Subjectivity Ltd: the discourse of liability in the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 and Gaskell's Cranford. (Elizabeth Gaskell)

With the passage of the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856, "a sort of legal monster" was born; composed of many people, and yet legally considered "as one single person," the limited corporations allowed by the Act vexed the notions of subjectivity then current in economic and legal discourse.(1) In allowing the individual members of corporate bodies to limit their financial responsibility for the debts of those corporations, the Act distinguished sharply between private and public identities--as one contemporary commentator wrote, the investor in a company "and his family" no longer need fear being "stripped of every earthly thing which they possess, even to their very beds."(2) Disengaging and protecting the private elements of subjectivity from the public, the Act paradoxically retained for the corporation as a whole a legal facsimile of the undivided individual. The emergent, limited corporations were thus designed on a model of identity which they themselves, in their very formation, help to antiquate.

In debating the limitation of liability, both the members of Parliament and witnesses before the various Select Commissions appointed to consider the issue drew on novelistic vignettes, emblematic stories of individual characters ruined by their investments in failed joint-stock concerns. Speaking of a Blue Book on the issue, Robert Lowe remarked that "a hurried glance at the contents might make a man fancy he was reading a novel."(3) The Times, in a diatribe against unlimited joint stock firms, accused these concerns of being fictional creations, composed of "imaginary Higgenses, Wiggenses, and Thompkinses," characters created by "a stroke of the pen." In its own richly imaginative fiction, The Times created a house "taken by the multifarious representative of |a~ nascent company in a part of town with which he has the fewest associations." In its physical organization, this house clearly displays the division of public and private within a geographically dispersed economy:

A part of this house is turned into an office, in front of which is inscribed, in gigantic letters, the title of the association, with the important implication that it is only the north, or the south, or the west, district branch of that establishment. The remainder of the edifice is devoted to the comforts and the luxury of the individual who has undertaken the representative functions of many gentleman-in-one.(4)

While journalists and members of Parliament turned to writing fiction, novelists discovered valuable material and productive methodological challenges in this seemingly narrow economic issue. Attending to the effects of impersonal institutional processes on particular people--the consequences of corporate failure for the lives of individual investors, for instance--the controversy made abstract social forces dramatically visible. In thinking through a new correspondence between institutional activity and personal responsibility, participants in the debate revealed problems within available notions of autonomy and accountability; in recalibrating the relation between economic processes and the individuals within those processes, the debate made problematic conventional understandings of individual agency and the value of personal knowledge. Confronting the uneven historical developments that produced these ideological tensions, novelists saw in fiction itself a means to reconcile the dilemmas of their circumstances. Just as parliament imagined a new corporate character into legal existence--an "artificial person" nostalgically modelled on an antiquated, undivided subject--so novelists resolved social antagonisms by means of their more extended narratives.

The collection of concerns outlined here together form a coherent discourse, what I will be calling the discourse of liability. Previous considerations of the historical and literary material surrounding the emergence of the modern corporation have taken that emergence primarily as a synecdoche for social atomization, as a signal event in the transition from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft and as an inaugural moment for the modern global economy. "Nothing which can minister to pleasure or utility from the manufacture and sale of ice in Liverpool to the cultivation of coffee in India has escaped the vigilance of this organized competition," wrote The Times in 1862; and, three years later, the paper exclaimed that the country and even the world as a whole was becoming "one vast mass of impersonalities."(5) Writing about the forms of social relations as present in literary texts, N. N. Feltes similarly describes the increasing impersonally, the "impoverishment," of Victorian community and uses the changes in company law as sign of these distanced and impersonal social relations.(6) More recently, Bruce Robbins has used the limitation of liability as a way of making concrete some of the major transformations of Victorian professional responsibility. "The professional" organizes a range of contradictory movements in mid-Victorian social and literary discourses, uneasily accommodating both an ethical level of analysis, centered on the particular individual, and an evaluation of systemic processes.(7)

Both Feltes and Robbins take their leads from Raymond Williams's analyses of Dickens's novels, and particularly from Williams's assertion that Dickens manages to register increasingly powerful and invisible social processes in visible forms.(8) But, while Dickens's texts underscore some of the central elements in this complex and shifting historical process, they do not allow a full investigation of that process. Elizabeth Gaskell's representation of the women of Cranford, I will argue, permits us to extend our consideration of the implications of the discourse of liability. The sequestration of private experience received its most enduring emblem in the definition of the domestic as feminine; supervising the private world threatened by unlimited liability, women were also seen as especially ignorant of and vulnerable to the depredations of unlimited joint-stock companies. When asked whether "women are rather liable to be deceived in many ways" William Cotton replied, "I am afraid they are. I believe they have been more deceived with regard to railways, mines, joint stock banks, and a variety of other things, than we are aware of."(9) Liable to be deceived, women were often liable for the costs of those deceptions. Taking up the sequestered sphere of the private and displaying its apparent distance from the discourse of liability, Gaskell demonstrates both its implication in and its active resistance to that discourse.

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