Context in Literary and Cultural Studies (2025)

Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde

2009

I wish to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for its generous support of my research for this project. I also thank Saint Mary's Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research for its provision of a grant in aid of research, and I extend my gratitude to the archivists at the Bank of England Archives for their gracious assistance. It has been my extreme good fortune to have received the help and encouragement of so many inspiring scholars during my work on this project. Chief among them is Jill L. Matus, to whom I am greatly indebted for this book's completion and for so much more. Her guidance and support has been instrumental to my intellectual growth from the earliest days of my work, and she continues to provide me with an admirable model of scholarly excellence and collegiality. Jim Adams's generosity knows no bounds, and I am grateful to have had the benefit of his exemplary counsel during a critical point in this book's development. I owe a great deal to Alan Bewell, Garry Leonard, and John Reibetanz, each of whom has been exceptionally giving of his time, knowledge, and enthusiasm. Christopher Keep has had a greater inf luence on my work than he perhaps knows, and I thank him for it. I also wish to thank the following individuals for their attention to various parts of this book during its development:

Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: characterizing the swindler as an important cultural and organizational figure

Culture and Organization

The current paper revisits Anthony Trollope's Victorian novel, The Way We Live Now, focusing on the main character of Augustus Melmotte. The paper analyzes the novel and its literary figure of a corrupt financier or swindler, drawing out theoretical and pedagogical contributions for organizational and management research. Contributions are framed in terms of imaginative organizational role archetypes embodied in swindler characterizations, swindlers' institutional work across societal elites, and the dark sides and grey areas associated with swindlers' organizational and financial misconduct. The rise and fall of Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's Victorian English society thus finds its cultural parallels today in outsiders who challenge financial and political elites and the status quo, at high personal risk to themselves and others complicit in their schemes. The important organizational conclusions concern the importance of recognizing dynamic figures that seize immense power over organizational, financial and political cultures.

Raving at Usurers: Anti-Finance and the Ethics of Uncertainty in England, 1690–1750 by Dwight Codr

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2017

Victorian Fiction and Finance

2017

In this chapter, I argue that integrating the rise of finance into Victorian literature courses allows students to recognize how literature captures abstract historical and economic shifts at the level of human experience, and to reflect critically on the literature using their own experiences with the modern credit economy. By discussing novels explicitly or implicitly engaged with the Victorian credit economy, I explore how connecting Victorian experiences of financialization to their effects in everyday life—from how people lived and worked to the ways in which rationalization and calculation affected their understanding of their social world—makes finance a crucial topic in the literature classroom.

Poovey Mary, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain

Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, 2011

Review Essay for "Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare" and "The Loss of the 'Trades Increase': An Early Modern Maritime Catastrophe

Shakespeare Quarterly, 2022

These two books are ethically inflected literary studies of early modern economic culture within England’s mercantile and financial networks. Taken to- gether, they are welcome evidence of the sustained vitality of economic literary criticism, both rhetorical and historical. Each demonstrates the urgency of revis- ing certain assumptions in this well-worn field: for Kolb, this means replacing networks of obligation with the financialization of social indeterminacy; for Barbour, the unremitting wages of empire replace the triumphal narrative of English global commerce. These books also demonstrate what kind of criticism can be written now and by whom, in a historical moment marked by the ever- more-apparent permanence of catastrophic social and economic upheavals once imagined as temporary, or at least manageable. The one system more robust and ubiquitous than ever is finance, specifically the global corporate kind that can, as Barbour describes, “turn tragedy into an engine of capital accumulation” (272), propped up by an exploitative, paradoxical, collective belief in the credit and debt Kolb reveals as at once “a quantifiable entity, and a fiction” (197). Kolb and Barbour suggest that an anti-capitalist ethics can be found animating early modern fictions—both dramatic and historical—through insistence not on twenty-first-century economic theory’s “rational actors,” but on a self-aware con- struction of a moral economic self that is often conflicting, continuously revised, and critically awake to indeterminacy and failure.

Has a Gang of Nineteenth-Century Literary Scammers Fooled Academia to this Very Day?

A pattern of criminal plagiarism is suggested for the 19th century, which includes a number of famous authors. The phenomenon is examined from the perspective of the author's exploration of obscure Victorian authors Mathew Franklin Whittier and his wife Abby Poyen Whittier.

Authors and other Criminals: Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Literature Compass, 2004

In this essay on eighteenth-century authorship, Kathryn Temple sketches a history of authorship from the perspective of the cultural, regional, and national conflicts that led to modern authorship's emergence. Arguing that the figure of the modern author arose in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, not from an uncontested common moral and ethical center, but from a maelstrom of conflicting practices and standards emanating from an amazingly varied array of national, class, and gendered sources, she suggests that ‘literary scandals’ played a special role in the construction of a nationalized author in that they brought high, low, and official juridical culture together to construe what authorship would come to mean in the modern world.

Feelings and Finance, as Based on Two Literary Works

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

In this article a French bank of 1850s in Paris is compared with an American one in an unknown state in the United States of America in 1970s. The French bank depicted by Zola for Paris and the American bank thought up by Arthur Hailey are, despite the time and geography differences, very similar in their functions. The former is only more deeply embedded in the stock exchange while the latter is essentially dependent upon loans made possible thanks to depositors. A war of nerves and extreme stress underline the themes of both of those superb novels.

Recountings: On Dickens’s Financial Memory

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2012

which the institutionalization of the banking system informed the cultural experience-and cultural production-of nineteenth-century Britain.1 Such thinking of course extends well beyond the bounds of both that period and those of academic enquiry. I point, for instance, to a recent marketing campaign by ing direct, which compels us to think in similar terms about the bank's construction in our own age. In ing's 2012 "Old Ways" television commercial, a central feature of its new "Forward Banking" campaign, the viewer enters a looming, grey cavernous space, a bank, which is emptied of employees and customers and, it seems, of its cultural significance as well.2 In this fascinating piece of revisionism, the bank's conventional iconography-the deposit slip; the pen with the chain attached; the limited banking hours, marked on an archaic sign; the water cooler, stale coffee, and free donuts; the velvet ropes; and, above all, the banker's green lamp-are, literally, obliterated, exploding one by one before our eyes. Endless reams of paper reminiscent of Dickens's Circumlocution Office rain down across this financial sepulchre and are replaced, as we move to the next shot and the comfortable, easy-chair bank of today, by the relaxed coffee-sipping individual, happily reviewing his financials on his smooth functioning iPad at his local "ing direct Café. " In rendering such images and objects of the banking realm so viscerally obsolescent, ing taps into a critical aspect of shared cultural memory: this commercial urgently reminds us of the degree to which banking, as a physical experience, had once been bound up with individual and daily life, and perhaps, more importantly, it reminds us of just how much of it we have forgotten. And as if the bank's connection to our collective memory were not plain enough from the images on screen, the nostalgic tones of Edith Piaff are called in to overstate the case: "It's all paid for, wiped out, and forgotten, " she sings in her mournfully defiant "Je Ne Regrette Rien. " What ing is doing here is attempting to revise, but not altogether alter, our conception of banking as intensely personal, tactile, and experiential. Such a construction of the bank can likewise be found, I would contend, in nineteenth-century British culture. Throughout the century, the period's fiction charts an increasing-if tentative-acceptance of the bank's role as 1 See for instance Patrick Brantlinger (1996), Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, Gail Turley Houston, and Gordon Bigelow. On the Bank of England in this period in particular, see Alec Cairncross, David Kynaston, and Richard Roberts. Poovey (2003) offers a useful overview of the development of the financial system in the nineteenth century.