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C H A P T E R T H R E E Anthony Trollope’s “Subtle Materialism” It is horrible to think what power money has in these days. Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister A new world of ideas is in the air and aVects us, though we do not see it. Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics As we move from Frances Trollope to her son Anthony, we shift to a world where money has become an abstract force. This representational change reflects the economic developments that took place between the 1830s and ’40s when Frances Trollope was writing and the 1860s and ’70s when her son’s career took oV. In that period, England ceased to be primarily a manufacturing economy and became instead one based on marketing and banking, which led to a “profound shift of metaphor from production to circulation”(Mirowski 132). This new perception of money created anxieties that focused less on the engrossment and consumption of wealth that we see in Austen and Frances Trollope than on money’s pervasiveness, its ability to mix or commingle with aspects of the culture previously thought to be immune from materialist influences. Trollope addresses these concerns through heiresses who dominate the Barsetshire and Palliser novels, women who possess the enormous fortunes that made the 1870s and ’80s the “age of the millionaires” (Perkin Rise 64). In creating these figures, Trollope transforms the traditional form of the marriage plot; in his novels , for the first time, the rich woman is a character that is not only appealing but that represents what the novelist identifies as positive values. Through such portraits Trollope acknowledges the powers and pleasures of possessing wealth, but he also limits money’s ability to circulate by not permitting his heiresses to cross certain social barriers. Dwelling on these thresholds allows Trollope to explore the 104 The Vulgar Question of Money psychological and representational strategies his contemporaries used to imagine ways the enormous power of abstracted cosmopolitan finance could, despite its contributions to England’s commercial success, be cordoned oV from the rest of the culture. Though Trollope has generally been read as engaging with England’s move from industrial to financial capitalism through the speculators who play key roles in his late novels, The Way We Live Now and The Prime Minister, in fact he engages questions about fluid rather than landed or manufacturing capital much earlier than this, in the third of the Barsetshire novels, Doctor Thorne.¹ There he introduces the ointment heiress Miss Dunstable and begins to explore, with startling explicitness, the economic implications of the marriage plot, implications he will continue to address through the heiresses who dominate the Palliser novels, Lady Glencora Palliser and Madame Max Goesler. The diVerence between these heiresses and the speculators who have typically been taken to represent the economic changes of Trollope’s period is that the former actually possess wealth, whereas the latter, as exemplified by Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister and Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, merely manipulate the signs of wealth in the form of promissory notes, bills of exchange, and other forms of credit instruments. Such speculative figures allow the system of finance capital to be represented as, in some sense, chimerical.² In contrast, the heiresses who appear throughout the Barsetshire and Palliser novels are fully identified with enormous fortunes they are readily able to use. As a contemporary reviewer noted,“Deprive . . . Miss Dunstable of her wealth, and [she] cease[s] to be” (Smalley 131–32). The same could be said of Lady Glencora Palliser and Madame Max Goesler, whose fates in the novels in which they appear are determined almost entirely by the money they possess. Writing at the moment when, “for the first time in history, non-landed incomes and wealth had begun to overtake land alone as the main source of economic power” (Perkin Rise 64), Trollope evokes through his heiresses the forms of wealth whose fluidity threatened to undermine the economic hegemony of traditional landowning families.³ In the ointment heiress Miss Dunstable, he creates a fictional example of the millionaires who were a distinctive feature of the period, men and women who made money not through industrial manufacture but through producing and selling household goods. They were“the new‘shopocracy’”(Wiener 64), whose numbers included the shopkeeper Sir Thomas Lipton, Lord Leverhulme, the soap manufacturer , the brewers, Allsop, Hindlip, Bass, Burton, and Guinness, all of whom [3.17.75.227] Project MUSE (2024-04-20...

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