Sara Malton. Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN: 978023061228. Price: US$80.00/£45.00

Of late, the field of Victorian studies has evinced a renewed interest in the impact of economics and finance on nineteenth-century literature and culture. Examples of this trend include Gail Turley Houston’s From Dickens to Dracula (2005); Kathleen Blake’s The Pleasures of Benthamism (2009); and Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt’s anthology, Victorian Investments (2009). Sara Malton’s compelling study Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture joins this discussion by examining the central role of economic deception in the realms of finance, literary narrative, and personal identity. In her introduction, Malton attests that she will not use forgery as an all-encompassing term to describe betrayal in the novel, but instead will treat it as a historically specific practice that presented “acute challenges to deeply held cultural beliefs about the primacy of individuality, identity, and origins” (15). Through a diachronic study of literary and nonfictional texts from the 1840s to the fin de siècle, she makes a persuasive case for the multifaceted role of financial forgery in the Victorian period. Malton takes a two-pronged approach to her topic, examining forgery in terms of its deceptiveness and its longstanding associations with capital punishment (until the 1832 and 1837 Forgery Acts, the crime was punishable by death). Malton argues that this legislative aspect of forgery was instrumental to its traumatic associations throughout the century. It represented an affront to the most “hallowed Victorian values: the primacy of labor and the value ascribed to an ethos of industry and deferred gratification; the knowledge of cultural and individual history; the ability to acquire such knowledge through visual signs; and the position of origins as stable and culturally determinant” (3). Malton’s book consists of four chapters, framed by a contextualizing introduction and a forward-looking conclusion that considers forgery from a modernist perspective. Drawing on Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), the first chapter discusses forgery in relation to capital punishment. Both texts are haunted by the “image of the forger at the gallows” (15), a specter from the past that simultaneously points to the destabilizing aspects of forgery and signals the complicity of legal and financial institutions in perpetuating this crime and meting out violent forms of retribution to contain it. While Malton might have pushed a little further on the intersections of forgery and corporeal violence, she does make the strong case that the cultural memory of the severe punishment allotted to forgers implicated England’s financial system. This argument is particularly convincing in her discussion of The Woman in White and Collins’s 1858 fictional biography of the forger Henry Fauntleroy, who had blamed the bank of England for his crimes. In my view, Malton’s second chapter—on forgery and white-collar crimes in the nineteenth century—is the strongest in the volume. It offers an excellent account of the tension between narratives of fallen womanhood and male forgery in Elisabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) and Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857). These texts function through the “pairing of a male, financial forger and a female ‘forger’ of sorts, who is driven into schemes of concealment by both emotional and economic imperatives” (66). Malton’s analysis of the parallels between biological and financial illegitimacy in Ruth effectively foregrounds the connection between economic forgeries and the production of “bastard” children. The third and fourth chapters share the common purpose of exploring financial forgery in light of the great fears—and expectations—about the decline in economic and social values which marked the latter half of the nineteenth century. Chapter three offers insightful readings of a group of fictional texts that identify England’s imperial and foreign interventions as one of the root …