Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (review)

REVIEWS 501 could be radically transformed in two or three decades from the unifying force Cook sketches to the subversive force Favret describes. This said, however, Epistolary Bodies is certainly one of the best books of its kind. It should permanently alter our understanding of the ways epistolary fictions "mean" in the eighteenth century. And it should establish Cook as one of the most promising scholars of her generation. Elizabeth Wanning Harries Smith College James Thompson. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1966. viii + 271pp. ISBN 0-8223-1711-7. Money is not just the root of all evil, it is the root of all novels, as well, according to James Thompson. While other theorists have talked abstractly about the relation between the development of capitalism and the novel, Thompson's new work, Models of Value, has the virtue of anchoring these discussions in specific and particular developments regarding capital in the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in this brilliant contribution to the history of the novel, Thompson argues that both the novel and political economy are parallel responses to a crisis in the way English society measured, embodied, and exchanged value. Ian Watt has discussed this change in sociological rather than economic terms, and Michael McKeon in generalized abstractions, but finally in the work of Thompson , we have the refreshing synthesis of theoretical discussion combined with concrete and discrete historical detail. The book begins by challenging a regnant myth. Literary critics have a selfeffacing way of adopting the business world's positivism in thinking of narrative as "fiction," that is, as less important than the clink of hard cash, while the world of finance or trade is regarded as "real"—as in the opposition between the fantastic world of art and the "real world" out there. What Thompson shows us by his painstaking historical work and close readings of monetary theorists is that the world of money and finance is as "unreal" or "fictional" as any other kind of narrative. When England began a shift from precious metals and coin to credit and paper money, according to Thompson, a crisis arose in how value was to be embodied. He reminds us of the "constructed" nature of precious metals minted as coins, which, while having the virtue of being solid, also had the liability of being scraped, clipped, and thereby pilfered of their full value. In the world of money, everything that is solid melts into the air of signification and representation. So it becomes logical, as Thompson claims, to see that the emergence of "two new literary forms or discourses that preeminently handle or manage this crisis [in the representation of value]—political economy and the 502 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:4 novel—are at the same time produced by this crisis and are inseparable from it" (p. 3). Considering John Locke, Adam Smith, Marx, and others, Thompson details the shift in money from the mere accumulation of wealth to the credit-driven dynamo of capitalism. The book pays attention to events like the Recoinage Act of 1695-96, which occasions discussions on the nature of money and how it can be controlled. When John Lockejoins the fray, he asserts that money is valuable because of the precious metal contained in coins—a conservative point, given the new dynamics of credit, that Thompson sees as linking Locke with conservative novelists such as Fielding for whom property's value is traditionally determined and is never lost or transmuted, no matter how confusing his plots get. As opposed to Locke, other rationalizers of capitalist monetary policy suggest that the value of money is socially determined by supply and demand rather than the inherent value of precious metals. This view is more reflective of the opinions of novelists such as Defoe or Austen, for whom all meaning comes from social interaction. Adam Smith furthers these ideas by insisting that money is a "representation " of the nation's wealth and labour. In this sense, as Thompson puns, "money talks" (p. 86). The discussions around money create in effect a new subjectivity . Rather than the older space left by traditional hierarchies of value, the new...