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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
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.
Almost every character in novels such as Middlemarch and The Duke's Children is connected to other characters by specified and publicly observed monetary relations. In Middlemarch, for example, Fred Viney is connected to his miserly uncle Featherstone by inheritance; Rosamond Vincy's marriage to Dr. Lydgate comes to be dominated by the issue of debt; Dorothea Brooke's relation to Lydgate, as to Reverend Farebrother, is one of charity; the banker Bulstrode is bound to the disreputable character Raffles (and to his own past deeds) by ill-gotten money and blackmail. While money is by no means the only, and often not the primary, determinant of relationships in Victorian fiction, it is the primary form that social evaluations of relationships assume. So while Dorothea's scandalous second marriage to Will Ladislaw is not about money, it is evaluated by Middlemarch society in terms of money. The same may be samd of Frank Tregear's marriage to Lady Mary Palliser in The Duke's Children (although his motives are arguably more mixed). While Lydgate's motive for twice standing by Bulstrode when the rest of Middlemarch has turned against him is not primarily pecuniary, it is socially evaluated in terms of money, specifically bribery.
Money, then, is the public yardstick of private relationship; part of the ideologieal work of the discourse of money was to make the private public.(4) The danger of gambling, whether with money or relationships, is that it can transpose private loss or gain into the public domain of scandal: on being told by his son Silverbridge that his gambling is "nothing to speak of," the Duke of Omnium replies, "Nothing to speak of is so apt to grow into that which has to be spoken of."(5) The very same sort of risks are shown in Victorian fiction to exist in relation to marriage, which never is considered entirely apart from issues of money. Indeed, the discourse of money and the discourse of marriage are alike in that they each operate to regulate romantic desires that were perceived as dangerous. Consider for example the way that the issue of money moderates the matrimonial intentions of Frank Tregear and Lady Mabel Grex in The Duke's Children or Fred Vincy and Mary Garth in Middlemarch. In particular, I will argue that the figure of gambling comes to function in Victorian fiction as a medium of expression for human desire, such that many relationships in novels like Middlemarch and The Duke's Children are shown to teeter between the gamble of romance and the romance of gambling.
The pervasiveness of the discourse of money in Victorian fiction and in Victorian society may in part be a result of the heterogeneity of money. Money comes and goes in many forms, and the forms of monetary relationship "diversified" significantly during the first half of the nineteenth century, paralleling the following well-known trends: 1) the maturation of the banking profession, as indicated by the rise in the number of incorporations and the increased sophistication of financing; 2) the institutionalization of the stock exchange in its current form and the popularization of financial speculation, as exemplified by the "Railway Mania" of the 1840s; 3) the professionalization of gambling, as represented by the rise to prominence of gentlemen's "gambling hells," the commercialization of horse racing, the marked increase in both on-track (upper-class) and off-track (lower-class) betting, and, in general, the replacement of the gentlemanly wager by the professional bookmaker; and, 4) the general increase in the rate of financial circulation, particularly through speculation and gambling, due to advances in transportation and communication technology.[6] Victorian fiction thoroughly records and responds to such developments as these, just as it shapes the discourses that constituted them. As a result, wealth is circulated in Victorian novels--gained, earned, lost or given--through at least nine different social forms: inheritance and dispossession; marriage; individual labor; charity; financial speculation; debt; bankruptcy (generally as an outcome of speculation, debt or gambling); foul play, particularly bribery and blackmail; and, not the least among these, gambling.
Different forms of money come with different valuations in Victorian novels. It can be argued that one of the primary social functions of the discourse of money is to mediate between various forms of wealth, between, in effect, "good" money and "bad" money. The "bad" forms--among which gambling is exemplary--are designated as such in relation to identifiable ideological interests. One trademark of the ascending nineteenth-century middle-class ideology was (as it still is) the universalization of a definition of culture as that which transcends social difference, politics and class.[7] The advantage of erasing class in particular as a meaningful distinction was twofold: it eased upward social mobility for the middle classes by replacing aristocratic status boundaries with financial, educational or meritocratic standards of gentlemanliness (as exemplified by Frank Tregear and Mr. Boncassen in The Duke's Children and, parodically, the Veneerings and the Podsnaps in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend); and, 2) it applied the socially controlling--not to mention profitable--middle-class values of hard work and self-denial to the lower classes, while at the same time obscuring historical inequalities by offering the ideal of "equality" as compensation for disruptive social changes. Two observations follow from this. First, in order to be effective, embourgeiosement had to operate bi-directionally on both the upper and the lower classes. It is for this reason that the aristocratic figure of the gentleman and its counterpart, the figure of the idle poor, are both so problematic in Victorian fiction. Victorian novels strive to mediate these two figures, and the distinction between good money and bad money is used for this purpose. Secondly, the discourse of work was pivotal in distinguishing good from bad, in character as in money. Gambling, which is one of the terms most frequently opposed to work, served particularly as a marker of this distinction. I will argue that it is within the discourse of gambling that the issues of monetary value and personal worth become enmeshed. More generally, the image of financial speculation comes to be associated disturbingly with moral and metaphysical speculations. As a result, value--as both the foundation of economic exchange and the estimation of individual character--threatens to be revealed as depending precariously on nothing but human desire.
II
Very good indeed, my Lord Duke; very good indeed! Ha, ha, ha!-all horses have heads and all have tails! Heads and Tails.
--Major Tifto, The Duke's Children
It was commonplace to observe, prior to the Victorian era, that gambling brought different classes together at race tracks, gambling establishments, and other venues of popular entertainment. By the time of The Duke's Children, one of the chief dangers of gambling was considered to be its proximity to the lower classes. For example, while Silverbridge believes that he can avoid "the fouls and rascals" who bet along side of the lords at the Derby, he does mix with them and does bet on the horse in which he owns a "share" with Major Tifto, eventually "plunging" for a loss of 70,000 pounds (DC, 147)....
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