Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

The recent financial crisis served as a grim reminder that values are anything but fixed in a modern economy. Instead, as Mary Poovey’s timely Genres of a Credit Economy underscores, value has been constructed and mediated by complex social and cultural processes. Poovey argues that two emerging textual genres facilitated the “financial revolution” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain by promoting public acceptance of the “modern” credit economy and its innovative monetary instruments (from checks and bank notes to a significant public debt) as something “natural” and commonplace. Poovey builds on a growing body of literary scholarship labeled “new economic criticism” to which her work also contributes. Her overriding interest lies with tracing the increasing separation between informational and imaginative writing on questions of credit and the economy: by the end of the nineteenth century, economic texts and literary texts were part of distinct disciplinary worlds and defined genres which differed both in their formal conventions and in their conceptions of value. In addressing literary as well as economic historians, Poovey bridges a disciplinary divide of the greatest magnitude by engaging the developmental parallels in the disciplines of literature studies and economics.

Poovey’s opening chapters establish that this generic and disciplinary differentiation was not always in place by exploring early-modern overlaps between imaginative and financial writing. Bills of exchange, checks and bank notes that became ever more prevalent from the later seventeenth century, she argues, were representational texts even as they became increasingly more “naturalized” and standardized over time. The value of these new instruments of credit was hotly debated well into the nineteenth century; however, early contributors to this debate frequently blurred the line between imaginative and informational writing. Thus, many eighteenth century texts that engaged questions of value appear as generic “hybrids” from today’s perspective. A prominent example are the writings of Daniel Defoe who repeatedly took up economic matters, but whose treatises on the subject are often overlooked by economic historians and literary scholars alike due to their apparent non-conformity to disciplinary conventions. Defoe’s Roxana, written in the wake of the 1720s “South Sea bubble,” Poovey suggests, can be read as “a primer in the kind of evaluation that everyday credit transactions required in the eighteenth century.” By the same token, James Steuart’s notable 1776 Principles of Political Economy contained many elements now commonly associated with imaginative forms of writing. By the late eighteenth century such hybrids became increasingly marginal as the “paper age” saw an explosion both in the publication of texts and in the scope of the credit economy. While texts on the political economy following Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations became increasingly abstract attempts to explain the market and its financial underpinnings, writers of imaginary texts began to distance themselves from the market model of value.

This process of generic differentiation is the focus of the remainder of Poovey’s study. The so-called “Restriction Period” between 1797 and 1821 during which Bank of England notes were not redeemable in gold gave rise to vigorous debates over the representational nature of money, facilitating in turn an increasingly specialized economic terminology. Economic writing differentiated into theoretical texts for a specialized audience and more popular, journalistic accounts for wider consumption. Abstractions and eventually mathematics became characteristics of economics as “science” and economic theorists from David Ricardo to the marginalist school promoted an increasingly narrow definition of market-defined value. Financial journalists such as Walther Bagehot in turn popularized the liberal economists’ conceptions of the credit economy. Responding to recurring manias and panics, both forms of informational writing attempted to normalize the expanding credit economy by offering expertise as “an antidote to anxiety.”

Emerging conventions for literary writing, by contrast, promoted a different view of value. Originality and lasting appeal rather than market measures of popular demand should determine literary worth, writers such...