Francis O’Gorman, ed. Victorian Literature and Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0199281923. Price: US$99

After O’Gorman’s introduction, Nicholas Shrimpton’s wide-ranging essay traces the evolving meanings of money in the nineteenth century. Through the 1840s, bankruptcies made money seem highly unstable and also made debt a frequent theme among novelists. “By the 1870s, with other countries belatedly following Britain’s example in shifting from bimetallism to the gold standard, it was possible to feel less anxious about money” (25). Shrimpton notes how often and exactly Victorian novelists balanced their books with precise accounts of characters’ incomes and debts. He also stresses how often the novelists criticize Mammonism, while rewarding their virtuous characters with good incomes and inheritances. Money is bad if you want it too much; money is good if you acquire it either innocently or through hard work. He cites Douglas Jerrold’s 1848-49 fantasy, A Man Made of Money, in which the protagonist is a modern Midas who, instead of turning everything into gold, turns himself into paper money. Next, Gordon Bigelow analyzes the economics of Isaac Butt and Thomas De Quincey as adumbrating marginal utility and neoliberal “free” marketism. Yet Butt and De Quincey were attempting conservative, “romantic” revisions of Ricardo and early liberal economics. Irishman Butt’s 1833 Chapters of College Romance and De Quincey’s literary writings provide a basis for Bigelow’s claim that they both practiced “gothic economics,” because they both saw value based not on labor or on any material foundation, but on the “occult” desires of the consumer. Perhaps the main surprise isn’t that Butt and De Quincey practiced “gothic economics,” but that economists from W. S. Jevons through Milton Friedman have claimed that the consumer is an entirely rational actor in the marketplace, not some ghostly emanation of an “occult” interiority. The next two essays, Catherine Seville’s on Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Alison Chapman’s on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, show these authors expressing uneasiness in their dealings with copyright, publishers, popularity, and money. Both essays carefully survey the histories of the authors confronting their vexed relations with making an income from writing, revealing some of the rifts between monetary and literary value. “My husband and I are averse generally to the periodical vehicle of publication,” wrote Barrett Browning in 1861 (74), but they did it anyway. “Such tensions should not be dismissed as mere inconsistency, snobbishness, or hypocrisy,” Seville declares, but they “reveal the ambivalent relationship between author and market” (72) Jane Moody’s examination of “the drama of capital” on the Victorian stage demonstrates how “depictions of fraudulent joint-stock companies, deceitful promoters, and collapsing banks cleverly exploited the uncertain economy of the theatre’s own mimetic conditions” (91). Of the many plays that dealt with financial matters, Moody concentrates on George Henry Lewes’s The Game of Speculation (1851), Tom Taylor’s Still Waters Run Deep (1855), Anthony Hope Hawkins’s The Price of Empire (1896), W. S. Gilbert’s Utopia, Ltd. (1893), and Dion Boucicault’s The Poor of New York (1857). “Whereas stock market crashes taught investors painfully real lessons about the folly of investing in ‘ludicrous’ schemes,” Moody writes, “the theatre identified the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate risk as a rich arena for ludic exploration” (97). While the novel has been viewed as “the definitive genre of capital,” the theater, as a cultural form based on illusion and spectacle, “acquired a special kind of explanatory power in the age of high capital” (92). In her analysis of Victorian women as investors in both “fact and fiction,” Nancy Henry questions “the ideology of separate spheres,” public for men and private for women. From the 1700s forward, women made up substantial minorities among investors in the Bank of England, the East India Company, and …