differentiations with which I am concerned. McKeon’s notion of "concrete virtuality,” moreover, helpfully clarifies the peculiar (though now familiar) status of the fictional character, which is both concrete, in being fully detailed by circumstantial particulars, and virtual, in not referring to an actual person. As McKeon suggests in the passage I have quoted (and as he explains at length in The Secret History of Domesticity), the authority granted to circumstantial particulars follows from "the modern valorization of the actual,” which, as others have amply demonstrated, was cultivated through the generic features and social conventions associated with natural philosophy.28 The emergence of fiction as a distinct product of imaginative writing required the elaboration of a distinct variant of circumstantial particularity—a variant that was concrete but not referential and that, therefore, was to be judged not by its accuracy but by altogether different criteria. One of these criteria was the density of particulars that characterized a text.
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Indeed, as Catherine Gallagher has argued, once fiction was fully separated from the continuum that had previously contained it, the dense weave of concrete but virtual particulars became a generic marker for fiction itself: "Thinness of detail almost always indicated specific extra-textual reference But the more characters were loaded with circumstantial and seemingly insignificant properties, the more readers were assured that the text was at once assuming and making up for its reference to nobody at all.”29
My interest in Defoe centers on his relation to the emergence of this identifiable realm of the fictional, which Fielding, Richardson, and other writers were soon to practice and theorize. Thus far, I have argued that Defoe resisted the breakup of the fact/ fiction continuum even as he experimented with print’s ability to elicit belief in events and characters that were neither decisively factual nor wholly imaginary. I now turn to another text in which Defoe engaged more thoroughly with the formal conventions that came to be associated with fiction before I show how booksellers (the forerunners of modern publishers) helped package this text in such a way as to push it into what had, by the 1 740s, become the recognizable market category of fiction.
The watershed event that separated Defoe’s early writings from his late productions was the rise, then fall, of the infamous South Sea Bubble in 1 720. Numerous historians, literary scholars, and imaginative writers have chronicled the vertiginous events of this momentous year and contemporaries' reactions to them,30 and a quick summary will be sufficient for my purposes. The South Sea Company was chartered in 1719 by a group of (largely Tory) Britons who were worried about the influence that the Bank of England was exercising on the government through its monopoly over the permanently funded national debt. It was a publicly traded corporation that invited public creditors to exchange their investments in government securities for South Sea stock; had it been successful, it would have created a strong rival to the Bank and, thus, a Tory financial interest capable of offsetting the influence of the Whigs. Parliament granted the company's charter, but, because legislators failed to set a rate for the exchange, South Sea stock was immediately subject to puffing by its directors, who hoped to sell their stock for an inflated price at the same time that they were investing heavily in the Bank of England. Investors thought (incorrectly) that the stock was backed by the authority of the government, and, with the example of the Mississippi Company and John Law’s French land bank before them, they began to run up the price of South Sea shares. Very few investors really understood the scheme, which relied on secret books, insider manipulation of the market, and bribed politicians, but they poured their money into the venture nonetheless. South Sea stock opened above par in 1720, with £100 worth of stock bringing in £128 on the Exchange; by June, the shares were trading at £745; and, in July, the price peaked at over £1,000.
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As we saw in the preamble, multitudes of companies were launched in the wake of the South Sea Company’s apparent success, and London was suddenly gripped bywhat nineteenth-century economists called a speculative mania. When the price of the company’s shares began to fall precipitously in the late summer and early fall, investors began to panic, and sellers outnumbered buyers in a frenzy of escalating distress. By early December, the price had fallen to £191, having lost nearly six hundred points since early September_ Realizing that Parliament was complicit in the fiasco, the public expressed its outrage in pamphlets, broadsides, and some of the most virulent satire of the century. Suddenly, credit seemed poisonous by its very nature, any government that derived its security from credit seemed suspect, and trusting any venture one could not personally control seemed potentially ruinous. In the terms that I have been using in this book, this constituted a fullblown crisis of the problematic of representation, for the collapse of the Bubble cruelly exposed all the fictions inherent in the credit economy, and, for a time at least, the government teetered on the brink as the public’s outrage and despair threatened to render the country ungovernable.31
E. I. Clery has argued that the collapse of the Bubble and the personal losses experienced by writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift provoked not only a general decline in public confidence but also a tide of misogynistic writing, which proliferated as writers personally injured by the crash sought scapegoats to blame for their losses, Clery also argues that the stylistic and thematic innovations that Richardson introduced into the genre of the novel in the 1740s were designed to counteract this misogyny by associating women with virtue and by severing the long-standing connection between femininity and fortuna.32 While I find Clery’s argument persuasive, I want to emphasize a point that she engages only in passing: one of the strategies by which writers like Richardson counteracted the debilitating effects of the Bubble was to cultivate a distinctive realm of tion, in which writers and readers might explore uncomfortable cultural anxieties without suffering their consequences. Through the medium of fiction, a writer might teach a reader to believe once more in possibilities that could not be proved; in so doing, a writer could encourage readers to accept the deferral that was essential to credit, both private and public, without feeling imperiled by risk. Even in the decades before Richardson began to feminize virtue, writers like Defoe were experimenting again with the relationship between print and belief as they gradually began to identify the special, healing virtues that might be associated with the distinctive form of representation we call fiction.
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The text that we now call Roxana (1724) is not a modern fiction, for reasons that will become clear. Instead, like "The Apparition of One Mrs. Veal,” this text opens with a preface that places the work within the fact/ fiction continuum by both claiming that the events the text relates are facts and rendering that claim suspect. As with "The Apparition” again, this preface self-consciously constitutes one segment of an elaborate chain of transmission, in the course of which, once more, the tale is transferred from a woman’s speech to the domain of print, which is overseen by men. The unnamed author of the preface, who has, presumably, arranged for the text to be printed, introduces an unnamed "Relator" (who either is also called the "Writer" or dictates the story to the Writer); the Relator heard the story from the "Beautiful Lady” who will subsequently be called Roxana. It is the Relator who vouches for the veracity of the tale: "He [the Relator] takes the Liberty to say, That this Story differs from most of the Modern Performances of this Kind, tho’ some of them have met with a very good Reception in the World: I say, It differs from them in this Great and Essential Article, Namely, That the Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History.”33 The Relator proceeds to undermine this claim about facts when he offers as "a Pledge for the Credit” of the story his personal acquaintance with “this Lady’s First Husband, the Brewer” (35). This familiarity introduces doubt, both because the Brewer’s initial role in this story is too limited for knowledge of his “Bad Circumstances” to count for much (he soon abandons Roxana) and because, when the Brewer briefly reappears (after more than a third of the narrative), he is revealed to be a chronic liar.
The Relator further sustains—and calls attention to—the fact/ fiction continuum when he offers as verification for the bulk of the tale the fact that Roxana—another inveterate liar—has told the tale herself: "As she has told it herself, we have the less Reason to question the Truth of that Part also” (Roxana, 36). If the details of the story come from Roxana, however, the actual words come from the Relator, who apologizes for “dressing up the Story in worse Cloaths than the Lady, whose words he speaks, prepared it for the World” (35). By insisting that a gap separates the original telling of the events from the (printed) version in which they are now accessible, Defoe directs the reader’s attention to mediation, as he had done in "The Apparition.” Unlike "The Apparition,” however, this narrative does not return the story to the narrator who opened it; in failing to do so, the text drops its formal emphasis on mediation. This abandonment of the frame, along with the length of the narrative and its focalization through a single character, also makes the theme of mediation disappear: in the course of the text’s three hundred or so pages (in a modern edition), most readers forget that Roxana’s story is being translated into the words of a Relator.
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The erasure of the framing (and authenticating) Relator is important because it pushes the text toward what McKeon calls "concrete virtuality”: once the authenticating apparatus of the Relator disappears, the only feature that authenticates the narrated events is "Roxana" herself, and she authenticates them not by referencing a real or quasi-autobiographical person (as the Relator might be said to do) but simply by speaking in the manner that the fully realized characters we associate with fictions do, Unlike Lady Credit, in other words, and unlike Mrs. Veal, Roxana is neither a rhetorical figure, nor a character taken from another story (real or imaginary), but a concretely virtual character that elicits that "equalizing process of identification” that McKeon describes. This is the kind of character with which
we are now thoroughly familiar as one of the signature features of realist fiction—and of the novel in particular. In many instances, this feature distinguishes a text as fiction because it does not refer to a real individual but is, nevertheless, realistic—that is, a plausible because recognizable, concretely detailed, lifelike, and self-consistent individual.
Even though it approaches this kind of fiction, however, the text we call Roxana does not conform to all the norms that came to be associated with fiction during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The text does fulfill the criterion I have already mentioned—it has plenty of dense particularization—but, in at least two other respects, Roxana falls short of a recognizably modern fiction. Both these constitute violations of a criterion that was at least as important as density of particularization for identifying and judging a fiction. The criterion I have in mind was unity, which was a property that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers derived from Aristotle’s discussion of the categories. Aristotle had described six categories— the moral, the fable, character, sentiment, language, and spectacle—but assigned them all a single normative feature: each category should be selfconsistent so as to render the entire imaginative construction self-consistent and, therefore, "probable."
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, as Douglas Patey has shown, British writers had begun to adopt the criterion of unity that Aristotle applied to the drama, and, during the next decades, other writers adapted this standard to fit imaginative writing of all kinds.34 As writers like Joseph Addison, Henry Fielding, George Campbell, and Samuel Johnson began to do so, they also introduced what Patey calls a “split” into the concept of probability. This split can be mapped onto the division between imaginative and informational writing, for the two kinds of probability were increasingly viewed as two different kinds of mediation;
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they also established two different but related standards for judging a printed work. "Beginning in mid-century,” Patey explains, "ordinary probability is usually thought to take its objects particularly from the mundane details of everyday social life; ’poetical probability’ is fidelity to deeper psychological truths, permanent truths of the heart and its emotions.”35 As part of this generic and philosophical split, the concept of nature, when used by imaginative writers and theorists, came to mean almost exclusively human nature, and, as imaginative writers restricted the meaning of nature in this way, they also elevated character in the hierarchy of formal features by which one could identify a text as fiction. By the 1760s, character had become the most important feature of any imaginative text; but, even before the hierarchy of "poetical probability” was fully reorganized, some writers insisted that unity of character was capable of organizing the unity of all the other categories and, thus, the unity of the text as a whole. In the words of James Harris, writing in 1744, a character could render imaginative action credible if the narrated actions are "various, and yet consistent. . ; a Succession, enabling us to conjecture, What the Person of the Drama will do in the future, from what already he has done in the past/'36
Probability, which was the philosophical and formal effect generated by a writer’s adherence to the unities, was held to be important for yet another reason. In Patey’s words: "The probable mediate[d] the falsehood of the fictional work and the truth of the reality it imitate[d].”37 In other words, for writers and theorists who were attempting to neutralize the negative connotations that some eighteenth-century Britons associated with fiction because it was a lie, the concept of probability, and the availability of clear criteria by which to judge it, rendered imaginative writing immune from the truth test to which informational writing had to submit. Having recognizable ancl socially agreed-on criteria by which to judge fictional probability, in turn, helped manage what I am calling the problematic of representation because such criteria provided a reliable system that allowed one to evaluate the features internal to a text but not the relationship between the text and the ground of its referential system. Adherence to the unities, especially the unity of character, was held to reinforce fiction’s immunity from this kind of evaluation, for even eighteenth-century divines associated unity with the harmony God installed in the universe. If an imaginative work could be shown to contain self-consistent characters that organized a formally uniplot to advance a single moral in sentiments that followed naturally from each other and that produced a unified spectacle in language that was consistent too, then that work was held to be demonstrably virtuous.
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Even if it was not referential, it constituted a model, in miniature, of God’s masterwork.
We will see in chapter 5 how the split within the concept of probability, and the relative autonomy this enabled theorists to grant the imaginative work (in the guise of organic unity), opened the door for later writers, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, to elaborate a model of value that was not simply an alternative to the value accorded informational writing but an alternative to the form of value economic writers associated with the credit economy. Lest we get ahead of ourselves, however, let me return to Defoe’s Roxana, which was published hard on the heels of the South Sea Bubble but before the criteria of unity and probability had been articulated in this modern way. In 1724, it seemed critical to neutralize the problematic of representation, but the modern, aesthetic model by which this would be done had yet to be refined: probability had yet to be split into its constitutive parts, and the criterion of unity had yet to be successfully transferred from drama to other kinds of imaginative writing. It should not surprise us, then, that Defoe’s text does not conform to all our modern criteria for fiction. Nor should it surprise us that, as these critical concepts were elaborated and refined, subsequent publishers tried to alter Defoe’s text so that it would do so. Before showing how rnidcentury publishers altered Defoe’s text, I will describe its two most noticeable violations of the criteria that midcentury writers used to evaluate fietion.
The first appears in the realm of character. Character in Roxana fails the test of unity or consistency in two senses. First, the text contains two different modes of characterization: while the characterization of Roxana and her maidservant Amy features the dense particularization and virtuality that McKeon associates with realist fiction, another character is characterized in an altogether different way. This character, Sir Robert Claypole, is neither particularly concrete—that is, circumstantially detailed—nor virtual—that is, tional rather than referential. Instead, Claypole, who advises Roxana about certain investments, is barely described at all; and, more important, this character refers to a real historical individual who, in actual life, performed exactly the services for real people that this character provides Roxana in Defoe’s text. Thus, Claypole helps Roxana ”raise [her] Fortune to a prodigious Height” by convincing her to save, invest, and take advantage of the ability of capital to accrue interest (Roxana, 207). That Defoe chose not to develop the text’s only historically referential character by giving a wealth of concrete particulars is in keeping with the theoretical conviction we have already seen: in cases involving actual people, he associated using too many particulars with divisiveness and injury.
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As he explained of another, nonfictive narration: "If this unhappy Story were a Romance, a Fiction, contrived to illustrate the Subject, I should give it you with all its abhorred Particulars, as far as decency of Language would permit. . . . But when Facts, however flagrant, are too near home, and the miserable Sufferers already too much oppressed with the Injury, we must not add to their Afflictions by too publick a use of the Calamity to embellish our Story.”38
In mixing two kinds of characterization in a single text, Defoe preserved the fact/fiction continuum, which the concrete virtuality of the rest of the characters might otherwise render obsolete. But including the referential character Claypole in the concrete virtuality of Roxana also introduced questions that the text could not address or resolve. The real Sir Robert Clayton prospered during the reign of Charles II and died in 1707; but, in the opening pages of her story, Roxana tells the reader that she was ten years old in 1683, when her father brought her to London (37). A birth date of 1673 would make Roxana thirty-four in the year of Clayton’s death; even though this is a plausible age at which an eighteenth-century individual might have conducted complicated financial transactions, it is obviously not the age that the character Roxana has attained by 1707. It is clear from other references in the text that Roxana amassed the bulk of her English wealth after the real Clayton’s death—that is, after 1715—for much of this action is explicitly set during the period of George l’s court.39 In 1724, this mixed mode of characterization would not have seemed particularly troubling, for its first readers would presumably not have required the text either to refer consistently to actual facts, as a referential text would later be asked to do, or to be internally consistent, as an imaginative work would eventually be asked to do. It was only with the split between kinds of probability and kinds of genres that these criteria became applicable and mutually exclusive, as we will see.
Roxana’s second violation of the norm of consistency concerns the title character herself. This character is inconsistent in two senses. Thematically, she is consistently inconsistent: inconsistency as deceit is Roxana's modus operandi. Thus, she is almost never who she says she is—she is not a lady of quality, as she pretends to be, nor is she French, which she sometimes claims; she does not consistently tell the truth; and Roxana is not even her real name. But this character is inconsistent in another sense as well: she is also inconsistent in her self-representations to the narrator and in the narrative."‘0 As the Relator notes in the preface, the character sometimes professes remorse but more frequently seems hardened to her crimes; sometimes she attributes her misfortunes to fate, and sometimes she takes responsibility for them.
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sponsibility for them_ Even more significantly, at a critical moment in the narration, she suddenly reveals an entire story that she now claims has been unfolding all along as an unnarrated preoccupation she supposedly felt but did not relate.
This story, which erupts into the narrative about two-thirds of the way through, concerns one of Roxana’s children, the daughter who (she now tells us) is named for her—Susan. As with nearly all the references to her children, Roxana introduces this story in a manner that explicitly calls attention to its disruptive relation to her main story, the story of herself: "I must now go back to another Scene, and join it to this End of my Story, which will compleat all my Concern with England, at least, all that I shall bring into this Account. I have hinted at large, what I had done for my two Sons, one at Messina, and the other in the Indies. But I have not gone thorow the Story of my two Daughters” (Roxana, 31 1). The remainder of the narrative focuses on Susan’s attempts to corroborate her suspicion that her former mistress Roxana is actually her mother, the maidservant Amy’s determination to eliminate Susan, the likely (but not narrated) murder of Susan, and Roxana's characteristic—alternation between enjoyment of her wealth and remorse for having let Amy kill Susan. The last two paragraphs of the first edition bring the narrative to an end, but they neither resolve the inconsistency that marks the character's attitudes nor explain why what (presumably) happened to Susan was narrated out of the order in which it occurred:
I can say no more now, but that, as above, being arriv’d in Holland, with my Spouse and his Son, formerly mention’d, I appear’d there with all the Splendor and Equipage suitable to our new Prospect, as I have already observ’d.
Here, after some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy Circum' stances, I fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities, and Amy also; the very
Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl, by us both; and I was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime. (378—79)
Both the inconsistencies that we can identify in the overall system of characterization in Roxana and the ones manifested by the character Roxana challenge the Aristotelian criterion for probability—unity. By so doing, they reveal that this text was not quite fiction in our modern sense. The very inconsistencies that keep Roxana from conforming precisely to our modern definition of fiction, however, did perform a social function in the early eighteenth century:
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they prolonged the process by which the reader tried to form an opinion about Roxana. Because the text makes it so difficult to know what to make of Roxana, the reader had to keep making conjectures about her. Unlike a referentially accurate narrative, in other words, in which a reader would have known to convict Roxana of lying, or a realist fiction, in which lying might seem like a recognizable behavior in a flawed character, this text asked readers to test and retest the status of the narrative, the veracity of its chief character, and the relationship between this character’s words and her creditworthiness. In so doing, Roxana encouraged readers to examine their own process of evaluation so as to determine whether—and what—to believe.
My point is that, in one sense at least, Roxana constituted a primer in the kind of evaluation that everyday credit transactions required in the eighteenth century and whose importance was magnified by the speculative possibilities—and the Bubble year. Before extending credit to a stranger or investing money in a speculative venture, an individual had to decide, by a complex process of evaluation and prediction, whether what the debtor or company promoter said about himself or the company was true, whether the assets he described were real, whether he was liker to be able (or willing) to repay the debt when it fell due, and whether the predicted profits were likely to materialize. If the tradesman (or tradeswoman) or investor knew at the beginning of the transaction that the stranger was a liar, then the decisionmaking process was unnecessary; if the tradesman or investor knew that the assets, willingness to repay, and productive potential were real, then the decision was easily made. It was only in a situation of undecidability, like that created by Roxana, that evaluation had to take the form of deliberation—a self-conscious consideration of evidence, probability, and generalization. Because he was not restricted to the narrative features from which later imaginative writers would forge fully virtual worlds, Defoe was not asking readers to suspend their disbelief. Instead, he rendered Roxana an exercise in the social process of evaluation that made the credit economy work. Engaging with this text, an early-eighteenth-century reader would have been encouraged to make precisely the kind of judgment later, explicitly fictional texts did not require: that about whether to believe or doubt, whether to extend one’s credit or withhold it.
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Even if the text we call Roxana initially exercised this social function, it soon lost its ability to do so. Once the features we associate with fiction were assembled and associated with the form we call the novel, in texts like Richardson’s Pamela, and theorized, in works like Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, the fact/fiction continuum could not remain intact.
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Its breakup did not have the catastrophic effects that accompanied the emergence into visibility of the problematic of representation, however. On the contrary: by creating a distinct category of fiction that neutralized the gap between sign and referent, this breakup helped push the problematic back out of sight. But this breakup did have deleterious effects for works like Roxana. In the context of the separate aesthetic and infomational or theoretical agendas that took the place of the fact/fiction continuum, attempts to serve the kind of social agenda I have associated with Roxana began to seem increasingly incoherent. Fiction became a recognizable realm that assumed the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief; and information, and its attendant theory, became the customary products of other kinds of writing, kinds that used facts and models to generate conviction. As character was gradually moved higher in the hierarchy of features that made a fiction probable, moreover, subsequent readers also grew intolerant of characters that displayed the kind of inconsistencies we see in Defoe’s last heroine.41 During the middle decades of the century, as prose fiction became the site of some of the most imaginative stylistic and marketing innovations of the century, publishers tried to make Defoe’s final imaginative work fit the criterion applied to all aesthetic properties so as to capitalize on the popularity of his first fictionlike production, Robinson Crusoe. In altering the text to make it conform to the market model,- they also left clues about how Roxana’s social agenda was transformed in order to serve the aesthetic agenda associated with modern fiction.
I discuss the market relations that linked authors, publishers, and texts in more detail in the first interchapter. Here, it is important just to note that, once an author sold the copyright to a work, he or she did not typically control the way in which the text was packaged or marketed. Publishers and printers enjoyed considerable latitude in determining how a book looked, and they were understandably eager to imitate any format that had proved its market appeal. Among the successful mid-eighteenth-century texts, none was more noteworthy than Pamela, which Richardson issued from his own printer’s shop in 1740. Just two years later, Defoe’s text was reprinted, but not under the elaborate title it had originally borne: The Fortunate Mistress; or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards call’d The Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany. Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of Charles [1.42 Instead of this copious, descriptive title, the text was reprinted as Roxana, and this name featured prominently in all subsequent eighteenth-century editions. 43
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While we cannot say for certain that Defoe's publisher was imitating Richardson's work, a text advertised under a woman’s single proper name had at least one feature in common with Richardson’s novel. Treating Pamela as "the hitherto much-wanted Standard or Pattern for this kind of Writing,” as one of Richardson’ s admirers advised, 44 in otherwords, had implications for publishers as well as authors. For both, making an imaginative work allude to or resemble Pamela was a way of making it visible in a market beginning to be crowded with competitors.
Beyond making Roxana resemble Pamela superficially, the change in the title of Defoe’s text might also have affected readers’ expectations about—or even their experience of—this book. Using a single proper name in the wake of Pamela might have encouraged readers to expect that Roxana would be as consistent as Richardson’s heroine claimed to be and, thus, to overlook the inconsistencies that I have identified in Defoe’s text.45 Publishers of
editions in 1740, 1750, and 1755 reinforced such expectations when they introduced changes designed to make the text conform to the Aristotelian norms the first edition violated. Some of these changes clarified the relationship between the author of the preface (the Relator) and the principal character, thereby giving the transmission of the story a coherent history.46 Others provided the closure that the original story lacked by underscoring and elaborating the moral transformation that Roxana just hints at in the 1724 edition. Thus, in the 1740 edition, Roxana "freely resigned her Soul to the Mercy of him who gave it”; in the 1750 edition, she "repented of every bad Action, especially the little Value she had for her Children”; and, in the 1775 edition, her husband assures the Relator that his wife, "being sensibly touched with the remembrance of her former follies[,] . . . had for several months past been truly a penitent.”47
John Mullan points out that most versions of Roxana published in the mid-eighteenth century and the nineteenth also "erased the possibility that the daughter might have been murdered, and made the protagonist discover some of the maternal feeling that she had scandalously failed to display (and noticed herself failing to display) in the course of her history.”48 Such changes were consistent not only with eighteenth-century publishers’ efforts to make their products sell but also with the aesthetic agenda of elevating the status of the novel in particular in the hierarchy of kinds of imaginative writing, an elevation that began in the wake of the South Sea Bubble. To elevate this form, publishers and writers alike tried to disavow any connection between new novels and the secret histories or criminal tales that had proliferated in the preceding decades.49 Making new novels conform to the Aristotelian categories also helped encourage readers and reviewers to evaluate these texts as fictions, not as references to real people, and this, in turn, helped consolidate the category of fiction as a distinctive kind of representation that demanded evaluative criterion of its own.
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In a recursive dynamic that would operate effectively until the 1790s, publishers and fiction writers rapidly formulated and promoted increasingly self-evident standards for evaluating the increasingly recognizable products we call novels. Because of the conditions of the publishing industry that I describe in the first interchapter, these standards simultaneously fulfilled aesthetic, ethical, and economic rationales. That is, during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a novel—that is, a new, generically particular kind of fiction—could simultaneously conform to the Aristotelian categories, thus satisfying aesthetic criteria, convey moral lessons by eliciting identification with a virtual character, thus satisfying ethical criteria, and appeal to readers, thus prospering as a commodity. As we will see in the first interchapter and in chapters 3 and 5, at the turn into the nineteenth century, the temporary coincidence of aesthetic and economic rationales collapsed under the twin pressures of a dramatic expansion in the number and kinds of new imaginative texts and a critical backlash, by poets in particular, against what they viewed as the degradation of Literary writing by popular fiction. To writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, the aesthetic and economic rationales briefly sutured together by mid-eighteenth-century writers and publishers were fundamentally incompatible, and this incompatibility led Wordsworth to theorize the nonmarket criterion of value that was implicit in the emergent aesthetic agenda. This kind of value was theoretically indifferent to, and protected from, the vicissitudes and dynamics of the market.
In many of the 1740s texts that provided the norms for the new kind of fiction we call the novel, we can see harbingers of the breakup that was to come. One sign of the rupture that was eventually to separate the aesthetic and the informational rationales is mid-eighteenth-century novelists’ tendency to marginalize financial themes and to subordinate references to money to an ethical agenda that serves the categories of characterization or plot. In the next section, I show how this marginalization works in Fielding’s Tom Jones. Here, I want simply to note that the kind of passages one finds in Roxana that precisely (and accurately) detail the way money could be transferred from country to country in the early eighteenth century, the way compound interest worked, or the way that mortgages could function as modes of investment are absent from novels like Clarissa (1747—49) In the latter novel, Richardson’s references to Clarissa’s inheritance feature prominently only at the beginning of the text, and they function here and throughout primarily as indices to this and other characters’ moral worth or as incidents in the novel’s complex plots.
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The ability to use money, in other words, or to transcend the desire to do so, becomes one among many markers of a character’s "deepest" nature, and references to financial matters are often used to initiate or turn the plot.50 Indeed, as indices of a character’s interior "depths," novelists’ references to money helped naturalize plot turns that could otherwise have been attributed to coincidences; they did so, paradoxically, by fictively rendering a character’s relationship to money a psychological, rather than a material, matter. Thus, the marginalization of monetary matters in fictions helped naturalize the psychologization ofeconomic behavior at the same time that it helped attenuate the relationship between the medium that conveyed this lesson—the book itself—and the market in which it was produced, distributed, purchased, and consumed.
As the final section of this chapter reveals, by the 1770s, the relationship between representations of monetary matters in fictional works and the operation of the credit economy had already begun to submit to the effacements and mystifications that accompanied the disciplinary disaggregation that this study chronicles. This effacement, of course, was not simply an effect of transformations within the kind of writing we call Literary; it was also one among many of the outcomes of the systematization of the writing we call economic.
Sir James Steuart's Principles of Political Economy:
Between Fiction and Theory
If Defoe’s essays on credit seem to belong to a guidebook on effective commercial behavior, the tale of Mrs. Veal and the text we call Roxana resemble experiments in the ways in which print could generate belief. While Defoe did not call these texts experiments, and even though they did not use either the procedures of late-seventeenth-century natural philosophy or the method that Francis Hutcheson began to associate with experimental moral philosophy in the 17205, these forays into the capabilities of print were thematically (if not formally) affiliated with the eighteenth-century philosophical experiments that theorized the relationship between individual behavior, national progress, and the dynamics of commercial society.51 Like some of Defoe’s earliest writings, which oscillated between encouraging self-government and invoking some kind of central authority to ensure discipline, moreover, all the writings I have thus far examined reveal that, like the Scottish moral philosophers, Defoe was trying to figure out how to cultivate the subjective motivations that would promote self-government in an increasingly commercial society.
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If, as he explained in The Complete English Tradesman, creditworthy behavior inspired the kind of belief that encouraged lenders to extend more credit to the tradesman, then figuring out how to use writing to produce creditworthy behavior was a socially constructive goal.52 And, if the creditworthy behavior of the tradesman could be generalized to the members of polite society as a whole, then writing about credit could actively contribute to the progress of a commercializing nation like Britain.
We can see this tendency fairly easily in Defoe's writings because so many of them focus explicitly on belief and its relationship to print, credibility, and credit. Defoe’s imaginative writings did not consistently theorize the subject of credibility, as The Complete English Tradesman did mercantile credit, but they made it possible for readers to engage in the process of extending credit—or refusing to do so—because they solicited the kind of evaluative process I have associated with Roxana. Many of Defoe’s imaginative writings, moreover, incidentally provided financial information. As the publication history I have described reveals, however, in the decades after Defoe’s death, the social and informational agendas that texts like Roxana initially performed were subordinated to the aesthetic agenda according to which recognizable fictions were increasingly evaluated, as writers and publishers increasingly began to insist on the differences that distinguished various kinds of writing instead of the continuum that had once linked them
As I pointed out in my introduction, the process by which writers and publishers differentiated imaginative and economic writing during the middle decades of the eighteenth century was gradual and uneven. I can describe the various facets of this process only in relatively general terms, and I will use the metaphor of levels, rather than that of chronological stages, in order to convey its unevenness. At one level, particular works were increasingly shaped to differentiated agendas or rationales—in this case, imaginative writing was adapted to fit the aesthetic rationale derived from Aristotelian poetics, and economic writing was adapted to an informational or explanatory rationale. At another level, and to serve these rationales, writers selected formal features and gave each one more or less emphasis in order to make a particular work conform to what were emerging as generic norms. At still another level, writers introduced distinctions within each of the broad kinds of writing precipitated out of the fact/ fiction continuum. Sometimes, as in the case of economic writing, these distinctions made different subsets of the general kind serve different, but related, purposes. Thus as we saw in chapter 1, from the mid-seventeenth century, the subset of economic writing called money functioned to mediate value and facilitate exchange; by the end of that century, another subset of economic writing was providing information in the form of specialized lists of prices and shipping news;
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and, during the eighteenth century, another variant of economic writing began to circulate economic theory in the form of political economic treatises, which I discuss in just a moment. In the broad category of imaginative writing, authors introduced their own innovations. Some of these elaborated existing generic distinctions, which sometimes crossed over into differences in format as well (satire sometimes took the form of prose, sometimes that of poetry, e.g.). Others tried to alter the relative prestige accorded various genres and formats (all kinds of poetry continued to be valued more than prose fiction, but some kinds of poems— like lyric—gradually rose in the hierarchy of poetic forms). Still others rearranged the order of features within the hierarchy that defined a given subgenre (character rapidly rose in importance as a feature of prose fiction, e.g.; the rhymed couplet gradually fell as a valued feature of poetic forms). One of the innovations imaginative writers (and publishers) experimented with installed a variant of difference within individual texts; thus, as I mentioned in the preamble, prefaces, letters to the reader, and the kind of appendices Richardson attached to Clarissa provided venues for metacommentary within the pages of a single book. These instructed readers about how to understand various features of the fiction themselves and sought to preempt—or influence—critical responses to these works.
This process of generic distinction accelerated during the eighteenth century. Even as it did so, however, numerous publications continued to appear that contained features associated with or borrowed from the kinds of writing that were rapidly being differentiated from each other. It is useful to examine a few of these texts, for they reveal some of the ways that the sorting out and differentiation occurred. In this section, I place three texts in relation to each other in order to highlight their similarities and differences against the backdrop of this differentiating process; in chapters 3, 4, and 5, and in the second interchapter, I examine additional texts in some detail to show how what were rapidly becoming genre-specific features, when housed in a single text, might enable a particular text to serve both the aesthetic rationale associated with imaginative writing and the informational and explanatory rationales associated with economic writing or render a text generically anomalous because it did not conform to either rationale. Here, and in later sections of this book, I call such texts hybrids, but I need to make it clear that these texts were not all hybrids in the same sense. The earlier texts I discuss, including the ones I examine in this chapter, look to us like hybrids because we can recognize in them competing rationales and the features that supported these agendas;
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but, to contemporaries, they might not have looked like hybrids at all because, as was the case with Defoe’s writings on credit, they were published before the aesthetic and informational agendas had been so clearly separated. We can make sense of some of the other texts I examine later, especially the novels of Charles Reade, by calling them hybrids; but, again, to contemporaries, this term might not have seemed appropriate because, by the late 1860s, the aesthetic and informational agendas had come to seem so different that readers could not imagine consulting a novel for reliable information. My use of the concept of hybrid, then, is heuristic; in each case, I am describing not a compound made up of two identifiable, historically distinct parts but a phenomenon that looks like a compound to us because it was precipitated out during a process of generic and disciplinary change.
I need to make one more prefatory point. Even though I argue that all the texts I examine here performed the general function of mediating the credit economy, I want to remind readers that they did not do so in the same way. Thus, I am not arguing, as many scholars have done, that there was a single "economic discourse, "plot," or "narrative" that all these texts articulated or to which they contributed.53 Instead, I am arguing that one of the functions performed by each of these texts was to naturalize the credit economy; but, in each case, this function coexisted with other agendas, which, as genres became increasingly differentiated, increasingly seemed incomparable too. These differences seem to me as important as the texts’ similarities, and I do my best to respect them in the pages that follow.
In this section, I examine Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) in relation, first, to Henry Fielding’s Tom Iones (1749) and, second, to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). The first pairing will no doubt be more surprising than the second, but, as we will see, Steuart’s work shares almost as many features with Tom Jones as it does with The Wealth of Nations, and placing the economic treatise alongside the novel enables us to see the overlap that persisted between the two kinds of writing, even after the fact/fiction continuum had been broken up. Placing these two texts side by side also enables us to see how this overlap was managed—or disciplined—as part of the process by which the features that we associate with political economy or economic theory were grouped together and used to define a new, relatively stable genre. The norms of this genre were established by Smith’s text, even though later political economists continued to experiment with variations on the features Smith used, in terms of both their relative importance and the way they could be mixed —
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for example, how mathematical language might be mixed with historical narratives or how such narratives might be mixed with abstract, theoretical models. By comparing Steuart’s Principles with The Wealth of Nations, we can see how Smith omitted some features that Steuart borrowed from imaginative writing because, by 1776, these features had come to seem too fictive for the informational and explanatory agendas that economic writing was increasingly expected to advance.
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Sir James Steuart (1713—80) was an aristocratic Scotsman whose outspoken support for restoring the Stuart monarchy led him to flee his homeland in the wake of the failed uprising of 1745. During his eighteen-year exile, Steuart lived primarily in France, but he also traveled extensively in Europe, in part at least to collect materials for the elaborate treatise on political econorny that he finally published in 1767, soon after his return to Britain.54 Given the relatively small numbers in which such books were printed and their typically high price, we can assume that Steuart’s audience was quite limited during his lifetime. As was the case with many of the economic pamphlets McCulloch anthologized, Steuart’s Principles was deemed to be important only retrospectively, from the perspective of the discipline of political economy, and as part of what eventually became a canon. From the vantage point of modern historians of the discipline, Steuart’s work has seemed important because it is the first example of systematic political economy.55 Beyond this, modern scholars have highlighted Steuart’s arguments about money and monetary policy, his theory that inadequate demand might slow the development of modern economies—the argument that led him to emphasize monetary theory-and his belief that legislators should be ready to intervene in monetary policy. For the nineteenth-century economic writers who were trying to create a canon, by contrast (writers like McCulloch), these positions disqualified Steuart as a candidate for canonization. His position on failing demand, as we will see, directly contradicted the orthodoxy of Say's law; and his support for government intervention ran afoul of the doctrine of laissez-faire, which reigned virtually unchallenged from Adam Smith through the 1870s.56
In this discussion, I primarily emphasize not the content of Steuart’s Principles but its formal features—that is, the formal contributions his treatise made to the genre we now call political economy or political economic theory. I emphasize form because doing so enables me to show how Steuart’s work shared some of the features that appeared in midcentury imaginative writing but adapted those features to serve the informational and explanatory rationales increasingly associated with theoretical writing. Even though Steuart altered these features,
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however, simply including them made his examples seem inadequate beside the fully abstract model that Adam Smith was soon to produce. Steuart did want to present a general account of market society. As he explained in his preface, his purpose in writing the Principles was to "reduce . . . to principles, and to form. . . into a regular science, the complicated interests of domestic policy.”57 As we are about to see, however, Steuart was suspicious of purely theoretical accounts, abstraction as a mode of knowledge, and formal models in general. He identified as his primary addressee a figure that, ontologically, hovered between the pure abstractions that populated theoretical treatises and the kind of concretely virtual character we find in novels of the period. He called this ure "the statesman.” In order to influence the actual lawmakers this figure represented—as well as the people the statesman governed—Steuart deemed novelistic features appropriate, for, if he could encourage readers to project themselves into the historical and geographically distant situations he had discovered in his research, he might persuade them to sympathize with the statesman, to adopt the policies the statesman endorsed, and to submit to the government he superintended.
Steuart was not the first writer to attempt to persuade readers to take one or another position on economic subjects, of course. As we have already seen, some versions of what we might call economic theory appeared in the seventeenth century, alongside and as part of texts designed to provide both market information and political advice. The primary innovation of Steuart’s Principles was to separate economic theory from politically interested advice by providing a comprehensive picture of a market system that was simultaneously national and international in nature. To provide this systematic picture, and to reduce his observations to "principles," Steuart created a mode of presentation that helped order his vast archive of materials by subdividing the subject into seven general categories: population and agriculture, trade and industry, money and coin, credit and debts, interest and circulation, banks, exchange, and public credit, and taxes. In his multivolume work, these subsections are linked by a chronological narrative that provides a developmental account of modern society; the theme of development recurs within each of these topics and in their relation to each other as well.58 This developmental narrative is repeatedly interrupted, however, by addresses to the reader, which sometimes explicitly solicit imaginative engagement with the situation Steuart is describing and sometimes comment reflexively on the work’s organizational plan, its strengths, and its weaknesses. The result is neither the kind of protofictional imaginative conceit we saw in Defoe’s writings on credit nor the fully schematic analysis that economists like David Ricardo would compose half a century later.
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Instead, Steuart’s Principles can be said to occupy the generic territory between prose fiction (the novel) and theory, as one example of how two genres that were already being separated out from each other could still overlap in the 1760s.
We can measure the distance between Steuart’s work and the kind oftheo
retical treatise that Ricardo wrote by noting Steuart’s repeated desire to "avoid abstraction as much as possible.” As part of his aversion to abstraction, Steuart also insisted that he was not creating a "system" but only providing the materials from which someone else might create such a model. "By tracing out a succession of principles, consistent with the nature of man and with one another,” he wrote, he was trying to "endeavour to furnish some materials towards the forming of a good one” (Principles, 1:24). His repudiation of the system was largely a renunciation of French theorists’ work, as he made clear when he rejected "Systemes." Such treatises, he explained,
are no more than a chain of contingent consequences, drawn from a few fundamental maxims, adopted, perhaps, rashly. Such systems are mere conceits: they mislead the understanding, and efface the path to truth. An induction is formed, from whence a conclusion, called a principle, is drawn and defined;
but this is no sooner done, than the author extends its influence far beyond the limits of the ideas present to his understanding, when he made his "def
nition.” The best method, therefore, to detect a pretended system, is always
to substitute the definition in place of the term. (9)
Elsewhere, Steuart referred to "the modern vice of forming systems, by wiredrawing many relations in order to make them answer” (3:165). Wiredrawing was a metal-shaping process in which a wire rod was drawn through a single, narrowing die or adjacent dies in order to reduce the diameter of the rod. Because the volume of the wire remained the same, its length changed in proportion to its new diameter. By associating this method with French writers, and by metaphorically invoking the kind of industrial process chronicled in Diderot’s Encyclope'die, Steuart distinguished between (British) "principles," which remained closely related to observable data, and (French) "principles," which followed the logic of (or inspired the production of additional parts for) the “system” to which they belonged.
Instead of organizing his argument according to the "conceit" of first principles, Steuart wanted to mix deduction with induction by using illustrations derived from actual observations to generate conclusions that were general without being abstract. N oboru Kobayashi calls the result "descriptive history";
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Whereas Adam Smith tended to separate theoretical observations from historical description, as we will see in a moment, Steuart tried to keep them "intertwined."59 It was in an effort to keep theory or "principles" intertwined with historical and eyewitness accounts that Steuart mixed the features I have described: particularized, often detailed accounts of historical and contemporary illustrations, descriptions of principles that he presented as universal or ahistorical, and first-person narrative intrusions that commented self-reflexively on his own method. The resulting mix of features constituted the first comprehensive model of market society, even if this model was neither abstract nor, formally, a system. It also preserved a formal link between two genres that were in the process of being separated from each other: fiction and theory.
In setting Steuart’s Principles alongside Tom Jones, I do not mean to imply that any readers—whether Fielding’s contemporaries or ours—would read the two texts in the same way. By 1767, the protocols for the two different kinds of writing were sufficiently differentiated to prevent what had already begun to seem like a category mistake; even by 1749, when Fielding published Tom Jones, the formal features that characterized fiction had begun to be codified—in part through the metacornmentary about the novel that Fielding had included in loseph Andrews. Thus, the concrete and virtual characters that appear in Tom Jones differ markedly from their counterparts in the Principles; the events chronicled in the former are explicitly made up, not derived from historical examples, as most of the events narrated in the latter are; the overall plot and characters of Tom Jones famously conform to the Aristotelian unities, whereas the developmental plot that organizes Steuart’s text is interrupted by digressions and asides; and the explicit aim of the novel’s narrator—to place this "historic kind of writing” within a typology of fictional types—differs from the implicit aim of the narrator in the Principles, which is to help the reader follow the argument Steuart was developing.60 Despite these obvious differences and the fact that the protocols for fiction had already diverged from their counterparts for other kinds of writing, however, the two texts also share numerous features. The author of each presented his work as a "new" kind or “province” of writing, claimed to have discovered the “laws” of human nature and to have followed the rules that govern a particular kind of writing, and punctuated the body of his narrative with digressions intended to “refresh” the reader’s mind. Each work also contains a narrator who directly addresses the reader and comments on the events and the nature of the narrative; alternates between generalizations, which the narrator supplies, and historical chronicles, which unfold as if without artistic direction; contains identifiable characters in addition to the narrator;
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and self-consciously chronicles a "revolution," whether in kinds of writing (Tom lanes) or in types of economic societies (Principles). Both authors, finally, explicitly claimed to present, as well as to embody, a comprehensive picture of historically particularized actions and to have derived from this comprehensive picture general principles that were (and are) universally true.
A few examples will give some sense of these formal similarities. First, both the novel and the treatise elevate character to a prominence it did not have in the early eighteenth century. Indeed, Fielding used the principle that "dramatic critics call conservation of character” to justify much of the plot of Tom [ones (337), and he explained this principle by explicitly invoking the midcentury elaboration of probability: "1 will venture to say, that for a man to act in direct contradiction to the dictates of his nature, is, if not impossible, as improbable and as miraculous as anything which can well be conceived” (337—3 8). The consistency of Tom Iones's character thus formally organizes and renders his various exploits probable, for, from the beginning of the novel, Tom is represented as honorable but imprudent, generous but impulsive. These mixed qualities organize and explain the scrapes Tom gets into as well as the way he repeatedly survives and surmounts them. Other characters also consistently enact their characters: Mr. Allworthy is consistently generous; is consistently self-interested; Sophia is consistently virtuous; and so on. While Steuart’s Principles contains no single character as concrete or developed as Fielding's characters, its action is also organized by a self-consistent figure that intermittently functions as a character; this is the statesman, who makes his first appearance in the opening pages of book 1, and who is also Steuart’s primary addressee: "The statesman. . . is neither master to establish what oeconomy he pleases, or, in the exercise of his sublime authority, to overturn at will the established laws of it, let him be the most despotic monarch upon earth.” The ellipsis in my sentence contains the following parenthetical explanation, which seems to contradict my claim that Steuart’s statesman can be construed as an individualized character:
"this is a general term to signify the legislature and supreme power, according to the form of government” (1:20). Despite this initial claim that "the statesman” refers to a collectivity, in the remainder of the Principles the figure gains increasing individuality as Steuart enumerates his powers and responsibilities. Thus, Steuart says that the role of the statesman is to "create reciprocal wants and dependences among [his] subjects” (135) and that the statesman must “combine” all the “principles” of a nation (work, demand, foreign trade) "and adapt them to his plan” (249). Unlike all the subjects he oversees, the statesman is not motivated by self-interest;
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and he is, by nature, reliable because consistent: "I suppose him to be constantly awake, attentive to his employment, able and uncorrupted, tender in his love for the society he governs, impartially just in his indulgence for every class of inhabitants, and disregardful of the interest of individuals, when that regard is inconsistent with the general welfare” (168).
As even these brief quotations should suggest, the notion that 21 statesman should oversee and invisibly "model the minds of his subjects so as to induce them, from the allurement of private interest, to concur in the execution of his plan” (Principles, 1:2 1) helped turn nineteenth-century economic writers against Steuart’s work, for ceding a nation’s economic management to an individual (or group of individuals) ran counter to Smith's principle of laissez-faire. As we will see in a moment, moreover, it was the decision to replace Steuart’s statesman with an impersonal abstraction—the invisible hand—that helped Smith reorder the hierarchy of features that characterized Steuart’s treatise; by so doing, Smith transformed a quasi-novelistic account into a fully theorized description of the apparently self-governing system of commercial society. In Steuart’s Principles, by contrast, the consistent use of a personalizing noun gives the statesman considerable prominence in the hierarchy of stylistic features, thus making this treatise more closely resemble a fiction than Smith’s account does. The resemblance between Steuart’s quasi-virtual statesman and a fictional character is most obvious in a "rhapsody" intended to "refresh" the reader’s mind. In this passage, Steuart depicts the statesman riding a metaphoric horse, then overcoming unnamed opponents in his struggle to create a system of public credit. The entire scenario resembles an episode in a medieval morality play, when a “type” enacts some universal situation. If Steuart’s character is more generalized than a character like Tom Jones, however, the statesman is still more imaginatively realized than a mere type, for the details Steuart includes encourage his reader to engage imaginatively in a dilemma that was certainly not universal or typical. As the statesman "looks upon” a /‘wide field,” he "sees" wealthy individuals beginning to rival his power:
The statesman looks about with amazement; he, who was wont to consider himself as the first man in society in every respect, perceives himself eclipsed by the lustre of private wealth, which avoids his grasp when he attempts to seize it. This makes his government more complex and more difficult to be carried on; he must now avail himself of art and address as well as of power and authority. By the help of cajoling and intrigues, he gets a little into debt; this lays a foundation for public credit, which, growing by degrees, and in its progress assuming many new forms, becomes, from the most tender beginnings, a most formidable monster, striking terror into those who cherished it in its infancy.
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Upon this, as upon a triumphant war-horse, the statesman gets astride. r . , He gets the better of all opposition, he establishes taxes, multiplies them, mortages [sic] his fund of subsistence, either becomes a bankrupt, and rises again from his ashes; or if he be less audacious, he stands trembling and tottering for a while on the brink of the political precipice. From one or the other of these perilous situations, he begins to discover an endless path which, after a multitude of windings, still returns into itself, and continues on an equal course though this vast labyrinth: but of this last part, more in the fourth book.
It is now full time to leave off rhapsody, and return to reasoning and cool inquiry. (226-27)
The features Steuart used in this description resemble those in fictions like Tom Jones and in moral philosophical treatises like Hutcheson’s works on beauty: on the one hand, Steuart attributed specific emotions to the statesman (amazement), and he placed him in a localized setting that could be said to provoke concrete, virtual responses ( "he stands trembling and tottering”); on the other hand, he gave this character no name, located him in no specific geographic or historical place, and described his actions in metaphoric or generalized (but not universal) terms (the “brink” he stands on is simply "the political precipice,” and the “path” he discovers is not described). This passage, moreover, is self-consciously marked off from the surrounding narrative ("it is now full time to leave off rhapsody” ), with the result that, even if it does contain fictional devices, it is at most an interlude, which disrupts as much as it advances the "reasoning and cool inquiry" that Steuart presented as his narrative norm.
While all this is true, it is also the case that Steuart’s Principles is filled with such interludes, many of which contain characters that do have specific names, geographic settings, and historical referents. Some of these interludes, like the long digression on the republic of Lycurgus ("a perfect plan of political economy; because it was a system, uniform and consistent in all its parts” [11275]), are explicitly referential in nature but composed from a combination of facts and fictions; that is, the Spartan republic Steuart describes did exist, but, because the available records about it were impressionistic and filled with gaps, his representation was based on conjecture as well as written materials. Other interludes are frankly and explicitly imaginative or virtual, as is the elaborate narrative by which he illustrated how agricultural improvement might have increased national populations; without reliable records, Steuart must have imagined that such was the case.
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Such imaginative narratives—of which there are many—clearly borrowed from the genre of conjectural history or the conjectural mode of the philosophical thought experiment, but the way Steuart’s narratives typically open as well as the detail they rapidly accumulate and the virtual concreteness they acquire as stories make them seem as much like a novel’s embedded narratives as the philosopher's abstract conjectures. Thus, the narrative about agriculture and population begins with the formula by which many philosophical conjectures begin: "Let me suppose a country fertile in spontaneous productions, capable of improvements of every kind, inhabited by a people living under a free government, and in the most refined simplicity, without trade, without the luxurious arts, and without ambition” (45; emphasis added). Almost immediately, Steuart abandons features common to conjectural histories and turns instead to features a reader would also have found in fiction: the coniectural mode (let me suppose) gives way to indefinite past-tense verbs and to terms, like therefore and actually that indicate causation within a concrete but virtual universe (46). Some of these embedded stories also prominently rely on individuated characters and dialogue, features they share with the embedded narratives that punctuate novels like Tom Jones (cf. the "island of small extent” [147—54] and Tom Iones’s Man of the Hill episode).
Steuart’s Principles and Fielding’s novel also share a common attitude toward Britain’s developing credit economy. Both acknowledged the importance of credit and commerce but also tended to look backward to the agricultural economy Britain was leaving behind rather than forward to the commercial society that was already well developed by midcentury. In Kobayashi’s terms, Steuait captured the "modern commodity economy. . . at the stage immediately preceding the capitalistic form of production”; in the Principles, Steuart never recognized the importance of industrial capital, nor did he gesture toward capitalist speculation.61 James Thompson, in his careful analysis of the credit instruments in Tom lanes, attributes a similar attitude to Fielding’s novel. Noting that "Fielding’s novels are situated in between, calling up a nostalgic vision of a stable agricultural economy yet situating his protagonists on the road in a cash economy,” Thompson argues convincingly that Fielding associated the former with virtue, generosity, and safety and the latter with temptation, corruption, and risk.62 In particular, the embedded stories that punctuate Steuart’s narrative, which almost all deal with past events (historical or conjectural), seem to belong, affectively as well as substantively, to the period in which an agricultural economy reigned, even if the genre Steuart was developing looked forward to the new mode of abstract analysis soon to be developed by Adam Smith.
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By the same token, Fielding’s entire imaginative output (at least before Amelia) looked backward in content, even as he proclaimed the generic novelty of his formal innovations.
All these similarities, of course, do not make Steuart's Principles and Pielding’s novel generically identical, and, by way of transition to my discussion of The Wealth of Nations, let me elaborate what I see as the most important formal difference between the Principles and Tom Jones. Once more, this distinction should be placed within the function they shared: both texts mediated the reader’s relationship to the credit economy, even if Steuart and Fielding expressed more ambivalence about it than Defoe did. The mediating function of the Principles is obvious, especially in the discussions of paper money and banks, for Steuart was explicitly instructing his readers about how to understand the role of these credit instruments in the domestic and international markets. While Tom Jones is not usually read as a handbook about how to use (or avoid) credit, it contains so many examples of virtuous and criminal, productive and foolish behaviors with money and credit that we might be tempted to read it as such. Thus, for example, we learn from the Man of the Hill that one should not live on credit, nor should one scorn or renounce riches altogether; we learn from the example of Squire Western that the "just value and only use of money” is not, as he imagines, "to lay it up” (222) or hoard it; we learn from numerous charac~ ters, including the Man of the Hill and Black George, that one should not steal or keep money that one has not earned or inherited; we learn from the mishaps of Tom and Sophia that one should keep an eye on one’s purse, especially when it contains credit instruments like banknotes; and, most important, we learn from Mr. Allworthy, Tom, and the narrator that the best thing to do with money of every kind is to give it away, in acts of generosity that are unremarked, unrnotivated (except by the recipient’s merit), and unremarkable (apart from their inherit virtue). In one of many passages stressing this last point, the narrator reminds the reader "that beneficence is a positive duty, and that whenever the rich fall greatly short of their ability in relieving the distress of the poor, their pitiful largesses are so far from being meritorious, that they have only performed their duty by halves” (632).
Even if Steuart’s Principles and Fielding’s novel can both be said to have helped instruct the reader about how to use and understand the credit economy, they did so in quite different ways. For Steuart, instruction was one of the primary functions of his treatise; along with the supply of information and explanations, the formulation of instruction organized the relationships among the various parts of the treatise.
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Thus, after his preliminary discussions of population and the historical backgrounds of trade and industry, Steuart devoted the remainder—the vast bulk—of the four-volume Principles to explaining how the modern institutions of credit (public and private), debt, banking, and taxes worked. Tom Jones, by contrast, consistently subordinates its narratives about economic behaviors and credit instruments to its aesthetic and ethical rationales, which do not depend on understanding how credit worked or obtaining information about various levels of national productivity. While it is possible for a reader to determine the precise nature of the "bank-bills" that Mr. Allworthy gives Tom when he sends him away early in the novel, in other words, it is not necessary to do $0.63 In fact, figuring this out does not enhance one’s understanding of or appreciation for the novel because the fiction’s primary function is not to help readers obtain information about or understand the money economy but to encourage them to cultivate moral virtues like prudence, moderation, and generosity.
To show how Fielding used references to money without mobilizing the informational or explanatory function these references could have had (and do have in Roxana), let me offer a few of many possible examples. From the opening pages of Tom Jones, the narrator emphasizes the "fortune" Mr. Allworthy has inherited, yet nowhere does Fielding reveal the monetary value of Aliworthy’ s estate. Indeed, when the narrator introduces Allworthy, the word fortune does not even refer to riches or land but to one of the two personified deities that bestow “favours” on Allworthy (the other is Nature): "Fortune had only one gift in her power; but in pouring forth this, she was so very profuse, that others perhaps may think this single endowment to have been more than equivalent to all the various blessings which he enjoyed from Nature” The only episode in which Fielding gives any hints about the monetary value of Allworthy’s "fortune" occurs in book 5, chapter 7, when, under the mistaken impression that his death is imminent, Allworthy makes awill. The will does specify several monetary bequests, but what matters in the scene is not how much individual legatees will receive but the attitude they express toward the possibility that Allworthy will die. Thus, Tom proves himself to deserve the bequest because he loves Allworthy so much that he would rather have his benefactor live than receive the money he will inherit. In both these scenes, economic transactions serve agendas that are either aesthetic or ethical or both; but they do not explain or theorize the market system. Allworthy’ s wealth sets up the plot of Tom I ones, but it does not matter to this plot exactly how much Allworthy’s estate is worth; Tom’s ability to love distinguishes him from his half brother Blifil in moral terms, regardless of how much money the two characters have at any point in the novel.
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This principle operates consistently in Tom Jones. The reader is told that Sophia Western has a "vast fortune" (225—26), and we are even given some specifics: "She was entitled to her mother’s fortune at the death of her father, and to the sum of £3000 left her by an uncle when she came of age” (292). Nevertheless, what matter about Sophia—as a character in the fictional plot and as a moral exemplar for the reader—are her moral values or virtues: her constancy, her generosity, her love for Tom. By the same token, money does play a significant role in the plot: it is Tom’s loss of the five £100 notes that propels him into many of the scrapes he suffers in his exile from Mr. Allworthy and Sophia, but these notes, though found, are never treated as money (they are never spent or exchanged for gold); and, when Allworthy recognizes them at the end of the novel (826), they function primarily as an index to the "black ingratitude” of George Seagrim (872), not as additional riches for Allworthy or Tom. When Sophia loses her pocketbook and the 12 100 it contains, this episode similarly has aesthetic and moral significance, not economic repercussions: the lame fellow who finds the purse does not even look inside (and would not have recognized the value of the note if he had, for, as the narrator tells us, he ‘Tcould not read” [549]) And, when Tom finds and recognizes the purse, the discovery primarily serves as an excuse for him to regain admission to Sophia, not as an opportunity to get the money he so desperately needs. Indeed, Sophia sends the purse and its contents back to Tom with a note whose reference to the money is so euphemistically entwined with an invocation of a more metaphoric "fortune" that Fielding is prompted to provide an explanatory note. The note Sophia appends to her letter to Tom reads, in part: "Accept this, which is now of no service to me, which I know you must want, and think you owe the trifle only to that fortune by which you found it.” Fielding’s note reminds the reader that Tom's "fortune" now consists not only of Sophia's notice but of money too: "meaning, perhaps, the bank-bill for £100” (756). At the end of the novel, when Tom refers to Sophia as his “treasure” (864), the translation of monetary into ethical value is complete, and the reader can enjoy the superiority to mere earthly riches that the narrative as a whole celebrates. After all, throughout Tom Jones, Fielding depicts only the “low” characters—ladies’ maids, manservants, and stablemen—thinldng about money obsessively and in specific amounts.
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If Tom Jones subordinated the informational and explanatory agendas ernbraced by Steuart’s work to aesthetic and ethical rationales, then The Wealth of Nations made two different adjustments to the generic mixture that the Principles contains.
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On the one hand, Smith marginalized or formally contained the features borrowed from fictions, like concretely virtual characters, the intrusive narrator, and embedded stories. On the other hand, he transformed Steuart’s quasi-descriptive, quasi-theoretical “principles” into reified abstractions whose relation to particularized historical situations was increasingly attenuated. The result is a text that not only achieves the internal coherence of a system in its organization but also produces the image of a system as one of its effects.64 Despite the obvious similarities between Steuart’s Principles and Smith’s Wealth, that is, in the former, and despite Steuart’s repudiation of the term system, it is primarily the writing itself—the plan, with its subdivisions and orderly chronological progression—that displays systematicity; The Wealth of Nations, by contrast, represents the market itself as systematic in its coherence, autonomy, and ability to regulate itself. That the British economy had not achieved this coherence, autonomy, or level of self-regulation by 1776 was, in a very real sense, incidental to Smith’s project, for he insisted that, if he could describe the market as it ought to be, he would be able to help make that ideal real. That the fictional component of Smith’s model has tended to disappear with the passage of time (and the fulfillment of many of Smith’s wishes) is one measure of the success that political economy has enjoyed in arrogating to itself the exclusive prerogative of explaining the modern credit economy.
In A History of the Modem Fact, I have described the process by which Scottish coniectural historians elaborated the ambition expressed by experimental moral philosophers to make the study of society as systematic as their disciplinary predecessor, natural philosophy, had made the study of nature.65 To realize this ambition, conjectural historians like William Robertson and Adam Ferguson substituted for the universals that appeared in the writings of moral philosophers like Francis Hutcheson ("human nature”) abstractions of a different kind. These abstractions, such as Robertson’s "the human mind," were able to function as personified agents in the writings of the conjectural historians and, thus, to provide links among historical events that might otherwise have appeared unconnected—or whose connection was solely a function of the historian’s retrospective perspective. At the same time, as concepts created by the method of conjectural history itself, these abstractions brought into imaginative existence phenomena that existed only in the writing of the conjectural historians. It was this last function that Adam Smith so brilliantly adapted to political economic writing. The first-order abstraction Smith claimed to describe—the market—as well as the second-order, quantifiable abstractions that followed from this—labor, happiness, and so on—were products of his method and of the writing through which he realized it.
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The market system, in a very important sense, was the product of The Wealth of Nations and of the theory or belief that guided Adam Smith.66
I will return in a moment to the all-important subject of belief, but first let me demonstrate how Smith marginalized—or disciplined—those features that Steuart’s Principles shared with novels like Tom lanes. One section in which we can see this appears in book 3 of The Wealth of Nations, for the discussion this book contains represents one part of the content we find in book 1 of Steuart’s Principles. Smith’s book is entitled "Of the Different Progress of Opulence in Different Nations.” As this title suggests, the book chronicles the historical events that prepared the way for the emergence of commercial society; like Steuart’s first book, Smith’s third book is essentially historical and draws on both written records and the kind of conjectures with which eighteenth-century British philosophers typically filled in the gaps that characterized all their available printed sources.
Even though the two books cover more or less the same ground, however, there are also some important differences. First, the placement of the two historical accounts signals the heart of the methodological difference that divides these two works. Smith’s historical account appears after he has laid out certain basic principles (the division of labor, the nature and accumulation of stock [including, importantly, capital]), and Steuart’s appears as pan of the naming of principles. Smith’s placement suggests both the logical priority he assigned to abstractions (they came first) and his conviction that such abstractions were separable from the historical events from which he had presumably derived them (they not only came first but could also stand alone) Steuart’s embedding of general principles within a historical account exemplifies what Kobayashi calls the "intertwining" of theory and historical description.“ This tendency is also what led Karl Mam, who found much to like in Steuart’s work, to complain, in 1859, that Steuart never managed to abstract the principles of political economy from his examples. "All the abstract categories of political economy still seem to be with him in the process of differentiation from the material elements they represent and therefore appear quite vague and unsettled, Marx wrote.68
The "vague and unsettled” nature of the "abstract categories of political economy” in Steuart’s Principles is partly an effect of the role played by the narrator: as this narrator guides the reader through his examples, he repeatedly calls attention to the gap between specific examples and the general principles Steuart supposedly wanted to stress, the inadequacy of his terminology, or the fictional nature of the episodes he introduces.
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In The Wealth of Nations, there is no equivalently delineated narrator, and those few narrative intrusions Smith interjected gesture toward the narrator’s modesty, not toward the nature or features of the narrative itself. Thus, book 3, like the rest of The Wealth of Nations, contains numerous instances of the following phrases: I believe, so far as I know, I reckon it not improbable, and however this may have been. These phrases tend to substantiate the reliability of what is being narrated rather than suggest that the chronicles are conjectural 0r fictions, as Steuart’s narrative intrusions often do. Smith also avoids the "vague and unsettled” "abstract categories” to which Marx objected in Steuart’s work by depicting abstractions as natural and inevitable products of historical change. Thus, phrases like must always make historical outcomes seem inevitable, and the unremarked introduction of analogies enables the narrative (not a personified narrator) to abstract general principles and a historical logic from particular examples: "That order of people, with all the liberty and security which law can give, must always improve under great disadvantages. The farmer compared with the proprietor, is as a merchant who trades with borrowed money compared with one who trades with his own. The stock of both may improve, but that of the one, with only equal good conduct, must always improve more slowly than that of the other, on account of the large share of the profits which is consumed by the interest of the loan” (371 [bk 3, chap. 2]). Because the narrator does not call attention to himself or to the metaphor that lifts a claim about history ("that order. . . must always improve”) to a general principle ("the farmer. . .is as a merchant”), the presence of the trope tends to pass unnoticed, and abstract "laws" emerge as if they are simply phenomena that have been observed.
Thus, Smith literally contained the features associated with virtuality or fiction in Steuart’s narrative by relegating the historical account (which has to have been derived partly from conjecture) to a section separate from the sections in which he laid out theoretical principles. But he also, more subtly, contained the features associated with fiction by simultaneously de— moting individualized characters and introducing abstractions that could function as agents in his narrative. While some of Smith’s historical narratives do specify names (or, more typically, subject positions, like "farmer”), there is no character equivalent to Steuart’s statesman. The two roles this figure plays in Steuart’s work—the statesman is the addressee and the chief actor in almost all the historical tales as well as the figure Steuart looked to for reform—are subsumed in Smith’s work into a single figure whose realization solicited a different kind of imaginative participation on the part of the reader. As addressee, that is, Steuart’s statesman provided a fictional counterpart with whom an actual statesman reading the work could identify;
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by identifying with this figure, the reader of the Principles could imagine himself acting as Steuart said he should—disinterestedly and with his subjects’ well-being consistently before his eyes (and with his political economic advisor at his side). Thus, the figure of the statesman functioned like the exemplary figure in a novel—Clarissa Harlowe, for example, or Tom Iones. As McKeon explains, this figure holds an imaginative mirror up to readers so that, through identification, the reader could imagine herself or himself into more principled, more ethical behavior.
In The Wealth of Nations, by contrast, where there is no named addressee and no single character with whom to identify, the reader needs to engage the text at a more abstract level—as a philosophical exercise, not (primarily) as an opportunity for imaginative projection. Even more important, because the agents who do have efficacy in Smith’s narrative tend to be abstractions, the reader must be willing to extend to these abstractions a variant of the belief that she would extend to a fictional character. In some senses, however, it seems more difficult to make a reader believe in the reality of an abstraction like "the invisible hand” than in a named character like Tom
Iones. In the passage in which Smith introduces this abstraction, we can begin to see one of the stylistic features by which he courted his reader’s belief. The passage opens with what looks like a straightforward statement of fact (but is actually a theoretical assertion), then introduces a generalized figure, to which the culminating abstraction seems simply to belong:
But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. (423 [bk 4, chap. 2])
What makes this passage credible is a complex syntactic system: first, we are given a collective noun (every individual) that secretes, as if in a logical progression, a singular noun that becomes a specific-although nonreferential—pronoun (he);
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this noun is syntactically parallel to, and, thus, links, two agents, only one of which (the invisible hand) carries any connotations of the abstraction they actually have in common. In other words, as the subject of an elaborate trope ("as every individual”), the he who "intends only his own security; and . . . only his own gain” is as abstract as the invisible hand, but, because the pronoun he could—and generally does—refer to an individual (virtual or real), the abstraction of this figure is diminished; and, by extension, it diminishes the abstract nature of that other, parallel agent, the invisible hand. Such abstractions (both he and the invisible hand) take the place of the concrete, virtual characters of fiction and the quasiconcrete, nonreferential statesman of Steuart’s text, and, by so doing, they organize a different kind of imaginary universe differently. in The Wealth of Nations, character is not the dominant feature in the hierarchy of stylistic devices, imaginative projection is not the appropriate mode of engagement, and historical reference is not an essential vehicle for generating evidence. Instead, the features of The Wealth of Nations are organized in relation to a series of abstractions, the function of which is to generate an abstract model that is universally applicable for readers who have learned to understand that the educational value of abstractions rests precisely in this general—not fictive and not specific—applicability.
Smith did include a few of the features that are so prominent in Steuart’s work. His metaphoric account of banking as "a sort of wagon-way through the air” is one example (Wealth, 305 [Me 2,. chap. 2}). By and large, however, he tended either to downplay his use of tropes, as in the example I just described from book 3, or to mark the presence of a figure of speech so emphatically that its artifice is clear. Thus, Smith introduces his metaphor about banking with a pseudoapology. "If I may be allowed so violent a metaphor,” he writes. His most expansive discussion of money, in which this metaphor appears (bk. 2, chap. 2), contains numerous tropes, but, even though he is forced to use them, Smith generally dismisses such figures as, at the very least, distracting. Having referred to money as "the great wheel of circulation, for example, he then disdains the trope: "It is the ambiguity of language only which can make this proposition either doubtful or paradoxical. When properly understood, it is almost self-evident” (27 4 [bk. 2, chap. 2]). Smith’s overall treatment of money implies that its use is similarly "self-evident” and that it is, as a consequence, immune from the taint of language’s ambiguity. Thus, when he describes the introduction of money, he identifies its adoption as a natural episode in the historical process of specialization. "It is more natural and obvious” to measure value by money, he explains, than to define value in any other terms (32 [bk 1, chap, 5]).
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Smith’s professed disdain for metaphoric language and his ability to populate his text with abstract agents (including various incarnations of "he" as well as "the invisible hand" and "the market system") may constitute the stylistic keys to the credibility of The Wealth of Nations, but formal features cannot fully explain the influence this text exercised, especially after the beginning of the nineteenth century. In other words, developments beyond the formal and stylistic innovations I have just described were necessary to make large numbers of readers believe in abstractions like the invisible hand. As we will see in chapter 3, these developments were institutional, social, political, and religious: they included the codification of political economy by Dugald Stewart and Thomas Robert Malthus; the popularization of the science of wealth by writers like I. R. McCulloch, Iane Marcet, and Harriet Martineau; the political triumph of the Whigs in 1832; and the rise of evangelical Christianity, which developed its own variant of political economy Finally, these developments were disciplinary: it was as much the embrace by practitioners of prose fiction of rationales that were exclusively aesthetic and ethical as the repudiation by political economists of the fictional elements their works still contained that finally made these two kinds of writing seem to require different kinds of belief and to concern two different kinds of value. Or, more precisely, it was imaginative writers’ increasing indifference to informing readers about the credit economy or instructing them in the use of its instruments that made theirwriting bear an increasingly opaquemor even misrecognized-“relation to commercial society. This relation and its misrecognition are the subjects of chapters 5 and 6.
Money Talks: Thomas Bridges’s Adventures of a Bank-Note
In this section, I examine a text that is even more generically anomalous than Steuart’s hybrid Principles This text, Thomas Bridges’s Adventures ofa Bank-Note, is also admittedly more marginal to our modern disciplines than Steuart’s treatise, for, despite the efforts of a handful of modern Literary critics and at least one historian to incorporate this and other works like it into the genealogy of the novel or an account of the humanization of the economy, Bridges’s text seems to have had almost no lasting influence on Literary form or the historiography of this period. Despite its oddity and current Obscurity, Adventures of a Bank-Note interests me for two reasons. First, its status as a generic hybrid enables me to provide another perspective on the distance that opened between the aesthetic rationale associated with fiction and the informational and explanatory rationales associated with various kinds of economic writing during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
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Second, the fact that this distance did open—and that it did so within an accelerating market in kinds and volume of print production—enables me to shift the focus of this study away from the formal features of texts and toward the social and economic conditions that informed such formal matters. Indeed, the gap that has opened in our modern disciplinary practice between a consideration of formal matters and the study of social conditions reflects—and encourages us to reflect on—the distance opened in the last decades of the eighteenth century between the two rationales I have associated with the genres of imaginative and economic writing.
When modern scholars discuss Adventures of a Bank-Note, they typically group it with other works that share its most distinctive feature: narration by a character that is fictional, in being concrete and virtual, but unrealistic, in being nonhuman. Denominating such texts "money-centered narratives,” "it narratives,” "object narratives, "spy narratives,” "novels of circulation,” "novels about non-human characters,” or "traveling coins, " scholars usually treat them as a subgenre of the novel; they tend to trace British variants of this subgenre to a French prototype, Alain René Le Sage’s Le double boiteaux (which was translated in 1708 as The Devil upon Two Sticks);71 and they identify as the period of these texts’ greatest popularity the last quarter of the eighteenth century (1770—1800), the decades that coincided with the “takeoff” of British print.72 During this period, an astonishing range of household commodities (and pets) spoke for themselves in printed tions, The animated speakers include (among many others) a corkscrew, a kite, a pin, a quire of paper, a watch, a black coat, a whipping-top, and a lapdog. Among the monetary narrators, contemporary readers could encounter the testimony of a half guinea, a halfpenny, a shilling, a silver penny, a silver three-penny piece, a sovereign, a Birmingham counterfeit coin, a twenty-pound banknote, and a rupee.73 The most popular of all the narratives of this kind, Charles Iohnstone’s Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (the first two volumes appeared in 1760, the last two in 1765), was so well received that, by 1800, it had appeared in twenty editions; it was still familiar enough in the middle of the next century for George Eliot to mention it, as Fred Vincy’s morning reading material, in Mliddlemarch. 74
Instead of considering Adventures of a Bank-Note as a member of this group or treating these works as an episode in Literary history or the humanization of exchange, I want to use this work to advance the history of the Literary that I offer in this book. To do so, I want first to highlight the features this text shared with (or borrowed from) the two genres with which I am concerned: economic writing and imaginative writing.
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The first two volumes of Adventures of a Bank-Note are particularly interesting in the context of the generic differentiation I am describing, for these two volumes, which were published in 1770, intermittently pursued both the informational agenda that was already associated with economic writing and the aesthetic agenda increasingly arrogated to imaginative writing. In the next two volumes, which were published in 1771, Bridges seems to have abandoned the first agenda and opted instead to model his text solely on the imaginative fictions that were being published in ever-greater numbers. Adventures ofa Bank-Note thus presents in miniature an example of the splitting apart of the two agendas, and it also provides another, more extreme version of the way in which imaginative writers increasingly subordinated their treatment of financial themes to an aesthetic agenda,
It is clear from the opening pages of Adventures of a Bank-Note that this text both borrowed features from and pursued the aesthetic agenda increasingly associated with eighteenth-century imaginative writing. The characters are all concrete and virtual, as are the narrated events, and it is filled with references to other, contemporary fictions, especially Sterne’s Tn'stram Shandy (1759, 1761, 1762, 1765, 1767) and, in volume 3, sentimental fiction like Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768). Bridges’s plot is picaresque in form, like the plots of these fictions, and, like Sterne’s incidents in particular, many of Bridges’s episodes are euphemistically risque or bawdy. Even if the work is recognizably an imaginative fiction, however, in the course of the first two volumes, Adventures of a Bank-Note also supplies a surprising amount of information about Bank of England paper. Early in volume 1, for example, the narrator, having revealed that he is a twenty-pound Bank note, tells the reader how such a note might be procured: a man whom the Note calls his “father” deposits coin in the Bank that he received for writing a poem, and, in exchange, he receives this piece of paper.75 The Note also reveals, in passing, that such notes were made out, by hand, to their initial bearer by the Bank cashier. To justify including this information, the Note states that the poet’s motive for obtaining the note was vanity, not prudence: wanting a title, and being unable to afford its purchase price, the poet has asked the Bank’s cashier to issue the note to "Timothy Taggrhime, Esq” (1:14). An honor thus conferred, the Note jokingly tells the reader, will persist even after the note is passed to other hands. "After the Bank has dubb’d you an esquire,” Timothy’s Muse assures him, "no man will dare to say a word against it; you may then boldly add the title esquire to your name the very next work you publish. Your title to the title will then be as indisputably a title, as your own title to your title-page” (1:14 - 15).
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In subsequent episodes, the Note offers additional information: he explains that the numbers printed on a Bank note’s face constituted its identifying serial number, that they signified the note’s date of issue, and that the Bank of England was required by law to record this number in a ledger when it issued the note.76 The Note also explains how this number could be useful when he describes what happened when an individual lost a Bank note: if the holder had recorded the serial number of the note, he could advertise for its return, and, if the note did not appear, he could notify the Bank that the note was lost and receive reimbursement for its value; the Bank, in turn, would stop the note—that is, refuse to redeem the note if someone else tried to cash it. Bridges’s Note describes this provision in an anecdote about a dishonest landlord who has substituted a grocer's bill for an illiterate tinker’s twenty-pound note. Realizing that the tinker might recognize his fraud, the landlord has to wait to see if the note is "advertised and stopped at the Bank.” "On the sixth day, when he saw an advertisemenlt], Lost on the road between * * * and * a twenty pound bank-note, number forgot,” the landlord knows that the tinker did not record the number and therefore will not be able to claim ownership of the note. At this point, the landlord "conscientiously mark’d me down for his own” and passes the note to another customer (Adventures, 2: 149).
In addition to information about what happened when a Bank note was lost, Bridges's text also reveals how long a Bank of England note typically circulated (less than two years) and describes what happened to a note when it was cashed at the Bank. Imagining his own demise, the Note reveals that, when a note was returned, a clerk clipped its serial number off, crossed the corresponding number out of the Bank ledger, and destroyed the note— or, as the Note relates these events, "a fellow with a hangman-looking face” deprives the note of its "spinal marrow” (Adventures, 1:166—67). The text also points out the social inequalities that jeopardized the validity of Bank notes when the Note complains about the scandalous provision that allowed members of Parliament to default on their debts without penalty (148—49).
To see why I call these offhand, incidental, and humorous comments information, it is helpful to recall two facts about the monetary situation that prevailed in Britain in 1770. We saw the first peculiarity in the preamble: in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a bewildering variety of kinds of paper money circulated, some of which was issued by the Bank of England, some by private banks, some by shopkeepers or merchants, and some by counterfeiters.77
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The second peculiarity follows from the relatively limited scope of circulation for these various notes: because each kind of (legitimate) note typically circulated only in a small geographic area, the vast majority of Britons would not have known how to evaluate the quality of various notes, might never have seen a Bank of England note, and would not have known how to realize the value of the notes that passed through their hands. In this confusing monetary environment, we might expect precise and useful data of any kind to have found a receptive audience—as was the case with the handbooks for merchants that had enjoyed great popularity in Britain since the sixteenth century and the numerous guides to currency published during a similar monetary situation in the United States (in the 1860s).78 As far as I have been able to determine, however, the middle decades of the eighteenth century saw the publication of no such monetary handbooks for laymen. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was published in Scotland between 1768 and 1771, included in its long entry on money no practical advice about how to recognize a valid banknote, when it was advisable to exchange country notes for coin, or how to transfer money between one bank’s currency and another’s.79 Sir James Steuart did offer general principles for evaluating the quality of notes in his economic treatise, but he also acknowledged that, because no bank (not even the Bank of England) was required to disclose the amount of its securities, it was impossible for anyone actually to know the relative merits of paper notes—including those issued by the Bank (Principles, 3: 1 73, 230).80
As a onetime banker himself, Thomas Bridges (1710?—75) would have known something about currency. As a partner in the Hull firm of Sell, Bridges, and Blunt, moreover, he would have known about both local currencies and transactions between a country bank and the Bank of England; and, because no more than about a dozen "bankers’ shops” operated outside London in the 1750s, he would have known that what he knew about
paper notes was still a specialists’ knowledge in 1770. Finally, as someone who turned to writing after the failure of his banking company (in 1759), Bridges would have realized that he could turn what he had learned about money from banking into income from another source—the writing of a book about how money circulated and what it saw along the way.81 That he decided to make the narrator of his tale a paper note instead of a coin, as all the other eighteenth-century money-narrators are, suggests that he wanted to capitalize on the special features of this particular kind of money and on his specialist’s knowledge about it.
Even if capitalizing on his knowledge about paper currency constituted one motivation for Bridges’s first two volumes, however, by 1771, when he published the next two,
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he seems to have completely abandoned this plan. After the end of volume 2, nothing that happens to the narrator requires the speaker to be a paper note, and nothing the note tells us conveys any information about Bank of England or any other monetary paper. The small size and masculine gender of the Note do enable him to engage in numerous sexually titillating encounters (as when he twice finds himself secreted in a woman’s bosom), but a coin could also have found itself lost between a matron’s ample breasts. The fact that the Note is small and light does encourage his holders to stow him in portable containers, like a snuff case and an apothecary’s clyster-pipe holder, but, when he simply narrates scenes he sees on the street (like the slapstick episode that ends volume 1, in which the leash of a blind man’s dog entangles his owner with a handylegged pastry cook), his presumed identity as a Bank of England note does not have any material implications for the narration. As the narrative unfolds in volumes 3 and 4, in fact, Bridges seems to have cared less and less that his narrator was supposed to be a paper note; he even seems to have forgotten that, in volume 1, the Note told the reader both that he is the only Bank note that can speak (Adventures, 1:166) and that his words are being recorded for print by a human being ("a secretary, or, more properly speaking[,] . . . a machine, whose utmost qualification before was . . . just to be able to write his name, and read it when he had done” [3]). In volume 3, the Note meets another Bank note who talks, and he begins to imply that he is writing the tale himself instead of using a human recorder: first, he tells the reader that the "bookseller pays me by the sheet” (3: 157); then, in volume 4, he refers to his “pen” (4:71), as if he has dismissed (or forgotten about) his amanuensis.
By volume 4, the Note has come to resemble a human character in numerous respects: he tells us that he reads the Morning Chronicle every day (Adventures, 4:70); that he once possessed twenty books (which he has pawned [87]); and that he drinks liquor (71). Having purchased a dram with one of the pennies he got for pawning the books, he finds his "bowels" upset (75). The Note twice states that, “at present, I am a great man” (201, 204), he has long discussions with an imaginary critic, whom he denominates "a presbyterian parson” (96—100), and he repeatedly addresses the reader as an equal (120, 133-34, 138—40, 200—204). While the Note does continue to circulate in these volumes, Bridges’s representation of circulation is so cursory and so rapid that the Note’s movement seems like a parody of the more stately circulation he narrated in the first two volumes. Thus, late in volume 4, we find passages like the following: "I was paid to a wool-stapler; he paid me to a long-legg'd hosier; the hosier paid me to a Nottingham weaver;
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the weaver changed me with the landlord, at the Bull in Bishopsgate-street; the landlord paid me to the one-eyed Norwich warehouse-keeper; from him I went to a gingerbread-baker, for gingerbread sent by the wagon into the country. By Timothy Treaclebread the gingerbread-baker, I was paid to Mrs_ Coppernose, a rich brazier’s widow, for rent: all this was performed in less than three hours” (142—43).
In volumes 1 and 2, then, it matters to the action of Bridges’s narrative that the narrator is a Bank of England note, the note function is explicitly separated from the writer function, and the informational and aesthetic agendas overlap. In volumes 3 and 4, by contrast, the narrator ceases to be recognizably a monetary token of any kind, the Note merges with the writer, and the informational agenda simply disappears. While the text as a whole never attains the unity of character or action that critics were increasingly identifying with aesthetic merit, Bridges seems to have decided to model his last two volumes exclusively on imaginative writing. In one sense, he was simply returning to the pattern he first adopted when he initially took up writing in 1762; his first two productions (both poems) were parodies of well-known imaginative works.82 In another sense, however, he seems no longer to have considered information about money essential to the production or marketing of imaginative writing. Accelerating the generic split I describe in this book to an almost comic pace, Bridges so dramatically subordinated the informational rationale to its aesthetic counterpart that the former simply vanishes, leaving no trace in the last two volumes ofthe work.
It is impossible to say how contemporaries responded to Bridges’s text, for the only critical notice I have found of these narratives does not mention it by name. What this review does stress is that works like Bridges’s had become "fashionable" by 1781: "This mode [of writings narrated by inanimate things] . . . is grown so fashionable, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection.”83 This comment confirms that Bridges struck a rich vein of interest when he launched his chatty Note into the world of print in 1770, but both his abandonment of monetary information in the last two volumes and the fact that his seems to be the
only narrative that features an informative paper note suggest that providing even incidental information—at least about money—was not essential to the popularity of this kind of work. By 1771, Bridges seems to have become convinced that alluding to other imaginative fictions, borrowing sentimental scenes from some, and taking the loose plot structure from others, would enable his volumes to ride the rising tide of demand for imaginative writing.
Generic Differentiation and the Naturalization of Money / 151
It is important not to make too much of Bridges’s change of direction. Adventures of a Bank-Note belongs to what was, by all accounts, one of many passing fashions in the increasingly heated book trade of the 1770s and 17803, and it remains something of a curiosity, one that few modern scholars have noticed.84 But, as one small barometer of the late-eighteenthcentury book trade, Adventures of a Bank-Note does illuminate a phenomenon that became much more pronounced in the nineteenth century: as books became market commodities, in ways and to an extent that had not previously obtained, authors of imaginative fiction increasingly turned away from the informational and theoretical agendas pursued by other kinds of writing, embraced the aesthetic agenda that seemed best suited to distinguish their works from those of their competitors, and tried to deny that the value of their writing had anything to do with the market in which they circulated. As we will see in chapter 5, the kind of value imaginative writing was increasingly said to create was soon to be theorized, celebrated, and canonized by poets who proclaimed themselves practitioners and prophets of Literature. For these writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their minions—money, the book trade, and market value were subjects too degrading for Literature to touch. As these writers provided a theoretical account of what Literature should be and do, they tried to portray the century-long breakup of the fact/fiction continuum as a historical inevitability that had as its natural product a new form of value, one that imaginative writers were uniquely fitted to grasp and render accessible to future readers.
There is one more sense in which Adventures of a Bank-Note might be considered a barometer. As we saw in the preamble, Bank of England notes did not attain the level of uniformity that enabled them to become truly identical-that is, culturally invisible—until after technical innovations were introduced in the Bank’s Printing Office in 1855. We have also seen that, even before the campaign to achieve uniformity succeeded, the Bank implemented numerous stylistic and material changes intended to make its notes uniquely valid; these ranged from new kinds of paper, to new forms of embossing and watermarking, to new denominations. These alterations, however, were not sufficient to render Bank of England notes so familiar that Britons would take them for granted and accept them at face value, for the Bank’s notes had only limited circulation for the entire eighteenth century and, thus, remained‘a rarity compared to the notes of local banks. In the context of the country’s circulating paper, then, we can see that one, probably unintended, effect of Bridges/s fictional text was to help make the Bank of England note familiar to readers who might never have seen one.
152 / Chapter Two
In volumes 1 and 2, the chatty Note travels far beyond the twenty-mile radius of London that would have marked the boundary of a real note’s circulation, its validity as legitimate currency is never questioned, and no one in the fiction balks at its relatively large denomination, In the world of the fiction, in other words, the Note’s circulation is geographically unlimited, ontologically certain, and monetarin unproblematic. In the world of the fiction, in short, the Note achieves precisely the kind of currency to which Bank officials could only aspire; and, insofar as Bridges’s fiction could circulate beyond the boundary that circumscribed the currency of the Bank's actual notes, it might be said to have helped prepare Britons to accept notes about which they had only read. As a fictional device that indirectly assisted the Bank’s campaign to naturalize its notes, Adventures of a Bank-Note reminds us of one kind of connection that continued to link monetary writing with its imaginative counterpart, even as practitioners of fiction and Bank officials alike stepped up their efforts to deny any substantial link between these two kinds of writing.
