Guilty Money:

The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914

---

Ranald C Michie

Financial History

This is an engaging socio-cultural study of the place occupied by the City of London within British cultural life during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Michie interrogates the dialectic nature of two traditional views of the City as a global financial centre: London as a theatre of corruption, fraud and scandal; and as a place of unbridled success and power for the ambitious elite.

Rather than rely on the opinion of orthodox figures contemporaneous to the period under examination, Michie recognises the novel as a pertinent source of socio-economic representation. By comparing both literary and popular novels at different times, this work illustrates how the evidence for cultural shifts can rest upon the generality of the population. Marrying literary and economic analysis, Guilty Money foregrounds the limitless possibilities of the novel as a work of historical documentation.

Readership

Financial History, Nineteenth-Century Literature

Contents

Introduction: Reality, Perception and Money

Chapter 1: Economic Decline, British Culture and the Nature of Capitalism.
Under economic decline the chapter will question the assumption that the economy was in decline before 1914. This will provide an essential corrective to those who see a causal link between the growth of an anti-industrial culture and Britain’s economic failure before the First World War. Under capitalism it will indicate the difference between bank based and market based capitalism and indicate how the financial sector in Britain was changing and expanding. Finally, in terms of culture it will raise such issues as the antagonism between the town and the country, the widespread envy of those who had become suddenly wealthy, the pervasive fear of poverty and destitution, the threat to the established order posed by the nouveau riche, the undermining of the confidence of the landed gentry, the suspicion of newly arrived foreigners, et al.

Chapter 2: The City of London 1815–1850: Booms and Manias
This chapter will contrast the development of the banking system and the increasing sophistication of the financial markets with the popular focus upon the speculative boom of the mid 1820s and the railway mania of the mid 1840s and the power and influence of the great City financiers. It is the instability of money made in trade and finance that is most prominent in the emerging fiction of this period.

Chapter 3: The City Of London, 1850–1870: Joint Stock and Limited Liability
This chapter will trace the advances made in finance with the ability to form easily joint stock companies that limited the liability of the investor to the amount invested. However, much of the fiction was concerned with the promotion of joint-stock companies where investors lost all their money at the hands of powerful financiers, with profound implications for themselves, their families and the community at large.

Chapter 4: The City of London, 1870–1890: Globalisation and Technology
Prior to 1870 the City of London can be regarded as a largely British financial centre though with an increasingly significant orientation towards the international economy. After that date, the City of London becomes increasingly involved in placing British money abroad, especially in the United States and the Empire. These themes are taken up in the literature, especially the international nature of investment and the involvement of cosmopolitan merchant bankers.

Chapter 5: The City of London in the 1890s: The Lure of Gold
In this decade the City of London experiences a number of financial crises as well as a massive speculative boom. The crises are all international in origin emanating as they did from British investments in Argentina, Australia and the United States. The speculative boom was also international as it focussed upon gold mining companies in South Africa and then western Australia. It even involved international tension and then open warfare as the British sought to establish control over the gold producing areas in South Africa. It is events such as these that provided the material for novels of the time.

Chapter 6: The City of London, 1900–1914: Home and Abroad
London is now the centre of international banking both attracting branches and offices from abroad and expanding its own activities into Asia, Africa and Australia. Such was the power and influence of the City of London that it attracted bankers and brokers from across the world, but especially Europe. Under these circumstances it was inevitable that a wide variety of authors would find material in the City’s activities for their novels.

Conclusion: Facts and Figures versus Smoke and Mirrors
Evidence indicates that the City of London was the largest and most successful financial centre in the world between 1815 and 1914. Conversely, what emerges from the fiction was the fact that the City of London occupied a rather ambiguous, and even contradictory place in British culture. The City of London is seen as both marginal and essential, powerful and dangerous. However, in one sense there was no ambiguity and no change, and that was the belief that the City was both alien and corrupt, even though the evidence for this belief varied over time.

Return to top