Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (review)

A number of the essays in this collection start plainly with the (more or less) contemporary financial scene. Cannon Schmitt begins with the U.S. stock market plunge of February 2007, Audrey Jaffe with a TV advertisement for CNBC using a digital stock ticker. The sense of the proximity between the financial systems of the nineteenth century and those of today does not go away across the book's ranging discussions of Victorian investments, with or without such gestures. Victorian finance in its many shapes has emerged over the last ten years as a powerful topic among both historians and English studies specialists. It is useful to think about why this is, but one must also consider that the perception of finance capitalism has changed. Jonathan Rose thought he had identified a strand of “capitalist criticism” among literary scholars in 2004. This was the opposite of the old Marxism: a species of critics who thought, Rose said, that capitalism had in important ways been good for literature. But, even assuming for a moment he was right, capitalism is now an uncomfortable topic again. The consequences of the subprime collapse, the failure of Lehman Brothers, and the 2009 global downturn is capitalism de nous jours. However these events influence critics and readers, however they determine assumptions and priorities, it is important to be self-aware and rigorous about their roles. When considering the relationship between contemporary discussions of finance and the Victorians, it can be easy to believe that some well-placed references to the contemporary scene do significant work in establishing connections, making comparisons, and identifying continuations. But the challenge of articulating informed, scrupulous, and meaningful connections is real.

Victorian Investments is sensible, as a collection of essays, in avoiding a restrictive sense of what “investments” are. Essay collections provide an opportunity to explore issues and concepts that are not tidy, packagable, or straightforwardly definable. The polyphonal nature of an essay collection can be more faithful to the unruly nature of history than the single voice of a monograph. That is the case here. “Investments” shift in meaning—and that is not simply to say that one person's gamble is another's investment is another's speculation. It is to emphasize that “investment” describes a fundamental hope of the capitalist system: that money can be made to generate more money. “Investment” is the promise, the lure, and the peril of modern capitalism itself. And it has many forms. The business of turning “spending” into “investment” is an obsession and a mystery, as full of fictions as it is of figures. The alchemy of money's growth is both impossible to write about because its workings are so vastly complex, and hugely generative—as money persistently is—of words. As nineteenth-century writers struggled to understand and police the workings of finance with language, those workings habitually slipped out of their reach. Mary Poovey is interested, in an essay that might be a book, about literary texts as an imaginative alternative to other forms of writing about finance in the first half of the nineteenth century. She sees financial journalism endeavouring to make finance seem to be moral—but failing to pull off that verbal trick. Here was a practice of language yearning for “the ideal of perfect writing”—an accurate description that revealed only morally impeccable behaviours—and a recognition that the “real and the ideal coincide [only] in a fictional form” (49). The argument relies on many labels, but the point is uncontestable: Victorian finance capitalism traded with a multitude of fictions, some of which sought to narrate its activities as moral, but could do so only imperfectly. Poovey is right to identify the role of secrecy in such narrations. She examines financial plot features that are easy for readers to overlook in The Mill on the Floss 1860. They are significant but curiously secreted in the text. The fact that they...