The Mistress of the Marriage Market: Gender and Economic Ideology in Defoe's Review

What kind of woman is Lady Credit, who glitters as Daniel Defoe's "favorite Mistress" in the Review of the State of the English Nation? A "teeming womb" and "Mother of Great Designs" who regularly applies "herself to publick Affairs, Managing the Cash, Banks, And Exchanges of the Merchants, the Finances and Exchanges of Princes; the Shops And Warehouses of Tradesmen, and the Companys, Factories, and Colonies Of Nations," she appears to be a public woman of great fertility and talent. ¹ She also resembles a number of other public, feminine figures of finance found in the Review. The undiscerning Trade, for example, who was "debauched" by the "Alderman Avarice" when she "went a Caterwauling . . . along the Streets" of London, is mother to a number of "Female Bratts." These daughters, raped by their father, in turn give birth to the street-walkers Monopoly, Patent, and Charter. Notable among the children of "Mother Trade" is Stockjobber, a "native pick-pocket, born a Thief, bred up a Cheat, and [destined to] die a Prostitute." Stockjobber haunts "her great Bawdy-House . . . Exchange Alley," where "her Pimps are the Brokers, her Cullies the Merchants and Tradesmen." Trade's other daughter, Ensuring, lurks in the streets as a "wandering, distrustful Creature" and gives birth to Lottery, a "young Bastard with a smiling Countenance" and "a Belly like the bottomless Pit," who was "put to Death by the State as a public Devourer," and Wager, "a saucy Jade, that turn'd States-Woman, and always put her Nose into Public Affairs" (5.107 [1708]: 427-28).

Lady Credit and the "Female Bratts" (Trade, Projecting, Ensuring, Monopoly, Patent, Charter, Stockjobber, Lottery, and Wager) burst out of Defoe's imagination and onto the pages of his periodical when all England was fevered with new debt-based strategies by which money seemed to give birth to itself. Defoe marshaled these fecund figures in service to an ideology promoting trade and other types of mercantile exchange over a primarily agricultural system of wealth production. ² But his allegories also express anxieties typical of what Craig Muldrew has identified as a "culture of credit." Early modern English people worried about the effects that increasingly longer and more complex lines of debt had on their emotional and moral obligations to each other. ³ How far and upon what basis to trust other persons in contractual negotiations of all kinds were central to the writings about social and economic relationships from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century.Defoe engaged these questions in allegories of coy mistresses and fertile pickpockets, with which he sought to reconcile English men and women to their own growing dependence on credit.

Defoe's narrratives drew upon a trope already long familiar in the anxious literature of the culture of credit: the figure of usury as an uncontrollably breeding mother. In the sixteenth century, Dame Usurye represented a wide variety of strategies for proliferating profit, strategies which, to moralists such as Thomas Wilson, who was heavily indebted to Aristotelian and Scholastic ethical theories, seemed unnatural and corrosive of social order."What is more against nature, then that money should beget or bring forth money, which was ordeined. . . not to increase it selfe, as a woman dothe, that bringethe foorthe a childe?" Wilson fulminated in 1572. "Usurye," he exploded, "the daughter of covetousnes, the mother of mischeife, and the very hel of evil overthroweth trades, decaieth merchandizes, undoeth tillage, destroyethe crafts men, defaceth chivalries, beateth downe nobilitie, bringeth dearth and famine, hyndereth the prince in her custome and welfaire, and last of al causeth destruction and confusion universallye." ⁴ Wilson expressed an already old-fashioned view during a period in which the commercial economy relied increasingly on international credit transactions and the pressure to reform old restrictions against charging interest on loans grew. More than a century later, Daniel Defoe adapted Wilson's allegory of usury to modernizing...