Personal business: Character and commerce in Victorian literature and culture (Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope)

This dissertation examines the personal side of business culture in the Victorian period: the way business was embedded in social and familial relationships and performed by individuals who needed to represent themselves to partners, employers and employees, customers, competitors, investors, creditors, and so forth. Rather than seeing personal business as an anachronistic holdover in a modernizing age most typified by "impersonal" and "abstract" forms, I suggest that it was a particularly Victorian phenomenon and actively under construction. The shapes this personalism took centered primarily on the quintessentially Victorian concept of character: from the emphasis on character knowledge as a moral safeguard for the economy, to the production of character narratives to maintain income and credit, to the development of business celebrity, which simultaneously elevated and emptied out earlier concepts of character. Generating models for reading and representing personal character that could be deployed in business organizations and contexts ranging from the family firm to the joint-stock railway company, Victorian authors helped fashion the terms of personal business that shaped their epoch's economic and social life. In particular, I argue that the realist notions of character developed in the Victorian novel arose as a response to the challenges of emergent capitalism. But as business borrowed principles of character reading and writing from literary forms, I suggest, novelists' awareness that the personal they constructed was not stable, but always subject to transaction and negotiation, troubled their efforts to imagine realist work as a solution to the excesses of the market. In fact, with their emphasis on character novels and other narratives helped to negotiate and naturalize both "impersonal" and "personal" kinds of social and economic relations, even as they criticized, resisted, and worried about them. The dissertation examines four instances of personal business in conjunction with literary texts that engaged them: the problem of trust and Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son; the problem of ruin and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; the development of character narratives for businessmen in business biographies; and Anthony Trollope's exploration of narratives of business character in The Way We Live Now.