| "The public know [sic] too much in the days when a stockbroker is essential to every novel and contangos are woven into love-tales. The special knowledge which was formerly hidden in the breast of the financial patrician has now become popularized."---G. Herbert Stutfield, 1889;In the aftermath of England's "Railway Mania" in the 1840s, it became commonplace to equate stock market speculation with gambling. Yet opinion had changed so dramatically by the end of the century that the Quarterly Review could confidently declare, "Though speculation may lead to rashness and be censurable, it is not gambling." This project considers how and why the discourses of gambling and stock market speculation diverged over the second half of the nineteenth century, and the cultural and historical changes this shift encompasses. My inquiry begins with a brief history of the stock market and of gambling practices in nineteenth-century England, followed by a study of the representations of both spheres of activity in the periodical press from 1850 to 1900. Detailed discussions of three Victorian novels---Little Dorrit, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now---follow.;Each of these novels figures the intersection between gambling and the stock market as the site for complex negotiations around changing perceptions of risk, value, and worth in Victorian society. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens explores issues of culpability and responsibility through the figure of the speculator, Merdle, and his surrogate, Arthur Clennam. By accepting the punishment that Merdle's suicide threatens to forestall, Arthur not only expiates the guilt he feels over his parents' rapacious financial practices, he enables speculation to be domesticated and integrated back into the commercial realm. Whereas Little Dorrit provides some broad outlines of the "speculation plot" that gained currency in 1840s and 1850s, my discussion of Middlemarch takes a closer look at contemporary gambling rhetoric, particularly as it is employed by George Eliot to convey the general economic instability experienced during the nineteenth century. Finally, I consider Anthony Trollope's engagement with the nineteenth-century debate over limited liability in The Way We Live Now. In particular, I examine how Trollope modifies and reworks the conventional rhetoric associated with speculation, adapting it to the changing financial and cultural realities of the late nineteenth century. The resulting text reflects both the extent to which stock investment and speculation had been normalized in mainstream Victorian society and the social convulsions that this integration produced. In each case, I explore how the novel contributed to the acceptance of the stock market as a legitimate social institution in Victorian England, and the ways it betrayed continued ambivalence about both the stock market and its members. |
