Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Investment
Author(s): Mary Poovey
Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1, Victorian Investments (Autumn, 2002), pp. 17-41
Published by: Indiana University Press
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not have been able to conduct the elaborate and geographically extensive business that fueled economies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Western Europe, nor would they have been likely to develop
the kind of informal associations that flourished in eighteenth-century
London coffee houses. By the same token, writing about finance was
also essential in creating the public confidence crucial to the refinement of credit instruments (like bills of exchange) and the spread of
financial institutions (like banks). In the "remarks on trade" that began
(Brewer 203-30).
If the development of a modern market economy has always
single most important factor was the increase, in number and kind, of
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MARY POOVEY
18
shares available for Britons to buy. While only five stocks were available
on the still rudimentary London Exchange in 1770, by 1811, government
securities and the shares of chartered corporations like the East India
Company had been joined by some industrial shares. After Napoleon's
in as many as 624joint-stock companies-a number that signaled a fourfold increase over the previous year (Robb 14; Michie 56). This increase
pay up-front. While individuals did not begin to invest in shares in large
on their own. By the 1890s, when the price of many shares fell to one
pound, more individuals were prepared to invest, for nearly a century of
indirect participation in an increasingly well-publicized activity had made
the rapid returns the stock market promised seem within the reach of
even the average middle-class Briton.
In this essay, I explore the role that financial writing played in
making the allure of investment vivid for Britons. For reasons that are
both historical and theoretical, I do not describe this writing as a single
discourse. Instead, I identify the features that characterized each mode
of financial writing that developed before the mid-1840s, then show how
these features were combined and reworked in a genre that was new in
that decade. From the mid-1840s forward, the new genre of financial
journalism brought the world of investment ever closer to middle-class
Britons in articles and books that not only drew their information from
other kinds of financial writing but also used many of the narrative
conventions popularized by contemporary fiction. Just as financial journalists began to borrow literary conventions in the middle of the decade,
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19
the level of themes and formal features that drew financial journalism
this information began to appear in London and European commercial centers in the sixteenth century as lists of prices, tables of exchange
rates, and the arrival and departure dates of ships. Such commercial
ical writing typical of the emergent political press. This new political
writing was often published as penny sheets; stylistically, it relied on
prices current in the market, although the readers of these cheap publications could certainly have included merchants who saw their interests
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20
MARY POOVEY
into ... Paper Credit, published in the first issue of the Edinburgh in 1802
and their subdued polemics from the unfolding campaign for free
trade. The contributors to the Edinburgh Review sought a more intellec-
burst. That the editors allowed him to so do even though the Times
accepted extensive advertising from railway companies suggests that his
columns had acquired a value of their own, over and above promoting
the companies whose advertisements the paper solicited (Parsons 23).
Three additional nineteenth-century innovations in financial
writing deserve comment. The first was the development of what we
might call business writing, by which I mean regular publications that
were both produced by and devoted to various financial institutions or
to the financial sector as a whole; this writing subordinated the author's
political agenda to what was represented as an impartial presentation of
facts. Such writing is epitomized by The Banker's Magazine, founded in
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21
1844, but historians have also linked it to the Economist, which was
launched in 1843 byJames Wilson (Edwards 6-84; Parsons 25).2 In its
early years, the Economist did not conform to the definition of business
writing I have just provided, for the paper was initially an organ of the
Anti-Corn Law League. It only assumed the function that became its
trademark-explaining the relationship between economic issues and
the financial sector in dispassionate, apparently apolitical languageafter the free trade campaign had succeeded. The paper had clearly
embraced this role by 1853, when the banker Walter Bagehot began to
and volume of this writing after 1820 make it seem different in kind
from its earlier counterparts. This was the publication of official govern-
Robinson 49, 63-64). By the 1830s, the reports of the select committees
established to monitor reform measures like the 1833 Factory Act and
the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act regularly supplied both numerical
information and eyewitness accounts describing various social conditions in Britain. With the publication of the Report on the Sanitary Condi-
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22
MARY POOVEY
almost 7% of the national income, and, for the first time, a significant
forms borrowed from contemporary fiction and in framing the presentation of financial information with features like first-person point of view
cial miscreant and to shield their articles from charges of libel. What
unites all of these texts, however, is neither the venue in which they were
Instead, what unites them was the function they performed: all of the
articles and books I call financial journalism sought to depict the finan-
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23
helped normalize the operations of a financial world still subject to catastrophic irregularities and still largely unfamiliar to British readers.
We can identify several reasons why financial journalism began
to assume its characteristic form in the mid-1840s. By the middle of that
decade, the institutions that composed the British financial system were
sufficiently defined to support the in-depth reporting that had already
commentary that financial journalism provided. Perhaps most important, however, are two additional reasons. The first is the repetition, for
the third time in the century, of the boom phase of an economic cycle
whose crashes had led ninety-three English and Welsh banks to fail in
1825-26 and thousands of individuals to lose their life savings between
1836 and 1839. As the railway boom first exploded, then began to
implode in the 1840s, journalists rushed first to arouse, then to assuage
the public's fears by presenting such swings as normal parts of a mature
economy. Finally, financialjournalism developed when it did because the
radical press of the early 1840s had also begun to publish essays about
finance, some of which were trenchant and compelling. These articles
demanded a response because they linked their harsh criticisms of financial institutions explicitly to Chartist politics. Thus the four-part series on
men, and practicing the "GREAT SWINDLE" of taxing the people for
managing the national debt (Richardson 91).
With Chartists drawing to a point evidence that everyone could
which emergent modes, like the business writing of the Economist, devel-
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MARYPOOVEY
24
oped. Thus, in articles like 'The State of the Money Market from a Fresh
nalism well established by 1853 and the threat of Chartism long gone,
Bagehot adopted the conventions of this writing to give his Economist essays
a personal, authoritative voice that purported also to be politically impartial. If Bagehot should be called "the greatest interpreter of commercial
sentiment and economic ideas of his day," as one moder historian argues
(Parsons 28), then he became so because he was able to make his middle-
class, pro-business ideas seem simply like common sense. He was able to
do this, in turn, because other financial journalists had already popularized a set of stylistic features that presented business as both accessible and
this genre, of course. Indeed, the most famous financial journalist was
for modern readers to see the interest Dickens took in exploring finan-
cial topics (Wills and Dickens 615-20). Nor were all of the contributions to the genre as playful as some of the examples I have cited here.
Arguably, in fact, the combination of a politically corrective agenda and
a personable, quasi-literary style that characterized such writing in the
late 1840s had metamorphosed into an explicitly didactic, even moralistic mission by the 1860s. The change in tone (although not always in
style) that accompanied this shift in agenda was a response to a number
of developments during the 1850s and 1860s, but two deserve particular
notice. First, by the late 1850s, with Chartism no longer a threat and
arguments about the spiritual perils of business no longer so obviously
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25
excesses during the first half of the century, began to lose its influence
ethical distinctions journalists drew. This was true, for example, of the
distinction between investment, which journalists represented as sound,
and speculation, which they represented as unwise or greedy. By normalizing the operations of individual institutions through such distinctions,
financial articles like W. E. Aytoun's 'The National Debt and the Stock
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MARYPOOVEY
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This is one way we know that financial journalism constituted a genre that
was new in the 1840s: the features its authors borrowed from other modes
even though the moral agenda visible in journalism after 1860 was
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27
Banker (1885). Rae, the manager of the North and South Scotland
Bank, viewed the certified accountant's balance sheet as an absolutely
unimpeachable document, which not only perfectly reflected the trans-
gain respecting him must be more or less at second hand and imperfect, and it may be delusive. But there is no mistaking the figures of an
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MARY POOVEY
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laws passed after 1844, including the 1856 and 1862 limited liability
acts, considerably lightened the already-lax rules governing the publication of company information. These laws did require year-end audits,
but company directors could employ friends to look over the books or
regularly available, and the manuals that were in print were outdated,
shadowed-and implicitly critiqued-the normalizing function journalism actually performed. Indeed, references to accounting suggest
that financial journalists both imagined that their writing supplemented existing financial writing with an ethical agenda and longed for
something that could make their own articles morally efficacious in the
way accounting promised to be. In both these senses, we can say that
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29
modes of financial writing-including journalism and accountingcorresponds to the definition of the supplement formulated byJacques
plenitude," and a substitute that "produces no relief' because its addition only confirms the inadequacy of that to which it adds (144, 145).
existing genres were drawn into a relationship with each other that
seemed to make financial writing a whole, in the sense of being simultaneously descriptive and morally efficacious; this is a plenitude, to use
of finance and made company owners honest. Ideally, this would have
been possible without the aid of literary devices, which were suspect in
exactly the ways that accounting was not. In nineteenth-century Britain,
tation fails in this sense, I also want to insist that some of the impedi-
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MARY POOVEY
30
hensively (much less to make them moral) because these financial insti-
tutions could not work if they did not keep aspects of their business
secret. Thus the tension between the imperative to disclose facts about
and if the public did not believe that representations of value (like
paper money and bills of exchange) functioned as if they were gold,
then credit could not exist. By the same token, the need to keep secrets
between London and Paris (1851) and London and New York (1866),
the ticker-tape machine (1867), and the telephone (1878) (Michie 7074, 82). The imperative to disclose information was further intensified
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31
man has a right to keep his financial dealings to himself. The constitutive tension between these two imperatives was further complicated by
the way that information could be both circulated by and confused with
rumor, which, in the hands of skilled publicists, could mislead investors
as it pretended to instruct. Indeed, one sign of the novelty of the emer-
the payee only by initials or numerals (Rae 11). The English government made sporadic efforts to require businesses to publish more infor-
not required to publish balance sheets until 1908, and not until 1948
did a Companies Act require trust companies to publish consolidated
balance sheets (Parsons 39; Robb 138).
This tension between disclosure and secrecy within the finan-
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MARY POOVEY
tension also dictated the much more encompassing, but more amorphous, cultural atmosphere that increasingly permeated Victorian
society. Indeed, what Raymond Williams would have called the period's
structure of feeling, which underwrote the emergent culture of invest-
ment, can be said to have derived from this tension between disclosure
and secrecy. While this tension may be a feature of all modern business
cultures-and even of every form of writing that elicits interest through
do not generate "value" in a form that financiers would have understood, I suggest that nineteenth-century literary texts did more than
of investment. In so doing, literary texts constituted another supplement in the chain of financial writings I have described. Because they
were not primarily devoted to the normalizing agenda that dominated
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33
the old charges that fiction was immoral or irrelevant, even though
literature in the form of poetry was generally considered a reliable
arbiter of values. A powerful weapon in novelists' rebuke to these
charges was the development of a set of formal features we now call
realism: the combination of a single-point perspective that positions the
reader outside and in the future of the fiction's action and the control
unified narrative system numerous points (in time, space, and character perspective) that do not contradict each other; the consistent use
many used financial plots to enhance their genre's reputation for rele-
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34
MARY POOVEY
We Live Now (1875). For this brief discussion, I have chosen instead
George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) because this novel provides a
succinct and particularly clear example of the way that a realist narrator
on Maggie and Tom. But bankruptcy is only the most dramatic of the
financial events in this novel, and it is actually simply the climax of a
cial plot, but to what I want to call the sentimental plots, which focus on
Maggie, Tom, Philip, and Stephen.3 Indeed, in each of the novel's first
six books, we can identify a constitutive relationship between the finan-
cial plot and the sentimental plot, in which the financial plot-which is
ship with Philip Wakem, and Maggie's desperate efforts to win some
kind of recognition from the boys; and the financial plot (again
presented largely in narrative summaries) arises from the lawsuit that
Mr. Tulliver brings against Mr. Privart (186, 188). In book three, the
financial plot and the sentimental plot seem to converge, for when
Tulliver loses the lawsuit, he falls ill and his family must be recalled. But
book three also contains another financial plot, which is revealed to the
reader in such scant detail that it is quite difficult to reconstruct. This
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35
taken (196, 198). It is the failure of the people for whom he holds these
securities--"poor Riley," then Mr. Furley (196, 198) -that causes Mr.
Tulliver to lose all of his household furnishings, which, for his wife at
least, is worse than his loss of the mill.
mental plots that constitute the figure of the narrative, while Tom's
plot. When Maggie agrees to meet Philip in the Red Deeps, she begins
to harbor a secret from her brother, who has forbidden such meetings.
point, then, the dynamic between secrecy and disclosure, which still
characterizes the relationship between the sentimental and the financial plots, not only appears as a theme within the sentimental plot but
also begins to receive the kind of narrative attention that other themes
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MARY POOVEY
36
by the opening of that final book, all of the problems of what had previ-
plot-have been resolved, and the narrative result is that the financial
plot ceases to have any importance at all. At the beginning of book seven,
Tom is master of the mill and he has paid off his father's debts, but none
of this matters because Maggie has run off with Stephen Guest. Eliot's
focus in book seven is exclusively on the sentimental plot, where personal
and social disclosures gradually and painfully triumph over secrecy, but
these issues appear, once more, solely as themes that are psychological
inition of, the dynamic that also informed both financial institutions
and nineteenth-century writing about finance illuminates one contribution that Eliot's novel made to readers' experience of the culture of
investment. By using the dynamic between disclosure and secrecy as an
organizing principle for the first six books of The Mill on the Floss, Eliot
that was simultaneously inescapable and elusive. The Mill on the Floss
thus shifts the emphasis away from informing readers about the facts of
finance, which was one agenda of so much financial writing, and she
never gives financial institutions enough attention to help naturalize
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37
ited. When Eliot converts the financial plot into the sentimentalized
themes of disclosure and secrecy, she effaces, belatedly and (for many
readers) ineffectively, the determining role she had previously assigned
to the financial plot. This imperfect effacement exacts its most obvious
toll in the notorious fairy-tale ending of the novel, in which brother and
sister drown in the flood that sweeps the mill downstream. As this conclu-
sion suggests, Eliot left herself few options other than such a contrivance
within the sentimental plot, for she had completely abandoned the
constitutive tension that animated the first six books of the novel-the
embrace that links Maggie and Tom at novel's end has been foretold
throughout the novel, and may be said simply to have been postponed by
the worldly necessities of getting money and finding a mate.
The kind of exploration Eliot provides in this novel is typical of
the excitement that sustains suspense and the frustration that ensues
when plots or characters disappear at the narrative's end. Readers might
also have experienced it if they engaged in the investment opportunities
offered in greater numbers in Victorian Britain, in the anticipation that
feeds a speculative mania and the incomprehension that follows a crash.
upon it, readers might even have been encouraged to wonder if the
dynamic of disclosure and secrecy that financial journalism sought to
normalize was quite as natural as journalists wanted it to seem.
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MARY POOVEY
38
that certain details and practices remain secret; and because realist
tion literary texts made to the culture of investment. The logic of the
that novel does invoke the fantasies associated with accounting. It does
so in book three when Mr. Deane tells Tom that he needs to learn book-
keeping in order to earn a place in the business firm of Guest & Co. In
she associates with Maggie's storytelling and correct the sentimentalized dealings in which Mr. Tulliver has indulged (228, 230, 234). Even
though she invokes the fantasy that such a mode of writing might exist,
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39
this feat not to judicious record keeping but to some unspecified speculative investments in foreign trade that the packman Bob Jakin insti-
gates (311). In other words, Eliot reveals to the careful reader both the
for the kind of imaginative longing that only heroism and daring can
have offered really does need both. Even though I think I could
generate something like Derrida's description of the supplement from
a reading of the scattered references to accounting in financial journalism and novels like The Mill on the Floss, I don't think I would have
been likely to notice or assign much importance to these references if I
had not already been alert to the possibility that fantasies about some
kind of perfect writing might haunt the system of financial writing.
Thus I was able to enhance and extend an essentially historical analysis
create what counts as knowledge about the past for us. But our inevitable reliance on such paradigms also means that what we know of the
past-what we know as the past-can never precisely recover or reproduce that past, but always signals the negotiation that is our attempt to
know. When nineteenth-century Britons struggled to find out about the
culture of investment emerging around them -so that they could write
one can know and what one can know-was similarly intensified
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NOTES
matters, see Woodmansee and Osteen (3-50). My treatment of genre draws on the work
of Cohen and Siskin.
2One could also argue that business writing began with Circular to Bankers, the
weekly periodical begun by Henry Burgess in 1828. Because this was a publication of the
association of country banks, however, and not primarily addressed to London bankers,
I do not discuss it here.
3I call these plots "sentimental" because this is a term that Eliot uses to describe
business transactions motivated by emotion and to distinguish between these and the business practices of Guest & Co., which are presumably motivated solely by economic considerations. In book three, chapter seven, the narrator refers to "the cautious firm of Guest &
Co., who did not carry on business on sentimental grounds" (243-44). By implication,
Maggie and the rest of the Tullivers do conduct "business" on "sentimental grounds."
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