INTERCHAPTER ONE
The Paper Age
The last decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth witnessed a dramatic increase in the volume and kinds of paper circulating in Britain. This proliferation had at least three fronts and several staggered points of acceleration. In the book trade, the volume of all kinds of publications increased after the passage of the Booksellers’ Act in 1774, then again when the price of paper fell at the end of the war with France (1815); publications increased once more when the introduction of machine-made paper lowered the cost of production (1820s) and yet again in the late 1850s and 1860s after the repeal of the window tax and the stamp duties known collectively as the taxes on knowledge. In the banking industry. the acceleration of note issue followed the passage in 1797 of the Restriction Act. Among country banks, note issue then increased every time a new group of banks was founded and fell when some of these, along with other banks, were forced to close. 1 The Bank of England, in turn, increased its note issue significantly in 1799, 1809, and then periodically, usually in response to demand, until the passage of the Bank Act in 1844.2 Finally, and bridging the gulf that seems to separate these two kinds of paper, commentary about financial matters, the currency, and the economy also proliferated during these decades. Some of these publications, as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, were direct responses to the monetary situation produced by the wartime economy (1793~1815); some capitalized on the new market for economic commentary created by the investment opportunities generated by the war; and some sought to replace such opportunistic publications with volumes intended to outlive their immediate provocation. Many of the latter took the form of political economic treatises that, by offering models of the economy as a whole, tried to attain a place in the emergent canon of political economic analysis.
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Contemporaries were intrigued by this avalanche of paper. In 1837, for example, Thomas Carlyle looked back on the French counterpart to Britain’s threefold print takeoff with a mixture of fascination and foreboding. Calling the decade between 1774 and 1784 the beginning of "the Paper Age, he linked "Bank-paper” to "Book-paper.” Both, he wrote in his inimitable style, captured the spirit of the "Age of Hope, when delusive dreams of endless riches as well as "Theories, Philosophies, Sensibilities. . . mount[ed] heavenward, so beautifully, so unguidably. . specifically-light” on the "wind-bags” made of paper.3 In the French case, one set of windbags—the paper currency known as assignats — soon became the "dishonoured Bills” that financed an abortive revolution, while another—the "beautiful art” that hid "the want of Thought" in the visionary publications—was soon banned or burned or used to justify the waves of executions known as the Terror. For Carlyle, the French example constituted a sobering example of the dangers an unrestrained flow of paper might herald. "Paper is made from rags of things that once did exist,” he remarked ruefully. "There are endless excellences in Paper—What wisest Philosophe, in this halcyon uneventful period, could prophesy that there was approaching, big with darkness and confusion, the event of events? Hope ushers in a Revolution,—as earthquakes are preceded by bright weather.” 4
By and large, modern historians, both Literary and economic, have forgotten the Paper Age or, in the few instances in which they have examined bank paper and book paper together, have found in these two kinds of publications a structural similarity that has led to fascinating, but not specifically historical, speculation. 5 In this brief interchapter, I place these various accelerations in paper production side by side as a way of introducing my discussion of the disciplinary disaggregation whose story occupies the remainder of this book. I will not argue that the accelerations in these forms of paper were connected in any simple, causal manner. While technological improvements in paper manufacture and printing did eventually affect the production of both bank and book paper, these innovations were not adopted in the two industries at the same time or to the same extent. 6 By the same token, the increase in the volume of imaginative, political, and financial publications did not cause banks to print more paper money, nor did the increased volume of circulating currency by itself make it easier for contemporaries to purchase books or subscribe to circulating libraries. It is undeniably the case, by contrast, that the overlap of the first two increases facilitated the third—that is, the increase in possibilities for publication and the proliferation of paper money made it both easier and seem more urgent to air one’s opinion about the credit economy in print. 7
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It must also be said, however, that the overlapping takeoffs in the production of bank paper and that of book paper were not strictly coincidental. Both of these were, in the simplest sense, symptoms of Britain’s growing commercial economy, which thrived on the credit represented by the expansion of paper notes and prospered, in part, because of the commodification of a wide range of fashionable and leisure products, including books and pamphlets. 8 To say that these increases were symptoms of something else, however, casts scant light on the relationship between bank paper and book paper, nor does it enable us to understand the different dynamics that characterized nineteenth-century developments in these kinds of writing. To show how bank paper gradually moved beneath the horizon of cultural visibility, becoming taken for granted in the ways I have discussed, and how both financial and imaginative writing acquired the relative degrees of visibility that characterize their modern forms, I need to examine the way all three kinds of writing took off together, then followed trajectories so different in outcome.
As we will see in just a moment, the speedup of production in the book trade preceded its counterpart in the banking industry, a chronology to which I adhere in this brief discussion. In the chapters that follow, however, I reverse this chronology. There are three reasons for examining developments in banking and financial writing before their counterparts in Literary writing. The first is my desire to achieve narrative clarity. Because the speedup in the issue of paper money spiked more dramatically (after 1797) than did its counterparts in financial or imaginative publishing, because this matter was settled more decisively (by the Bank Act of 1844), and because the history of monetary events is generally less well-known to today’s readers, it seems important to begin with the narrative I provide in chapter 3. Second, as we will see in chapter 4, financial and economic writers rapidly adopted measures that gave their productions sufficient social authority to force imaginative writers to respond to them (whether directly, in critiques, or indirectly, via appropriation, reworking, or marginalization). As a consequence, the body of financial and economic writing I examine in chapters 3 and 4 constituted one of the cultural contexts in which imaginative writers developed their generic innovations. Restoring this context can help us understand the treatment Literary writers gave to financial and economic issues in their work. And, finally, imaginative writers’ most characteristic—or generically definitive—response to the consolidation of the credit economy and the upsurge in economic commentary about it was to repudiate all but the most attenuated connection between the market economy and imaginative productions.
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For this reason, the monetary genres that underwrote the expansion of credit and the economic genres that tried to explain it can be said to have been the negative or misrecognized conditions of possibility for the writing we call Literature. I discuss this dynamic among genres in chapter 5, and I devote chapter 6 to some of the consequences that this denial had for Literary writing per se.
The Takeoff in the Book Trade
Our understanding of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century book trade has been immeasurably enriched in recent decades by the pioneering work of James Raven, Peter Garside, Rainer Schowerling, and William St. Clair, and much of the summary I provide in this section draws extensively from their published work. 9 In St. Clair’s narrative of developments within the book trade, the first point that merits attention is the intimate connection between the expansion of publishing in Britain and innovations in credit like the ones I examined in the preamble. Because printing required both outlays of fixed capital (for presses and type) and a constant supply of working capital (for book production, warehousing, advertising, and distribution), the expansion of the print trade depended on establishing both innovative modes of financing and distinctive relationships among various parts of the industry. Among the innovative credit arrangements, the most prominent were the use of postdated promissory notes, which enabled English book producers to establish two-way relationships with geographically distant markets where credit was well established (like colonial America), and the subdivision of shares in copyrighted titles, which allowed publishers to spread the cost of production yet funnel most of the profits to families whose members were in the trade. 10 Within the industry, both a strict hierarchy and a division of labor helped maximize profits: writers and editors were initially subcontractors to printers, and printers soon joined them as subcontractors to booksellers (the forerunners of modern publishers). A highly centralized, collectively protected cartel of book producers grew up as these modes of financing, ownership, and labor were established. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, St. Clair explains, after the lapse of the Licensing Act (1695), and despite the passage of Queen Anne's Act (1710),11 booksellers in England were able to create and protect monopolistic pricing structures because their concentrated and internally organized corporate institutions linked writers, printers, booksellers, and potential buyers throughout Britain and across Europe and North America in an elaborate network of production, distribution, profit, and credit. In what St. Clair calls the "high monopoly period” (1710—74), English booksellers enjoyed the ability to set prices, control the volume of print production, and dominate the production and distribution of virtually all the printed materials produced in London and the English provinces.
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Several characteristics distinguish the high monopoly period of publishing, in St. Clair’s account: the printing of anthologies and abridgments was strictly curtailed; high book prices became the norm; and the pressruns of most books were deliberately kept small. Even though the publishing monopoly was not absolute—Scots and Irish publishers managed to defy it, and a few titles, like Robinson Crusoe, escaped the net—the virtual monopoly over new titles meant that the writers who prospered from the high price of books had little incentive to challenge the publishing system. It also meant that the vast number of English readers had very limited access to books written by their contemporaries and virtually no access to anthologies or abridgments, which would have made excerpts of longer works available to more readers lower down the social scale.
For the purposes of my argument, the significance of St. Clair’s thesis is that the ability of the publishing cartel to limit access to new titles condemned the vast majority of English readers to a steady diet of works published before the Act of Anne (along with the books that St. Clair includes in the "official supernatural,” like the Bible). These works included old folktales, like Jack and the Giants, and pseudo-scientific/ medical handbooks, like Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece and Dreams and Moles, with Their Interpretation and Significance. Such writing, by and large, did not make a distinction between fact and fiction, as much of the eighteenth-century writing that we now value was beginning to do. Nor did these seventeenth-century titles demand of readers the sophisticated intellectual skills or leisure to read necessary to enjoy a work like Hume’s Enquiry, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, or even Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Instead of cultivating a single nation of readers whose members developed commensurate skills because they read the same things in the same way, as St. Clair’s title (The Reading Nation) implies, the eighteenth-century publishing industry helped create two nations of readers with two, very different sets of skills and expectations about reading: one, a tiny minority, practiced discriminating fact from fiction by reading expensive, time-consuming books that commented self-consciously on their own epistemological and stylistic status; and the other, the vast majority, sought escape and self-improvement by reading cheap works that were rapidly consumed and that preserved the superstitions, mysteries, and ignorance that prevailed at the dawn of print.
Virtually all the imaginative and financial writing I examined in chapter 2 was published during this high monopoly regime, and much of it belonged to the expensive material consumed by the elite.
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Then, in 1774, the conditions that governed publishing in England suddenly began to change. As with the late-seventeenth-century lapse of the Licensing Act, this change was inaugurated by a legal development. While the story behind the passage of the Booksellers’ Act is too complex for me to rehearse here, suffice it to say that the success of the lawsuit that challenged the English courts’ failure to enforce the Act of Anne had momentous implications. As St. Clair describes this contest, it was really a struggle between an old, monopolistic way of doing business and the commercial model described by political economists like Adam Smith:
The scene was now set for the most decisive event in the history of reading in England since the arrival of printing 300 years before. It was a struggle between the ancient guild approach to economic management and the emerging world of free trade and economic competition, between entrenched interests and challenging innovatory forces, between elegant old money and vulgar business, between the clear words of modern statute law and the fuzzy talk of common-law rights, between a static ancien re'gime view of society based on hierarchy, heredity, property, and allocation of roles, and the new Enlightenment science of political economy that aimed to use the power of reason to bring about social and economic improvement. According to the Lockian view of property, the booksellers’ portfolio was the intellectual property equivalent of a rich real estate originally tamed from a wilderness by the ancestors of the present owners, and subsequently improved and added to over the centuries by careful stewardship. Seen in terms of political economy, the portfolio was a fortune amassed by monopolistic businessmen derived from centuries of monarchical usurpation, restrictive trade practices, and price exploitation. 12
As St. Clair’s description makes clear, the Booksellers’ bill ironically pitted the ideas promoted by eighteenth-century political economists against the mode in which their works had initially been published, for, if the monopolistic conditions St. Clair describes had not obtained, it is not at all clear that such small-market, high-cost volumes as Steuart’s Principles or Smith's Wealth of Nations would ever have made their way into print. Whatever the ironies involved, in the end, political economic theory triumphed: the House of Lords decided against the English publishers, reinstated the terms of copyright established by the Act of Anne, and (however briefly) allowed Smith’s dream of open competition to flourish in the book-producing industry.
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In the wake of the 17 74 decision, the English publishing trade threw off the shackles of monopoly, and the proliferation of paper that I have described began. The first increase in the output of imaginative writing seems to have occurred in what the Critical Review called the "prolific scribblerian year” of 1771-72, but this speedup became steady and sustained only in the early 17805, when the effects of the 1774 act began to be felt. Whereas the average annual rate of growth for both new titles and reprints was 1.58 percent between 1740 and 1780, from 1780 to the end of the century this rate more than doubled, rising to 3.37 percent.13 As Raven points out, this takeoff in imaginative publications consisted of an increase in the number of titles and editions rather than in edition sizes; it reflected both the expansion of the provincial distribution network, which, by 1800, included at least 112 circulating libraries in London and 268 in the rest of England, and new productivity and marketing sophistication on the part of printers and booksellers.“ In the 1790s, a period during which new novel titles appeared at about three times the rate at which they had been published in the 1750s, the ranks of imaginative writing were joined by a flood of cheap printed material, much of which was political in nature. Despite successive attempts on the part of the government to suppress such materials (in 1794, 1 796, and again in 1819), publications like Salamagundi for Swine and Hogs’ Wash formed a staple of the reading materials of the masses.
Even during the brief window of publishing competition that the Booksellers’ Act opened, according to St Clair; Britain remained a nation divided into two reading audiences. This was true not only because publishers responded to the pent-up demand of the majority with new works that appealed to the lowest common denominator of ability and taste but also because the old materials they repackaged in cheap new editions tended to represent a distinctively conservative point of view that did not accommodate the substantive and formal innovations elite readers had learned to appreciate. Much of this "old canon”—stories like Guy of Warwick, Robin Hood, and Bevis of Southampton—was very old indeed, and its continued availability helped preserve the fact/ fiction continuum for the lower classes long after elite readers had become used to seeing a difference between the two.“ The newer volumes of the "old canon” included various series of "standard novelists” and “English poets,” but most of these were, generally speaking, conduct literature: "The publishers of old-canon lists, whether mainstream or newly joining outsiders, not only ignored the discoveries of the Enlightenment, but offered a Counter-Enlightenment to readers who knew nothing of the Enlightenment." 16
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The pricing structure of new publications also reinforced the bifurcation of British readers and ensured that this situation would survive the Booksellers’ Act. While the prices of works included in the "old canon” fell sharply, the prices for works not so included rose steeply. Copyright legislation passed in 1808, 1814, 1836, and 1842 reinforced the publishers’ control over both pricing and the volume of print runs by gradually extending the length of copyright from fourteen years to the length of an author’s lifetime plus seven years (or forty-two years from date of publication, whichever was longer). This legislation effectively closed the window briefly opened to competition and made the works of most early-nineteenth-century elite writers—even those who populate the modern Literary canon— available to only a relatively small number of readers because no affordable English editions of these works existed.
As we will see in chapter 5, creating, then preserving, two nations of readers had momentous consequences for the social dynamics that characterized the nineteenth-century Literary world. For the gap that separated the expectations of the two groups of readers, compounded by the discrepancy in the sizes of the two audiences and the profits to be made by catering to the majority, meant that, every time a legal or price barrier fell, opportunistic publishers rushed to respond to (or create) demand with works that were cheap and easy to read. This, in turn, led the minority of elite readers and writers increasingly to fear that the very nature of English Literature was in peril, for, every time the volume of cheap publications increased, the overall quality of the nation’s writing seemed to fall. In response, elite writers, aided by reviewers and critics, repeatedly sought to discriminate among kinds of imaginative writing and ways of reading. Not surprisingly, such discriminations were difficult to define and police, and they did little to close the gap between reading audiences that the publishing industry had perpetuated.
There were two substantial exceptions to publishers’ ability to control the pricing of new books after 1800, both of which further complicated relations between the two nations of readers. The first exception consisted of works considered too controversial (usually too "obscene”) for publishers to risk protecting their rights by prosecuting piracy. The most notorious examples of such works, Southey’s Wat Tyler, Shelley’s Queen Mab, and the first two cantos of Byron’s Don Juan, were issued in pirated editions whose prices fell in direct relation to the quality of the paper on which they were printed and the number of words squeezed onto each page, As a consequence, these works became available to the large audience of "general readers,” whose taste elite writers had already come to fear.”
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Instances of the second exception, new novels, were indirectly priced by the circulating libraries. After 1842, these libraries exerted so much pressure on the publishing industry by their willingness to purchase in bulk that their influence over new fiction resembled the eighteenth-century monopoly that the booksellers had exercised over publishing in general. While the circulating libraries’ fees (and the high prices assigned to new novels purchased by individuals) did restrict the size of the audience for these works, the libraries could not stop alternative modes of publication—like cheap weekly magazines—from printing increased numbers of formulaic fictions; nor could they guarantee that the novels they did stock would approach the particular taste increasingly refined by the increasingly ambitious (and anxious) minority elite. As we will see in chapter 5, the result was a competition among models of value offered by members of the Literary world, each of which intersected in complex ways with the market model of value theorized by economic writers. The force field created by these complicated factors shifted as each condition was curtailed or altered. Thus, the ability of British pirates to cut into legitimate publishers’ profits by underselling them was curtailed in 1839 by the repeal of the law that required printing presses to register with the state. The power exercised over the price of new fiction by Mudie’s and other circulating libraries ended in 1894 when the circulating libraries voluntarily agreed to stop purchasing primarily novels published in the triple-decker format. And the gap between the two nations of readers did not even begin to close until the 1870s, when the adoption of compulsory schooling began to have an effect; arguably, the gap did not begin to close until the twentieth century. In my coda, I suggest that, even though schooling has undeniably narrowed the nineteenth-century version of the gap between elite and general readers, another gap has now replaced it: this one separates specialist readers, who have been trained in graduate programs, from the vast majority of readers, who are not disciplined by such training.
The Proliferation of Bank Paper
Before 1833, it was impossible for anyone—even a Bank of England director—to say how much credit paper circulated in Britain at any given time. It was clear to everyone that the volume and kinds of monetary paper had increased since the passage of the Restriction Act in 1797, but, with no regulation requiring that banks publish any part of their accounts, and with conventions of secrecy shrouding the denominations and volume of the outstanding bills of exchange, accurate information was simply unavailable.
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As we will see in chapter 3, the Bank Charter Act of 1833 began to require banks, including the Bank of England, to make some of this information public, but, as late as 1851, when William Newmarch tried to determine the exact volume of currency circulating in Britain, he was forced to rely on estimates for at least part of his conclusions.
The impenetrability of Britain’s paper currency, at least in terms of volume, constitutes an important feature of the turn-of-the-century monetary situation for two reasons. The first has to do with the political issues that surrounded the currency. Given the relationship that was presumed to exist between the elevated commodity prices of the war years and a large volume of credit paper, the impenetrability of the currency meant that contemporaries on all sides of the political divide were free to speculate about which banks were issuing too much paper. Opponents of the Bank of England charged the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street with overissue during the Restriction period; supporters of the Bank, in turn, accused the country banks of issuing paper irresponsibly. Since the legislation that enacted the Restriction allowed banks to issue notes in small denominations, and because alleviating the requirement that note issue be redeemable for gold made the currency extremely elastic, all banks were tempted to issue paper to meet demand, and, as far as anyone could tell, most banks were succumbing to this temptation. Everyone agreed that prices were rising, in other words, but no one was sure why; and, when the end of the war with France brought no price stability and banks continued periodically to fail, everyone accused everyone else of monetary irresponsibility. Because no one could know exactly how much paper individual banks issued, then, speculation and accusation flourished, and the volume of writing about the currency issue increased, as writers tried out theories and floated volumes of imprecise information.
The second reason that the impenetrability of the volume of currency matters is that, as long as competing kinds of paper credit circulated, and as long as no one—not even the Bank of England—took responsibility for controlling the nation’s currency, paper money remained controversial. No credit money could be taken for granted, in other words, because every banknote was as subject to evaluation in relation to the notes of competing banks as every bill of exchange always was. Until some institution took control over note issue in general, and until it was possible to rank and keep track of various kinds of paper credit, all notes would compete with each other, and, as a consequence, they would remain objects of cultural scrutiny. The Bank Act of 1844 finally began to exercise some control over this chaotic situation, thereby creating the conditions by which Bank of England notes could begin to attain the level of taken-for-grantedness that W. H. Wills celebrated (prematurely) in his 1850 essay in Household Words.
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By strictly limiting the right of country banks to issue notes, and by establishing a specific ratio between securities and note issue for the Bank of England, the 1844 legislation began to rationalize the English banking system, to make Bank of England notes the most stable (and, therefore, desirable) form of paper currency, and to make information about the currency regularly available to anyone who wanted it. This legislation was controversial from the moment it was adopted, and it continued to be controversial for the rest of the century. Nevertheless, along with the technical improvements in printing that I described in the preamble, the 1844 Bank Act did help push the Bank of England note beneath the horizon of cultural visibility, and, even though rival forms of paper continued to circulate, Bank of England notes ceased to provoke the questions other kinds of paper repeatedly raised.
In this section, I briefly chronicle the related histories of attempts to find out about the volume of currency and attempts to control the effects of too much, or too little, credit paper. I return to these histories in chapters 3 and 4, but an overall picture should help frame those more detailed accounts. The Bank of England plays a central role in both stories, of course, for its ability to issue paper against securities, the monopoly it had been granted over note issue in London, and the special relationship it enjoyed with the government and the national debt placed this private institution at the center of the nation’s money supply-even if it was not assigned an official role in controlling the volume of currency. During the eighteenth century, there were sporadic attempts to discover (and disclose) the volume of notes issued by the Bank and the amount of the securities that backed these notes, but the results were, at best, estimates and, more often, simply educated guesses. Meanwhile, beginning in the middle of the century, the number of country banks slowly began to increase. One estimate puts the number of provincial banks at 119 in 1784; by 1851, when Newmarch published the results of his investigation, he counted 900 non-London bank offices in England and Wales.18 Most of these country banks issued notes, but, because no one knew the volume of this paper or the value of securities that stood behind it, no one could evaluate with confidence the relative validity of any country bank’s notes.
In the last decades of the eighteenth century, two pieces of legislation gave investigators some insight into part of the circulating currency. First, in 1775, bills of exchange for amounts less than 20s (£1) were made illegal;
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two years later, this restriction was increased to £5 bills. This meant that, from 1775 until the Restriction Act, the small, easily counterfeited bills that circulated in such great numbers in the middle decades of the century largely disappeared.19 Second, in 1782, the government required that all inland bills of exchange and promissory notes carry a stamp; the duties set in that year were repeatedly increased until 18 1 5. This meant that the Stamp Office in London theoretically held records of all bills issued in England and Wales and, thus, that it was possible to find out how many bills of what value were outstanding. In practice, as Newmarch discovered, these records could sometimes be misleading because (among other reasons) they were not inclusive, they did not record the exact amount of each bill, and they did not include foreign bills at all.20
The Restriction Act, as we will see in chapter 3, provoked a flood of new writing on the currency, much of it intended to figure out which banks were issuing excessive currency. In addition to the pamphlets I discuss in chapter 3, the decades of the Restriction period (1797—1819/ 21) saw the publication of two additional contributions to the currency debates. The first was Henry Thornton’s Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802), which not only attempted to exonerate the Bank of England from the charge of overissue but also, in the process, tried to ascertain the volume and value of the bills of exchange currently in circulation. Determining this figure was important to any attempt to understand the currency, for most contemporaries thought (in 1810 at least) that bills of exchange constituted part of the nation’s circulating medium, even if one held, as Thornton’s critic Walter Boyd did, that bills were not, strictly speaking, money.21 The second important contribution to the currency debates reported the findings of the 1810 House committee appointed to consider the price of bullion. Testimony before this committee, which issued the important (if controversial) Bullion Report of 1810, included significant statements by Thomas Richardson, one of the founders of the famous billbroking house that became Overend, Gurney, and Company. As familiar as he was with the state of the bill market, however, Richardson was unable to determine the exact volume of the circulating medium.
In 1832, after the resumption of gold payments by the Bank, Henry Burgess, the secretary of the Association of Country Bankers and one of the chief contributors to the Bankers’ Circular, confidently assured the Bank Charter Committee that a reduction in the volume of Bank of England notes invariably led to a contraction in the number of bills of exchange. This opinion was echoed in 1840 by Lord Overstone, one of the government’s leading experts on financial matters, in testimony before the Committee on Banks of Issue.
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When Newmarch published his findings in 1851, he was forced to contradict this principle and to agree instead with the observations published in three short papers by Mr. Leatharn, head of the Wakefield banking firm of Leatham, Tew, and Company. Even though Leatham's figures were based on estimates and averages at crucial points, Newmarch essentially confirmed what the banker had observed: when the Bank of England contracted its issue, the volume of bills of exchange did not decrease but actually increased substantially.22 Despite his best efforts, however—he personally examined 4,367 bills of exchange held by five London bankers and bill brokers—even Newmarch could not determine with precision the volume of the circulating medium. In the course of his long and careful article, he had to acknowledge that his conclusions were only "approximate estimates.”23
Even though the Bank Charter Act of 1 833 required all banks to publicize the volume of their paper notes, then, the overall volume of the circulating medium, as well as the principles that governed the internal relations of its parts, remained elusive.24 Since country banks continued to issue notes— albeit in ever-decreasing volume—through the entire nineteenth century, and because foreign bills of exchange remained untaxed (and, thus, unregistered), the volume of the currency continued to provoke controversy. Since rising prices (or the devaluation of the pound) constituted only one of the controversial symptoms of a currency that had exceeded the securities it presumably rep resented, moreover, contemporaries repeatedly returned to the matter of money to try to determine why Britain’s credit system did not simply generate more profits, as the classical political economists said it should. As we will see in chapter 4, the most worrisome signs that something was wrong with the system were the periodic manias and panics that punctuated the nineteenth century. The panics that erupted with alarming regularity after 1825-26 brought down scores of banking firms, along with other businesses that had previously prospered. These panics seemed to herald some problem even more pervasive and less comprehensible than the impenetrable volume of the nation’ s money supply; but one thing was clear to everyone who wrote about these subjects: without both reliable information and theories about how the credit system worked, no one would be able to anticipate, much less forestall, the crises that continued to shake Britain's economy.
Differential Forms
In the remainder of this book, I trace the measures taken by producers of monetary, financial, and Literary genres to differentiate their works from each other during the course of the nineteenth century.
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In the process of naturalizing this differentiation, I argue, the producers of financial (and economic) Writing and Literary authors implicitly supported two different models of Value, The most dominant model, as We have already begun to see, defined value in market terms-as a function of exchange, price, labor, utility, or some other measurable index. The other, less prominent model defined value in terms of subjective qualities that defied quantification, were immune to exchange, and were sometimes difficult to grasp or convey. Writers used Words like imagination, genius, and originality to characterize the qualities by which this Value could be recognized, but, because every individual experienced it differently, the exact nature of the value these objects conveyed often seemed impossible to describe. Indeed, instead of focusing on the differentiation of value, which was implicit in their projects, the imaginative Writers Whose Works I examine in the following pages often concentrated on differentiating the formal characteristics of their writings and linked these formal features to the contribution their works supposedly uniquely made to the mediation of value in general. As we will see, in other words, most Writers who aspired to offer an alternative model of value tended not to do so explicitly but rather, by a combination of tactics, simply to distance themselves from the dominant, market model of value. Among these tactics was the elaboration of the idea that only posterity was fit to judge the merits of a Literary production, the celebration of imaginative artworks as constituting formally self-contained Worlds that were immune from market price, and the development of an internally differentiated cadre of workers, all devoted, in different ways, to the perpetuation of Literary genius.
In arguing that nineteenth-century Literary Writers tried increasingly to differentiate their work both from the writing produced by political econo» mists and from the market model of Value, I am, of course, flying in the face of much recent scholarship. As I noted in the introduction to this book, many Literary scholars have described the structural, metaphoric, and linguistic continuities that can be found in writings by nineteenth-century political economists and novelists in particular. I do not dispute the claims that Victorian political economists and novelists, for example, both showed an interest in organicism (as Catherine Gallagher argues) or that we can identify a "logic of capital” in novels by Dickens and the economic writing of Ricardo (as Claudia Klaver argues). My point is that these continuities now have to be discovered precisely because nineteenth-century Writers devoted so much energy to denying them and because their efforts were, to a certain extent, successful. Nineteenth-century writers denied the continuities we now see in their Works for several reasons.
"The Paper Age” / 167
In the place, these Writers saw themselves as competitors, not only with other members of their own profession, but also, disciplinarily, with writers of other kinds of works; they saw themselves as competitors because they knew that they were all seeking to mediate some kind of value, even if they were not always able to define the kind of value their writings conveyed. In the second place, precisely because the model of value promoted by classical political economists was so antithetical to the kind of value Literary Writers sensed but could not define, the latter often tried simply to extract themselves from market relations altogether-to deny, in one way or another, that the political economists’ understanding of the world had anything to do with Literature. This led to what I have been calling the misrecognítion of Literature's relation to the market. 25 And, in the third place, because it was impossible for Literary writers to repudiate the market in practice, they developed elaborate defenses of their own Work meant to mask or obscure the ineluctable fact that books circulated in the market too. Our contemporaries find metaphoric resemblance at the levels of form and structure, then, because nineteenth-century Writers tried so hard to deny that any other kind of relationship existed, even when this meant obscuring the common project that united Literary writers and economic theorists.
The momentum behind this denial (or misrecognition) came from economic and imaginative Writers alike and took the form of both differentiation from their professional or political coworkers and differentiation from work produced in other genres. On the one side, because critics of the government repeatedly denigrated paper notes as "fictive" substitutes for "real money’l (by which they meant first gold or silver, then convertible Bank of England notes), writers who sought to defend the credit economy increasingly felt it necessary to deny any association between imaginative writing and paper money-not to mention imaginative Writing and their own, supposedly superior theories about Value. By the same token, as we have seen, because no bank publicized the volume of its notes (before 1833), and because the Bank and Pitt’s ministry did not make public the rationale behind the Bank’s unprecedented loans to the government in the 1790s, speculation flourished about both these matters-especially as economic conditions became more volatile in the first decades of the nineteenth century. To counter these speculations - and to brand them as unfounded, incendiary fictions - economic Writers offered alternative accounts that either took the long View, by emphasizing Great Britain’s historical march to commercial supremacy, or struck a greater level of abstraction, by emphasizing political economic theory.
168 / Interchapter One
In their responses to critics' cries for information and disclosure, in other Words, financial Writers offered historical narratives that sought to submerge recent events in a longer context, and economic writers composed theoretical treatises that tried to transcend the call for information by offering abstract, supposedly universal principles.
On the other side, authors who wanted to elevate the social prestige of imaginative writing increasingly struggled to identify some axis of discrimination that could distinguish their work not only from the writings of political economists but also from the floods of formulaic, sensational, and political writing that proliferated in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the century. To do the latter - to enhance the status of (some kinds of) imaginative writing and to distance this from other kinds that only superficially resembled serious Literature- many authors sought to deny the extent to which their Writing depended on commercial transactions. By treating financial matters as content-as themes, plot elements, and, most important, indices to a character's moral worth-Literary writers followed the example already set by Richardson; they sought to subsume their unavoidable participation in the market into imaginative ( and voluntary) choices that primarily served an aesthetic, not a commercial, rationale. Even more pointedly, beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Writers at nearly every rung of the hierarchy of imaginative kinds began to fill their Works with stereotypical, generally negative depictions of business characters. That these negative portrayals coincided with the growth of the book trade suggests that many Writers were attempting to manage, at the level of content, what lames Raven calls the "embarrassing dilemma” created by the book trade’s structural implication in the commercialized fashion industry its more elite participants criticized. 26
With financial and economic writers offering history and theory as correctives to charges about the fictive nature of paper money or demands for more information, and with imaginative writers increasingly desperate to deny their Works’ status as commodities, the early-eighteenth-century continuum that linked fact to fiction was finally, completely severed, As a result, by the second half of the nineteenth century, economic Writers who invoked imaginative images to explain phenomena that otherwise seemed inexplicable, as W. Stanley Jevons did when faced with the conundrum of speculative manias, embarrassed even their staunchest admirers; and imaginative writers Who wanted to bring information back into fiction, as Charles Reade did in the 1850s and 1860s, found themselves increasingly pushed to the margin of serious Literary writing.
"The Paper Age” / 169
In the chapters that follow, I respect this separation by treating the two kinds of writing separately. In doing so, I may risk reifying a distinction whose origins and successive stages require historical explanation, but I can provide this explanation only by examining contemporary efforts to make the separation seem natural.
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