The Victorian discourse of gambling: speculations on 'Middlemarch' and 'The Duke's Children.'

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 within that discourse. The figure of gambling is used to trace connections at a broader level between the discourse of money and two other Victorian discourses: marriage and work. Gambling is analyzed as that which hinds together and problematizes this central trinity of Victorian concerns.