Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790–1830 by Alexander Dick (review)

Romanticism and the Gold Standard examines constructions of value in British monetary policy, banking practices, and Romantic literature. Much like the work of James Thompson and Mary Poovey, Dick’s contribution to these issues is methodologically informed by historicism and symbolic analyses of money and literature as structurally homologous systems of signification. Dick promises to add “a new angle” to this homology by demonstrating how it was historically shaped by various banking crises and Britain’s subsequent introduction of a gold standard in 1816 (p. vii). Dick devotes particular attention to the Bank of England’s suspension of cash payments in 1797. The Bank Restriction Act prevented the redemption of bank notes for coins and resulted in a crisis of confidence in the banking system, which exported gold to sustain Britain’s wartime efforts even as it extended credit and increased the domestic circulation of paper money to offset growing debt.

Dick here covers some familiar territory insofar as he considers what Poovey describes as the “problematic of representation” that emerged after the Bank Restriction Act: like a sign unmoored from its referent, paper money no longer referred back to the precious metals that were once its ground (Genres of the Credit Economy, pp. 5–6). Dick essentially reads the gold standard as addressing this gap between sign and referent. Yet if the gold standard sought to redress the crisis of “confidence” after the Bank Restriction Act, it also resulted in a sense of “embarrassment” regarding British debts and the gold standard’s inability to resolve inconsistencies in monetary policy (p. 18–19). Drawing on the recent turn to affect, Dick tracks the embarrassment (understood varyingly as shame, perplexity, and debt) felt among political economists and Romantic writers as they responded to the contingency of value that the monetary crisis signaled.

Dick’s argument references multiple methodological frameworks, but it is not always clear how he connects them or what sanctions privileging one framework over the other at strategic points in his chapters. The primary methodological tension arises from the book’s competing impulses toward historical and metaphorical analyses of Romantic-era writers and economists. “My literary claim is that through their interest in [standards of value], the Romantics and their contemporaries produced self-conscious and ironic experiments with genre, form, and engagement,” Dick states; “but my historical claim is that these productions in turn strongly influenced the theoretical and ideological formation of the nineteenth-century economy” (p. 9). What is the relationship between the literary, the historical, and the economic in these claims? How does Dick’s symbolic analyses of money and literature relate to his historical analysis if, as he claims, the former makes a problematic assumption that money and literature are “structurally parallel” (p. vii)? The assumption of a structural parallel nevertheless proves essential to Dick’s central claim that Romantic writers produced “a new kind of standard” by giving literary form to the very absence of absolute values that shadowed monetary debates on the standard (p. 32). This claim leads to Dick’s more sweeping assertion that the crisis of relativism is Romanticism, and thus “Romanticism is the standard” (p. 9, emphasis original).

These methodological tensions result in chapters that move from historical background to symbolic analysis of how Romantic literature self-consciously standardized relativism in its many guises. Thus Chapter 3 describes Coleridge’s surprising endorsement of paper money in opposition to advocates of the gold standard such as William Cobbett before shifting to the symbolic economy that underlies his Lay Sermons and the Statesman’s Manual. Coleridge functions as a “bridge” between Christian political economy and literature because his theory of the symbol replaces religious belief with a highly metaphorical standard embodied in literature (p. 83). Similarly, Chapter Four details Shelley’s critical responses to the criminalization of banknote forgeries and is followed by readings of literary works (e.g., The...