Description
Book SynopsisOffers ways of understanding the relationship between the financial system in Great Britain and other aspects of Victorian society and culture.
Trade ReviewThis is a generous collection in every sense of the term, commendable for the breadth of its voices and for the wealth of information it offers both newcomers to and veterans of the study of Victorian finance. . . . Assembling contributions from top scholars in history and literature, Henry and Schmitt offer us a diverse and highly readable volume. Vol. 50, No. 3, July 2011
* Journal of British Studies *
Serious, ample, and provocative, the essays are an important addition to the literature of nineteenth-century finance and offer constructive consideration of a fundamental feature of the practice and myths of capitalism as we continue to live with and in them. Vol. 52, No. 1
* Victorian Studies *
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Finance, Capital, Culture Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt
Part 1. A Prehistory of Victorian Investment
1. "Signum Rememorativum, Demonstrativum, Prognostikon": Finance Capital, the Atlantic, and Slavery Ian Baucom
Part 2. Cultures of Investment
2. Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment Mary Poovey
3. The First Fund Managers: Life Insurance Bonuses in Victorian Britain Timothy Alborn
4. Limited Liability, Market Democracy, and the Social Organization of Production in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain Donna Loftus
5. Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England David C. Itzkowitz
6. Ladies of the Ticker: Women, Investment, and Fraud in England and America, 1850–1930 George Robb
Part 3. Fictions of Investment
7. Trollope in the Stock Market: Irrational Exuberance and The Prime Minister Audrey Jaffe
8. "Rushing into Eternity": Suicide and Finance in Victorian Fiction Nancy Henry
9. Rumor, Shares, and Novelistic Form: Joseph Conrad's Nostromo Cannon Schmitt
Afterword Martin Daunton
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
