Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England (review)

Rebecca Stern's intriguing book begins with the financier John Sadleir's dramatic rise and equally precipitous fall, ending in his 1856 suicide by poison. From a discussion of this notorious smash-up—which deeply affected many Victorian households and was narrated as a personal, domestic story of ruin more often than as a public scam—Stern argues in an original and compelling manner for the pervasiveness of "domestic fraud" narratives in Victorian culture. Stern undermines the ideology of separate spheres, asserting that "far from being an isolated haven of fiscal safety and ignorance, even the most modest home was a site of purchase, exchange, and employment" (5). The imbrication of the "private" with the "public" sphere was inevitable, she argues, and created an "appetite for narratives of invasion, seepage, and contamination that asserted the impossibility of maintaining firm boundaries" (4). Home Economics defines fraud broadly, including social as well as financial breaches of trust. Stern therefore examines not only the results of money speculations but also those other exchanges that involve crediting—or giving faith to—the representations of others. With chapters on the Tichborne Claimant, on the Yelverton Divorce case and Victorian marriage fraud, on servants' and their employers' duplicitous exchanges, and on the dangerous practice of food adulteration, Stern's exploration of the ubiquity of domestic fraud ranges across Victorian culture and society.

One of the most exciting aspects of Stern's work is its undaunted genre-crossing. This is nowhere more evident than in her original reading of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862) in relation to the widespread practice of adulterating food. Rossetti's poem has been variously interpreted as a story of sexual initiation and fallenness, a celebration of women's ability to succor one another in a larger sisterhood, a cautionary tale about capitalism, and a depiction of lesbian desire. Stern acknowledges these readings and then posits a more literal possibility: what if the goblins' fruit really was poisoned, adulterated with one of the many substances commonly used in some—especially lower-class—marketplaces? She thus explicates the poem as a locus of Victorian domestic fraud that begins with the desire for food that looks luscious but is in fact poison. As Stern puts it, "Rossetti's hungry girl renders allegory actual: because food is a commodity one literally consumes, food adulteration makes material the grossest fears about capitalist corruption and thus justifies the most paranoid attitudes toward market culture in general" (94). In investigating popular Victorian texts on food adulteration to contextualize her argument, Stern looks at Punch cartoons and popular street ballads. All of these texts, she finds, "overtly linked comestible consumption with commodity consumption as a way of representing fraud as a pandemic problem. Adulterated food thus worked as a signifier that all commodities and people that vended them were potentially poisonous" (94).

From this New Historicist reading of the poem, Stern's fertile work segues to an exploration of the perils of mimicry and imitation and the upsurge of interest in the microscope's possibilities for detection: "a penchant for scrutiny evolved alongside the development of capitalism and its abuses. In the context of food fraud, we find this strand of inquiry encapsulated and magnified, both, in the Victorian fascination with the microscope" (103). It is no wonder, Stern argues, that Victorians felt they had to take on the work of fraud detection themselves in relation to the food they ate, because there were no effective laws to protect consumers. Complicating her argument further, Stern muses about the "paranoid text" that is "Goblin Market," a poem that "delights in the dynamics of apprehension: Laura's fall into bad shopping bespeaks undeniable fascination with a dangerous market, just as Lizzie's valiant prudence demonstrates the satisfactions of rightly placed suspicion" (99–100). Stern closes this wonderful chapter with an overview of novels with "adulterating plots" and a perceptive reading of Mrs. J. H. Riddell's The Race for Wealth...