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  • Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800-1914 by Timothy Alborn
  • William Deringer
Timothy Alborn . Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800-1914. Toronto, Buffalo, & London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. xi + 439 pp. ISBN 1-4426-3996-2, $80.00 (cloth).

At the least, Timothy Alborn's excellent history of life insurance in Victorian Britain deserves praise for its felicitous opening epigraph. "A great change is gradually coming over the world", the quotation reads. "Adventure, sport, enterprise, are giving way to caution and the calculation of averages. Men do not take the risks they used to. The modern man is surrounded by policy constables, sanitary inspectors, and insurance agents." (3) On its own, the 1896 passage rehearses a familiar image of Victorian life: cautious, calculating, sterile, and under constant surveillance. But the brilliance of the epigraph is [End Page 421] not its content but its source—Badminton Magazine. I think Alborn intends this at least partially as an opening joke. Regulated Lives is, in the end, a rejoinder to the Badminton-Magazine-view. To buy into the flippant idea that nineteenth-century culture was defined by its lack of "adventure, sport, enterprise", Alborn suggests, is to overlook all the interesting games—financial, epistemological, moral—being played by Victorians, sometimes with the help of their insurance companies. Alborn's cheeky opening quotation is emblematic of the book as a whole. It is imaginative in its sources, wry in its exposition, tactful in its argumentation. Alborn's argumentative target is not Badminton Magazine, of course, but rather a reductionist approach to the history of business and culture, whether "modernizing" or "postmodernist" in bent, which presumes that we can tell complicated historical stories in unitary ways. His argument is that life insurance embodied not one but many different definitions of what the normal, modern life ought to look like in the Victorian age: the "sympathetic", the "numerical", the "medicalized", the "commodified". These multiple definitions, and the people who produced them, did not always agree with one another. But, then again, "few institutions in the nineteenth century were as adept as juggling multiple modernities as life insurance companies were." (297)

Regulated Lives builds this argument on two levels. First, different chapters carefully reconstruct the various vital perspectives on Victorian life that collectively constituted Victorian life insurance. The first two chapters provide a high-level survey of the industry, describing trends in business organization and legal regulation. Chapter 3, effectively a second introduction, identifies the various players in the insurance game and outlines "the profusion of human interaction that was necessary for life insurance to work in Victorian culture." (76) Chapters 4 and 5 explore how actuaries and insurance salesman, respectively, encouraged middle-class Victorians to conceive death as something statistically predictable across a large population and yet wholly unpredictable for any one individual. Chapters 6 and 7 examine how insurance company directors managed their financial capital and managed to convince middle-class Victorians to entrust them with their savings. The final three chapters examine how insurers determined who qualified as insurable, with particular attention to the changing role of doctors in defining the sufficiently normal "life." The research behind these chapters is striking both in its thoroughness—Alborn draws upon the archives of over two dozen companies—and its inventiveness, particularly in the use of non-specialized sources, from Victorian novels to Badminton Magazine.

Second, Alborn illuminates Victorian life insurance's "multiple modernities" through a persistent strategy of gentle irony. It is here [End Page 422] that Alborn is at his best, uncovering subtle paradoxes that complicate any unitary conception of what life insurance (or life) meant to those who produced and consumed it. For example, Chapters 6 and 7 reveal that, while early Victorian companies promoted life insurance as a prudent instrument of middle-class fiscal discipline, life insurance also quietly became one of the greatest advertisements for the thrills of financial speculation, by way of increasingly popular "bonus" schemes. Chapter 8 points out that life insurers were extremely careful not to insure morally or physically unsuitable lives at the moment of sale, yet prided themselves on staying out of customers' lives after policies were bought (one exception...

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