Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian Britain offered to the globe an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism - currency, banking, investment, money markets, business practices and theory, intellectual property legislation - from which the financial systems of the contemporary world emerged. Cultural forms in Victorian Britain transacted with high capitalism in a variety of ways but literary critics interested in economics have traditionally been preoccupied either with writers' hostility to industrial capitalism in terms of its shaping of class, or with the development of consumerism. Victorian Literature and Finance is the first extended study to take seriously the relationships between literary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance. These essays move beyond the examination of literature that was merely impatient with the perceived consequences of capitalism to analyse creative relationships between culture and economic structures. Considering such topics as the nature of currency, women and the culture of investment, the profits of a modern media age, the dramatization of risk on the Victorian stage, the practice of realism in relation to business theory, the culture of speculation at the end of the century, and arguments about the uncomfortable relationship between literary and financial capital, Victorian Literature and Finance sets new terms for understanding and theorizing the relationship between high finance and literary writing in the nineteenth century.

Francis O'Gorman is Reader in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. He has written widely across the Victorian period and his books include Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001); Ruskin and Gender (co-edited with Dinah Birch, 2002), and The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (co-edited with Katherine Turner, 2004). He is currently writing about raising the dead and the enchanting power of words in the nineteenth century. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Companion of the Guild of St George.