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Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002) 185-213



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Filthy Lucre:
Victorian Ideas of Money

Christopher Herbert
Northwestern University

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"Papa! what's money?"

—Paul Dombey

In 1878, the young James Frazer published an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on "Taboo" in which, through a study of prohibition systems in ancient and in "primitive" societies in Polynesia and elsewhere, he argued that the concepts of the sacred, on the one hand, and of the filthy or the polluted, on the other, are originally one and the same. "The opposition of sacred and accursed, clean and unclean, which plays so important a part in the later history of religion, did in fact arise by differentiation from the single root idea of taboo, which includes and reconciles them both and by reference to which alone their history and mutual relation are intelligible," says Frazer. "Even in advanced societies," he adds provocatively, without elaborating, "the moral sentiments [...] derive much of their force from an original system of taboo" ("Taboo" 16-17).

The evolutionary superiority of modern Europeans over primitive savages lies precisely in our ability to make this distinction between worship of the divine and revulsion from the dirty, the impure, the contaminating: so runs the nominal argument of The Golden Bough (1890), where Frazer expounds the theory of taboo at length. But the potentially heretical and sacrilegious character of his argument could not have failed to strike readers from a culture fixated, as Victorian culture was, upon the extreme segregation of the two categories alleged by Frazer to be ultimately equivalent. The theory declared that the fundamental "moral sentiments" of Christian society contained at their core an almost unthinkable instability in the relations of the sacred and the dangerously dirty. Frazer's anthropology thus implied that the normative modern bipolar pattern of moral and religious thinking was produced and maintained by the interposition of massive cultural machinery designed to force asunder, to define as opposites, categories [End Page 185] which had much in common and otherwise might bewilderingly converge. For a reader alert to the significance of Frazer's theory as a parable of modern life, it invited potentially embarrassing speculation about the ideological purposes which this machinery of separation served. Foremost among these purposes would inevitably be that of lending religious sanction to a discriminatory system of social-class coding (the cleaner, more refined classes, the propertied classes, being closer to God)—not a function that it would be easy to reconcile with Christian teaching. In the contemporary setting, at all events, the question of the relations of divinity and dirt could not long be held apart from that of the relations of wealth and poverty.

In addition to directing a fiercely ironic gaze upon the cult of cleanliness and purity that was central to Victorian moral sensibility, Frazer's theory diagnosed obliquely another widely noticed feature of the contemporary middle-class mentality, its devotion to the principle of closing its eyes systematically to unwelcome realities. As we will see, writers of the day insistently described their society as a great many- layered system of occluded awareness, one in which not knowing what one knew became almost the defining principle of consciousness, at least in the sphere of middle-class life. In his analysis of the elaborate prohibition systems found in societies based on strict regulations against entering into direct or indirect contact with or, in many cases, mentioning aloud various peril-laden categories of things and people, especially those associated with divinity, Frazer thus invites his readers to reflect from another angle on the continuing thralldom of modern life to "the single root idea of taboo." Sex is of course the area most famously tabooed in Victorian discourse, but I want to examine in this essay another area, the one associated with the cultural theme of money—not that these two subjects, sex and money, can ever be cleanly dissociated, as every text of nineteenth- century fiction reminds us. However reliable Frazer's theory may be as an analysis of primitive thought, it seems designed to tell us a great deal about the powerful force field...

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