![]() Michie’s study comes in the wake of such studies as James Taylor’s Creating Capitalism, Margot C. Did readers who consumed sensationalist accounts of the City expect the reality to be sober? These were potboilers concerned with power, sudden reversals of fortune, sallow-skinned villains, and snobbery. With their plots centred on ruthless financiers controlling the fate of nations the more far-fetched of these novels might be seen as the ancestors of conspiracy-driven airport novels. It would be interesting to ascertain how many Victorian novelists did have a City background. The only truly great writers (depending on one’s estimation) who emerged from a brief City background and then, not until the end of the period, were Kenneth Grahame and P.G. Nor was there any attempt to create, it seems, a fictionalised ‘hero of finance’, or eulogistic popular group biography in the vein of Samuel Smiles’ Lives of the Engineers (1867). Given the non-residential nature of the City as it developed, it is hard to imagine how a novel of the City could have competed with richly textured and closely observed novels in other settings. Clearly many an author hoped that tales of dramatic gambles in the financial jungle would prove to be commercial, but Michie has not found any one who aspired to be a George Eliot of the counting house or a Margaret Oliphant of the square mile (he misses the fact that Oliphant’s Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life, published in 1883, features a female head of bank). And the fraudulent companies that feature in many of the works considered, certainly shows the novelists to have been inventive in their absurdities, from the Atlantis recovery scheme of Thorne’s and Custances’s Sharks (1904) to the flooding of the Sahara in Rider Haggard’s Yellow God (1909). What of Ye Outside Fools! by the splendidly named Erasmus Pinto – whose actual name was Latham Smith? Michie has certainly uncovered some curios, such as the novel Ye Vampyres written by ‘the Spectre’ in 1875. ![]() Whether Michie has uncovered amid these ‘romances of financial fraud and city crime’, hitherto forgotten literary gems is never made clear, since we rarely get any comments on the raciness or otherwise of the work examined, so we are left to wonder if Emma Robinson, author of The City Banker (1856), for instance, should be rescued by Virago from the enormous condescension of posterity. With potential themes such as anxiety about the worship of Mammon, the pursuit of respectability (by shabby genteel clerks and anglicised Jews), the impact of ‘character’ (whether individual or racial), ‘passion versus prose’ and with such major events as the railway mania of the 1840s or the collapse of Overend and Gurney in 1866, the subject is unquestionably important for students of British history over the long 19th century. ![]() It is only natural that having devoted his career to studying the City as it ‘actually’ functioned, he should be intrigued by what novelists – in the age of the realist novel – made of it, and what this body of literature (with short stories and other works of fiction) says about the society and culture of the period, in its attitude to commerce, finance, and the getting and losing of wealth. That this act of literary excavation is a labour of love performed by Professor Michie, is made clear in his somewhat defensive preface, where he describes it as a ‘product of obsession and rejection’ (p. One of the virtues of this work is that it brings to the reader a mass of obscure works of fiction featuring the City, or City-located characters. It has never been so easy to study literary representations from this era, so that the industry of a past scholarship in which a combination of stamina, high boredom threshold and serendipity uncovered the material, is now superseded by the Google search engine, and the more technically adventurous can now contemplate sophisticated ‘data mining’ of texts. As a monograph designed to explore the fictional representations of the City and high finance in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the study might also have been timely in harnessing the wealth of digitised primary resources (digitised national and regional newspapers, periodicals, and electronic versions of canonical and non-canonical works of literature). As ancient financial institutions crumble, national economies falter, and global capitalism experiences a collective wobble, a work that studies the City of London in its formative period appears to be perfectly timed. Michie’s Guilty Money ought to be timely work, given its subject matter. Appearing in the suitably Victorian-sounding imprint of Pickering and Chatto, as a volume in its ‘Financial History’ series, the financial historian Ranald C.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |