a1 University of Colorado at Denver

HARDLY A CHAPTER goes by in novels like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860) or Our Mutual Friend (1864) or Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) or The Way We Live Now (1875) without money being invoked. Generations of critics have noted that almost every relationship between characters comes with a pound sign attached. Thus The Last Chronicle of Barset belies its most esteemed and truthful character, Mr. Harding, when he says, “Money is worth thinking of, but it is not worth very much thought” (447; ch. 49). He is correct to the extent that money alone fails to do justice to the complexity of most of the relationships in the novel. In the first place, money is only a component of a broader and more pervasive set of connections that can be described as exchanges of capital. Indeed, as this essay shows in the case of The Last Chronicle of Barset, if one stands back from more than a few novels of the mid-Victorian decades, one can see that the intersections and progressions of fictional lives that they portray are couched within a larger pattern of interaction and exchange of which capital is the protagonist. 1 If this formulation seems extreme, it is only one step beyond the arguments of recent studies that money is “perhaps the most common theme in nineteenth-century fiction” (Vernon 14) or that “the universal, leveling power of money is a theme intrinsic to, perhaps even definitive of, the novel form itself” (Brantlinger 23). The intensity of the nineteenth-century novelistic fascination with money in particular and capital in general can be explained in part by demonstrating, as Mary Poovey and James Thompson respectively have, that novelistic discourses emerged in eighteenth-century Britain in conjunction with the emergence of the discourses of political economy. Similarly, the fact that the mid-Victorian decades in particular produced such a large number of works organized around exchanges of capital is understandable in relationship to historical developments within capitalism. I have in mind especially the finalization in the 1830s of the long transition from gold to paper – from wealth as treasure to the exchange of capital – and the complete formalization in the first half of the nineteenth century of the central institutions of finance capitalism, namely the joint-stock company and the stock market. 2 These contextual factors set the stage on which mid-Victorian novels in particular struggled to interpret and re-express the meaning of human relationship for a society increasingly organized by and obsessed with exchanges of capital. The first goal of this essay is to describe, more thoroughly and precisely than has been done to date, exactly how capital circulates through mid-Victorian novels, taking The Last Chronicle of Barset as a representative case. The second goal is to demonstrate how exchanges of capital are not only thematically significant but actually constitute the plot structure of this novel. Finally, the third purpose is to challenge certain recent critical arguments that continue to posit – even while critiquing – a separation in the nineteenth century of the domains of the novel and of political economy, a separation that reproduces the Victorian notion of “separate spheres” and underestimates the cultural work of mid-Victorian novels.

Footnotes

1 Such a reading is implicit, if not explicit, in recent studies that analyze representations of circulation, whether of money, gossip, blood, or language itself. I am thinking particularly of Beer, Shell, Smart, and Trotter.

2 I mark this finalization with the standardizing of currency on the Bank of England note in 1833; only in 1844 were other British banks banned from issuing their own notes (Vernon 32). The London Stock Exchange was established in its modern institutional form in 1802 (Baskin 207). Also indicative of the period is that “[t]here were eight million pounds more paper money in circulation in 1825 than in 1823, with no corresponding increase in trade and industry to justify it”; at the same time, “there had developed a vast extension of private credit – the ‘new currency of the age’ – and the market was flooded with bills of exchange, promissory notes, and similar paper” (Russell 45). I of course am not claiming that paper money or stock trading did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. Rather, I am claiming that finance capitalism reached society-wide dissemination in the first half of the nineteenth century and only then took on the institutional forms that still are in place in the twenty-first century. As Ermarth remarks in this regard: “Market-places may be old; but the market-system, which ‘is a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society’ is a fairly recent invention, as new as the humanist conception of the species ‘man’, as new as ‘the profit motive’, and as new as the idea of gain conceived in terms of capital” (121).

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Franklin, J. Jeffrey "The Victorian Discourse of Gambling: Speculations on Middlemarch and The Duke's Children"
ELH - Volume 61, Number 4, Winter 1994, pp. 899-921
The Johns Hopkins University Press

Excerpt

    When I was young, people called me a gambler. As the scale of my operations increased I became known as a speculator. Now I am called a banker. But I have been doing the same thing all the time.

    -- Sir Earnest Cassel, Banker to Edward VII 1

    At a time when the poor were existing on wages that could be counted in shillings per week rather than pounds, and women could be employed at a penny an hour in the Welsh coal-mines, Harry Hastings lost more than one hundred thousand pounds in the two- and-a-half minutes in which it took to run the Derby.

    -- Henry Blyth, Hell and Hazard 2

I

The discourse of money is so ubiquitous in the British Victorian novel that any analysis of it runs the risk, on the one hand, of becoming trivial and, on the other hand, of becoming embroiled in the broadest and most pressing issues of the nineteenth century. One such issue that cannot be avoided is the bourgeois revolution, the widely noted social paradigm shift from the predominantly aristocratic, status-based ideologies of the eighteenth century to the Whig ideologies of commerce and work that came to dominate the nineteenth century. 3 Thus it may not be surprising that the readings of George Eliot's Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope's The Duke's Children offered here find the discourse of money to be a primary vehicle for the progressive or liberal ideologies of the ascending middle class. However, I move beyond this general, speculative level toward more specific inquiries: exactly how is money represented in these novels, and how might those representations be read in relation to the ways in which subjects and social institutions were constructed and served? The analysis concentrates on the figure of gambling as a component of the discourse of money, and gambling is shown to link together all other components...

Franklin, J. Jeffrey "The Life of the Buddha in Victorian England"
ELH - Volume 72, Number 4, Winter 2005, pp. 941-974
The Johns Hopkins University Press

Excerpt
ELH 72.4 (2005) 941-974
[Access article in PDF]
J. Jeffrey Franklin
I. Competing Victorian Buddhas

Thousands of late-Victorian Britons went about with images of the Buddha floating in their heads. While this may sound like a statement out of Lewis Carroll (who indeed alludes to Buddhism in the Alice books) it is nonetheless a fact, if for no other reason than that three book-length poems recounting the life of the Buddha were published in London in the 1870s and 1880s: Richard Phillips's The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed: An Epic (1871), Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Being The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Büddhism (1879), and Sidney Arthur Alexander's much briefer verse narrative, Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha (1887), which won the Newdigate Prize that year at Oxford.1 But there were other reasons; these verse narratives represent the culmination of a trend of swelling interest in the West in Buddhism, which commenced in the 1830s, matured as the study of Comparative Religion in the 1860s, peaked in the popular culture of London's "Buddhism-steeped Nineties," and then submerged until resurfacing in the New Age movement of the 1960s.2 Arnold's poem is particularly representative of this trend. It not only was a bestseller but a cultural phenomenon in England, as well as in America and India. Though it has received scant critical attention since the nineteenth century, "[i]mmediately after its first publication in 1879 it became one of the most popular long Victorian poems; its author . . . achieved overnight fame throughout the English-speaking world, and for two or three decades the poem exercised an intellectual and religious influence out of...

Rosdeitcher, Elizabeth "Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (review)"
Victorian Studies - Volume 43, Number 2, Winter 2001, pp. 317-319
Indiana University Press

Excerpt

Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often reach one of two by-now-familiar conclusions with respect to the political effects of cultural forms. Victorian novels, for instance, can either consolidate middle-class institutions or challenge them, recuperate the dominant ideology or subvert it. They can be authoritarian or democratic, conservative or populist, produce "good" subjects or "bad" subjects. In Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, J. Jeffrey Franklin cuts across this political divide to describe the workings of the Victorian novel as contradictory and ambivalent, capable of serving opposed political ends simultaneously. He performs a subtle balancing act [End Page 317] between the extremes of recuperation and subversion, yet ultimately, and very convincingly, tips the scales in favor of realism's subversive capacity.

Serious Play tells the story of realism and Victorian culture from the vantage point of the concept of play. It offers a detailed analysis of the function of play in three different spheres of nineteenth-century British culture--gambling, theater, and aesthetic theory--as they figure broadly within the culture and as they are represented in the realist fiction that came to predominate in a marketplace of competing cultural forms and discourses. Integral to each discussion are persuasive readings of eight novels by Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace...

THE COUNTER-INVASION OF BRITAIN BY BUDDHISM IN MARIE CORELLI'S A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS AND H. RIDER HAGGARD'S AYESHA: THE RETURN OF SHE
J. Jeffrey Franklin a1
a1 University of Colorado at Denver

PRIOR TO THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, Europeans had heard of Buddhism, if at all, as an aside in tales of the exotic Orient in which the Buddha figured as a minor Hindu deity or a celestial sun god. Eastern thought had trickled back toward the seats of Western empires for centuries along the same routes used for tea and opium, but serious engagement with that thought only began in the late eighteenth century with translations of the Bhagavadgita, and systematic study of Eastern sacred texts did not begin in France, Germany, and England until around the 1820s. 1 As late as the 1860s, but rapidly at that point, Buddhism “hit” Europe, becoming a wide-spread topic that peaked in London's “Buddhism-steeped Nineties” and then declined after the turn of the century (Caracciolo 30). 2 One indicator of burgeoning British interest was the publication in the last three decades of the century of at least three book-length poems recounting the life of Buddha. In particular, Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Being The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Büddhism (1879) became a best-seller in Europe, India, and America and was credited with inspiring conversions to Buddhism, as well as with influencing Rudyard Kipling's creation of the character of the Teshoo Lama in Kim (1901). 3 The initial premise of this essay is that through the latter decades of the century themes and figures drawn in part or whole from Buddhism increasingly made their way into British literary discourse. This appears to be especially true of “sensational” and “romance” novels, a fact significant in itself for understanding how Buddhism filtered into British culture (though full consideration of the relationship between those sub-genres and Eastern thought will have to await another occasion). But to the extent that one can detect such concepts as reincarnation, karma, and nirvana, for instance, in works of literature of the time, they generally are hybridized with Christian, Gnostic, Rosicrucian, alchemical, Greek pantheistic, ancient Egyptian, and other occult figures. This hybridization is another significant aspect of the ways in which Victorians struggled to construct a Buddhism in their own image. Buddhism pervaded late nineteenth-century European thought, though diffusely. It was woven into the complex fabric of discourses concerning empire, the crisis in Christianity (recently exacerbated by Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Nietzsche, among others), and the general perception that spirituality had come under increasing threat in a society dominated by the materialism of the market and the rationality of science. 4

Footnotes

1 I draw here and throughout on a number of historical studies, in particular Almond, Batchelor, Lopez, and Welbon. As Almond notes, it was only in the first half of the century “that the term ‘Buddha’ (‘Buddoo’, ‘Bouddha’, ‘Boudhou’, etc.) began to gain currency… and that the term ‘Buddhism’ first made its appearance in English in the scholarly journals which appeared, in part at least, as a consequence of the developing imperial interest of both England and France in the Orient“ (7). The first English study of Buddhism that I have found is Upham (1829).

2 This claim is supported by the fact that a search of the PCI (Periodicals Content Index) database for articles published with “Buddha” or “Buddhism” in the title reveals this pattern: 3 in the period 1840–50; 0 in 1851–60; 13 in 1861–70; 74 in 1871–80; 148 in 1881–90; 367 in 1891–1900; 287 in 1901–10; and 243 in 1911–20.

3 The other two poems I refer to are Philips's The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed: An Epic (1871) and Alexander's Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha (1887), which was the Newdigate Prize poem at Oxford in 1887. The most famous conversion attributed to reading The Light of Asia was of Charles Bennett, who in 1901 became Ananda Metteyya, the first British Buddhist monk. As Humphreys puts it in The Development of Buddhism in England, Bennett, “like many before him and untold thousands since, found that a new world of spiritual adventure was opened before his eyes” by The Light of Asia (13). On Arnold's influence on Kipling, see Whitlark “Nineteenth-Century ‘Nirvana Talk.’”

4 On the influence of Buddhism on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see Welbon and Schwab, as well as analysis in Dumoulin.