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Reviewed by:
  • Real Money and Romanticism by Matthew Rowlinson, and: The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James by Elsie B. Michie
  • Jill Rappoport (bio)
Real Money and Romanticism, by Matthew Rowlinson; pp. xi + 249. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, £56.00, $93.00.
The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James, by Elsie B. Michie; pp. xvi + 303. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, $70.00, $24.95 paper.

Rewarding new studies by Matthew Rowlinson and Elsie B. Michie address the importance of money to a literary culture that increasingly expressed anxiety about the riches and remuneration it sought. Together, they contribute to our understanding of the ways in which nineteenth-century imaginative writing both responded to economic conditions and shaped cultural attitudes toward wealth.

Victorianists studying Charles Dickens have as much to gain from Real Money and Romanticism as scholars of Walter Scott. Rowlinson’s overarching argument is that specific events in monetary history shaped not only the production of key early nineteenth-century texts but also their formal properties. At a time when heterogeneous forms of currency (bills of exchange, paper banknotes, diverse coinage) were circulating as presumably “homogeneous units of value” (27), Karl Marx and the other writers Rowlinson discusses represented money as both a “sublime abstraction” and a wide range of indeterminate, material forms subject to cancellation, devaluation, or wearing away (105). The inherent contradiction in money, Rowlinson claims, was of particular interest to authors whose own relation to money was also changing; as copyright laws shifted during the eighteenth century toward acknowledging the author’s intellectual labor and not just the publisher’s hand in material book production, textual values were in flux.

Economic pressures shaping this literary history included the inconvertibility of paper notes into the gold that had once supported it, Scott’s liability as a signatory in a series of bills of exchange, and Dickens’s repurchase of his own copyrights for far more money than he received for his manuscripts. Such varied economic conditions, national and personal, together with several publishing strategies (Scott’s anonymity, John Keats’s depiction of exchanges with publishers as gifts, Dickens’s serial publication) raised the question of what Romantic writing was really worth, and how—or whether—an [End Page 539] author’s debts were ever finally paid. As a consequence of its authors’ financial anxieties and as a reflection of their necessary meditations on money, Rowlinson suggests, the literature discussed here allegorizes its own monetary value. It does so primarily through the depiction of “anachronistic remainders” (192): an old coin no longer in circulation, stored sacred artifacts, a stopped clock. The “curiosity,” according to this intriguing argument, can be both a “worthless residue and a sublime value,” making it “a double of money” and difficult to price (71). Such problems of valuation reflect the indeterminacy of both authorial value and monetary forms during this period. Since, as Rowlinson notes, the “identity of capital” depends upon the “money form” (57), the nature of capital itself for Marx and others is as much at stake in his readings as the negotiation of literary and financial wealth by Romantic writers.

As this last comment suggests, interdisciplinarity is one strength of this smart and nuanced book. Rowlinson not only draws on a wide range of sources (literary, historical, economic, psychoanalytic, philosophical) to present his argument, but makes its critical pay-off as much about Marx, for example, as about Dickens. This quality should guarantee Real Money and Romanticism a broad audience, but it’s also a quality that will likely frustrate certain readers of Victorian Studies, who may find the connections between certain passages (for example, an eleven-page reading of Marx against Elaine Scarry and Sigmund Freud, and a three-page argument about the historical shortcomings of a recent edition of Scott’s works) and the primary arguments of the chapters tangential or loosely analogical at times. The book demands a kind of transdisciplinary flexibility from its reader. For the most part, it rewards the labor it requires. The second chapter’s historical...

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