Jaffe, Audrey. The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5171-3. Price: US $24.95 (paper)

As Audrey Jaffe demonstrates in The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph, the economic looms large in Victorian studies as well as in contemporary thought and politics, with cultural and political figures alike scrambling to devise plausible, reassuring narratives of the financial present and future. Current western societies, Jaffe compellingly argues, inherit from their nineteenth-century predecessors a fixation on quantifying distinctions between the reliable investor and the irresponsible speculator, legitimate and illegitimate forms of market activity, and the vexed relation between an economy of personal, emotional well-being or happiness and a materialist economy. However, the distinction between happiness and economic measures proves negligible, as does the line between the “pulse of the people” and the excitable stock market (53). The average, the public, and the stock market all get produced simultaneously as comparative measures. We are interpolated, but imagine ourselves not to be like everyone else. We respond to and influence the fluctuating money market (at once the measure of the public pulse and its pace setter) in fairly predictable ways, in part acting on its excitements, while simultaneously affecting them with our own. We purport to separate happiness from economics, but measure our happiness by attaining what others also want, an affective state that mimics the acquisitiveness of market dynamics. We are constituted by the major fictions and ideologies of our time (the novel, the stock market) but, of course, bring them into being and lend them vitality. What impresses the reader of Jaffe’s work here—and elsewhere— is its succinctness in honing in on a particular issue and its ability to span past and present. In four compact chapters, Jaffe traces the imbrication of cultural productions (especially the novel) with the market economy, noting their shared investment in circulating and reifying abstracts like the “average.” Both deploy a technique that Jaffe terms “distant reading,” in which the average emerges as an “imaginary mid point . . . devised to anchor the system” (9). The novel with its characterological system of averages and exceptions, as much as the stock market graph and ticker, aim to make comprehensible a welter of differences and emotions that, by definition, exceed the predictable or the rational. The first chapter considers the “relentlessly comparative” characterization of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) and the undercurrent of “likeness anxiety” that pervades the novel, which constructs a host of peripheral, ordinary characters as a backdrop for the rare exception (40). In the second chapter, Jaffe analyzes the Victorian drive to legitimize the stock exchange through narratives that convert risk-taking and speculation into matters of moral management and perspicacious readings of character. While all stock market activity initially bore the stamp of illegitimacy, increasingly public narratives (such as investment advice manuals) sought to minimize the sheer unpredictability of activities that, Jaffe avers, most resemble gambling. These narratives urged, instead, the necessity of making a clear distinction between the solid, dependable investor—who manages the money of others as carefully as he restrains his emotions, eschewing all excitability—and the untrustworthy jobber, or speculator: a self-enriching, emotionally unstable figure. These themes recur in novels such as Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855-57) (the subject of Chapter 2) and Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1875-76) (the subject of Chapter 3), both of which draw their energy from the dramatic rise and fall of the stock market, while simultaneously supplying cautionary tales about the speculator’s financial and emotional irregularities. Not only must one learn to read character astutely, but one must also make prudent emotional investments to avoid taint by association. Jaffe’s fourth and final chapter traces the …