Exchange and Excess in Lillo's London Merchant

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 PETER HYNES Exchange and Excess in Lillo=s London Merchant As an early and prominent example of bourgeois tragedy, George Lillo=s London Merchant finds pathetic interest in the life of a class usually reserved by Restoration theatrical custom for mockery and satire: traders, businessmen, dwellers in Defoe=s >middle station,= or, to use the contemporary pejorative, >cits.= In comedy, of course, the obtuse cuckolds and grasping aldermen of earlier times had begun their rehabilitation well before Lillo=s play reached the boards: John Loftis has charted a progressive transformation of attitude from the contempt expressed by most Restoration writers to the apologetics of the early eighteenth century (Loftis). Lillo=s accomplishment was to do for serious drama what Steele=s The Conscious Lovers had already achieved for comedy: he granted full dignity to the merchant class and suggested that it was ready not only to take over the economy, but to claim cultural legitimacy as well. Criticism of The London Merchant has done ample justice to its adherence to bourgeois values and ways of thinking;1 in this essay, however, I want to take a slightly different approach to the ideology of the play. While it is quite true that this is exceptionally class-conscious drama and that it vigorously propagandizes on behalf of merchants and their activity, I want to suggest that there is more to Lillo=s engagement with the idea of trade than a set of favourable propositions about a newly respectable set of people. Rather, the theory of trade articulated by Thorowgood and his like furnishes a point of reference for motifs of circulation, of contract, of balance and excess that are part of the very weave of the text itself. In what follows, therefore, I will first canvass the more routine aspects of the play=s treatment of a merchant ethos, and then show how its economic ideas are also constitutive principles of its symbolic repertoire as well as of its structure. ON MERCHANTS AND TRADE 1 See Brown; Burke; Canfield; Flores; Hammer; Morrissey; and Wallace. For a general historical account of the fortunes of the middle class in Lillo=s time, see Earle. Thorowgood, as his name suggests, embodies most if not all of the play=s fundamental values. Although a wealthy merchant, he pointedly avoids the vices and folly of his earlier dramatic counterparts. He is a tender widower, not a jealous cuckold, and an indulgent and concerned parent to his daughter Maria. While eager to have her pick a husband from among the 680 peter hynes university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 young aristocrats he invites to his home, he is determined not to force her inclinations in the manner of the traditional >heavy father= of comedy. In a more public capacity, Thorowgood serves as a role model for his two apprentices, Trueman and Barnwell, inspiring them by example and by instruction. His standing in the larger community is high: young bluebloods think it perfectly acceptable to frequent his house, and he appears to enjoy universal respect. Thorowgood and his class also exercise wide-ranging public power. The play=s first scene imparts that the London merchants have averted a Spanish invasion of England by influencing the Genoese bankers who were about to finance the attack to withdraw their promised support. Thorowgood positively crows over this evidence of economic might: >The State and Bank of Genoa, having maturely weigh=d and rightly judged of their true Interest, prefer the Friendship of the Merchants of London, to that of a Monarch, who proudly stiles himself King of both Indies= (1.1.30B33). Thus in both domestic and national settings the merchants establish a central, respectable, and influential place for themselves: Lillo communicates forcefully that they have arrived. This dignified and profitable mercantile practice has a theory, too. At the beginning of act 3, Thorowgood advises Trueman to look into the economic philosophy that underlies trade: Methinks I wou=d not only have you learn the Method of Merchandize, and practise it hereafter, merely as a Means of getting Wealth. B =Twill be well worth your Pains to study...