A 'capital idea': Dickens, speculation, and Victorian economies of representation

This dissertation examines the relationship between literary and economic modes of representation from the early through the high Victorian era by focusing on speculation and the career of Charles Dickens. Treating the emergence of the modern speculative economy of Britain and the beginning of Dickens's career as a literary capitalist, the first part of the dissertation focuses on the "mania" of 1825--26 and the "Bozmania" of the late 1830s. Here, where I pursue some of the continuing implications of the first modern economic crisis in nineteenth-century Britain, I also examine Dickens's attempt to comprehend them in Nicholas Nickleby (1838--39). While the first part of the dissertation also examines the relationship between Dickens's literary and commercial innovations and the increasing importance of abstract forms of representation in a growing and volatile capitalist economy, the second part looks at the spectacular materiality of the mid-Victorian age as exemplified by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Discussing Dickens's complex role in influencing and promoting the idealized speculations on the Condition of England that the display of commodities encouraged and enjoined, I also consider his tacit reaction to the Crystal Palace "spirit" in Bleak House (1852--53). The effect of this novel on Dickens's reputation among critics, in turn, is a central subject of the final part of the dissertation, which discusses credit and credibility in the literary and economic "spheres of action," as well as the relationship between the economic crisis of 1856--57 and the vocational crisis Dickens experienced at the time. Focusing on the novelist's treatment of both in Little Dorrit (1855--57), I also return to a consideration of the symbolic nature of the mid-Victorian economy in which credit, the dominant currency, was coined through figures of speech; and I review the extension, the rationalization, and the idealization of this speculative currency in Victorian society. This, too, is a subject of Little Dorrit , a novel which articulates Dickens's apprehension of the confines of the economic imagination he contributed to shaping.