Matthew Rowlinson. Real Money and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0521193795. Price: US$89

Matthew Rowlinson’s absorbing and intricately argued new book, Real Money and Romanticism, begins with a deceptively simple epigraph attributed to a long-serving, twentieth-century congressman and then senator from Illinois, Everett L. Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Presumably, Dirksen was referring to the almost inconceivably large sums of money that constitute the U.S. federal budget; as such, the adjective “real” was for him synonymous with “substantial” in the colloquial sense of being significant. For Rowlinson, however, Dirksen’s ironic one-liner serves the double purpose of unintentionally drawing our attention to the substantiality (or lack thereof) of money in its more literal sense. The “billion here” and “billion there” to which Dirksen refers, after all, do not exist anywhere in material form, which is to say, they are not “real” in the usual sense. As insubstantial digital blips, they would appear to register the distance we have traveled from what many of us assume was money’s original, “real” existence: coinage whose face value reflected its metallic composition as measured against some standard (usually gold). Yet as Rowlinson demonstrates throughout his book, money has almost never been “real” in this sense, and the specie that is generally understood to be money’s embodied form has, for most of its history, often been little more than its residue or remainder. Through detailed excurses into money’s historical and theoretical existences, followed by three “case studies” of the influences of the period’s monetary system on the works of Walter Scott, John Keats, and Charles Dickens, Real Money and Romanticism makes a compelling case for the deep psychic as well as social and literary role of money in our lives. Rowlinson’s introductory chapter could and should find its way onto many graduate-level syllabi as an advanced primer on the history of money. It is not without an agenda – Rowlinson clearly finds some accounts more convincing than others – but it is nonetheless balanced and lucid. Perhaps most importantly, it not only traces the history (or rather, competing histories) of money, but explains the stakes of these varying accounts. If money begins its social life as merely a method of recording debts and credits, as in Marc Shell’s account of the development of “the broken coin [symbolon]” as that which “merely provided the necessary symbol of credit or trust” (qtd. in 1), then its eventual slide into becoming itself a part of that transaction represents a falling away from the purity of the original exchange. By contrast, if money has always had a symbolic as well as real dimension – here, Rowlinson invokes the fact that medieval tally sticks, employed to record government debt, were apparently used from their start as instruments of transferrable debt, since creditors could pass their “stock” (the longer piece) to third parties – then the idea of a society free from the original sin of “impersonal” monetary transactions must be abandoned. This leads Rowlinson to revisit the old question of the relationship between gift exchange and monetary exchange. Although these two modes of transaction have often been contrasted, Rowlinson sheds light on an important structural homology: just as gift exchange is always open (insofar as no gift is precisely equal to its counterpart), the appearance of money’s embodiment of economic rationality is always belied by its symbolic remainder or excess. Thus we must forego the illusion, especially popular in times of economic distress (when, as now, the market value of gold shoots up extraordinarily), that symbolic money is only as recent as the demonetization of gold in 1971. Instead, as Rowlinson puts it, “In …