Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles ed. by Charles Ivar McGrath and Chris Fauske (review)

259 to be wrought by eighteenth-century events, such as the Hanoverian succession and fall in 1714 of the Tory party, and its deployment, in subsequent years, of ‘‘Country’’ rhetoric, emphatically opposed to the ‘‘Court’’ rhetoric of Walpolean Whigs. While the book argues that deep historical processes such as the rise of print culture transformed authority in London, it keeps these separate from, or at least does not also consider , the political and other cultural shifts that arguably keep the very meanings of Court and City, Whig and Tory, dynamically open to redefinition. Still, the book’s readings offer insights into the way important texts engage urban experience, and its principal contention, that writers sought to assert their authority over how London could and should be imagined, is incontestable. James Noggle Wellesley College Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles, ed. Charles Ivar McGrath and Chris Fauske. Newark: Delaware, 2008. Pp. 242. $56. Interdisciplinary in scope and intent, this collection of historical, literary, and economic interests well would have benefited from integrating disciplinary vantages into a more topically and theoretically unified understanding of Augustan print culture’s role in developing British ideas and attitudes about finance. Local and particular data dominate over more speculative attempts to synthesize larger ideas concerning the dissemination of opinions about money and credit ; the whole endeavor is too risk averse. The essays individually offer solid scholarship, and a welcome focus on Irish financial history, but also often lack the rhetorical spark and broader appeal to speak as well across fields as within them. The Introduction praises pioneers in the field, but then summarizes essays without really explaining how the collection coheres as a statement about the prominent place print culture deserves in future studies of the early British economy. Literary essays are in the minority. There are spirited readings of Swift, and a nicely detailed assessment of Defoe. Overall, however, humanists may be confirmed in their belief that the dismal science of economics can make for dull reading. Data and facts, and records of parliaments abound. The book, thus, offers more to those interested in ledgers of money and power than in print as cultural work. Mr. Fauske’s strong essay on Swift speaks directly and best to print as the culture of letters. In an animated analysis of Swift’s vacillations from supporting the Tory-driven South Sea scheme to opposing an Irish Bank and Wood’s coinage patent, he offers a disarmingly devious and economically challenged Swift, thoroughly untrustworthy for any reliable accounts of the truth about Ireland’s financial needs or interests once sophisticated financing was involved. The secret to understanding Swift on the Irish economy is to realize that ‘‘he did not have a long-term plan’’ and thoroughly misunderstood the ideas needed to form one. In the Wood affair, for example, Mr. Fauske explains that Ireland desperately needed small coins to conduct daily business with legal tender, that ‘‘the coin was to be offered at something close to its actual metal value,’’ and that Swift’s opposition to Wood’s coinage was both hyperbolic and damaging to Ireland’s economic interests, at least in the short term. On Wood and beyond, Swift ‘‘was 260 playing on fears based on ignorance.’’ Despite his well-supported critique of Swift’s veracity in fiscal matters, Mr. Fauske admires Swift’s ‘‘spectacular grandstanding’’ in print, the fine writing and rhetoric Swift substitutes so delightfully for economic truths. Rhetoric forms the focus of J. Alan Downie’s similar insistence that we must not turn to Swift without weighing his desire to please the audience of the moment and to trim financial sails as necessary. From the Examiner essays to Gulliver’s Travels, Mr. Downie cautions that on money matters Swift typically was ‘‘pandering to the prejudices of the landed country gentlemen’’ and thus must be subjected to thorough rhetorical analysis to plumb the changing motives, styles and voices he improvised for each new economic situation and audience. However, when Mr. Downie tries to extend Swift’s tactical distortions into a counterargument to Habermas’s idea that the early eighteenth century created a new bourgeois public sphere in which...