Victorian Literature and Finance (review)

In the introduction to this collection, Francis O'Gorman links his project to the emergent field that Jonathan Rose has called "capitalist criticism." Rather than examining Victorian literature's critique of capitalism or its complicity with capitalism, this new scholarship explores the ways that nineteenth-century capitalism was generative for literary culture. In this vein, the claim that drives and draws together the essays in Victorian Literature and Finance is that there is a "creative" relationship "between the two activities of high capitalism and Victorian literary imagining" (2). The essays in O'Gorman's collection explore literary engagements with capitalist finance, broadly defined. Indeed, the breadth of the definition of finance that draws the essays together is at once one of the collection's strengths and one of its drawbacks. That breadth allows O'Gorman to bring together a capacious and eclectic range of accounts, including examinations of Victorian literary engagements with economic theory, authorial investments, literary financing, currency questions, speculation, and financial collapse. By providing this range, the book refuses to oversimplify the complexity of its central term, either theoretically or historically. "Finance" is not simply banking or speculation but an extremely dense and multifaceted set of activities that take place on both the individual and institutional level.

As Victorian Literature and Finance demonstrates, such activities are not only represented by the literature of the period but also help to fund, produce, and shape that literature. The collection's nine contributors discuss the role of finance in both canonical and non-canonical texts by writers as diverse as the Irish Tory Isaac Butt and the philosophical radical J. s. Mill. The essays treat drama by dion Boucicault, edward Bulwer lytton, George Henry Lewes, and Oscar Wilde; fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, H. Rider Haggard, Charlotte Riddell, and Anthony Trollope; poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Peacock; and an array of nonfiction prose. The very range of materials covered by the essays and the multitude of versions of finance examined through them, however, point to the collection's drawback. Both "finance" and "literature," as the essays amply demonstrate, are such large terms that they do not always provide a compelling rubric for placing a group of essays in conversation with one another. The collections very inclusiveness results in diffuseness.

There are, however, interesting crossovers between the essays. One of the most intriguing strains of thought in the collection is the idea that certain literary texts were engaged in the pedagogical project of instructing audiences about life in an advanced capitalist society. In her extremely insightful essay, "The drama of Capital: risk, Belief, and liability on the Victorian Stage," Jane Moody argues that because of its deployment of appearances, distortion, and contradiction, Victorian theater "acquired a special kind of explanatory power in the age of high capital" (92). Through readings of comedy, melodrama, and burlesque, Moody draws fascinating links between specific theatrical genres and various aspects of finance capitalism, including speculation, risk, and liability. Tara McGann's "Literary realism in the Wake of Business Cycle Theory: The Way We Live Now (1875)" also reads generic form as instructing its audience in a new understanding of finance. mcGann demonstrates the way the novel's representation of Melmotte revises conventional realist representations of the speculative financier as well as the genre of high realism itself. By representing Melmotte as, in part, a victim of circumstances, Trollope moves the representation of character and circumstance out of the realm of individual agency and toward the realm of amoral naturalism. O'Gorman's own essay, "Speculative Fictions and the Fortunes of H. Rider Haggard," is the third essay in the collection that develops a pedagogical reading of its Victorian texts. O'Gorman finds intriguing connections between the risk-taking entertained in the genre of romantic adventure and that demanded by participation in capitalism's necessarily speculative economy. Haggard's fictions, O'Gorman argues, groom the reader not so much to tolerate risk as...