Subjects
Guilty Money:
The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914
Ranald C Michie
Financial History
978 1 85196 892 3: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 585 4
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.
Sample pages
Readership
Financial History, Nineteenth-Century Literature
Contents
Introduction
1 Capitalism and Culture: 1800-1856
2 Financiers and Merchants: 1856-1870
3 Damnation and Forgiveness: 1870-1885
4 Avarice and Honesty: 1885-1895
5 Gold and Greed: 1895-1910
6 Money and Mansions: 1900-1910
7 Wealth and Power: 1910-1914
Conclusion
Reviews
'Both informative and witty, Michie's book is a must for historians of finance as well as for those of 'culture'.
– Michel Lutfalla, Financial History Review
'One of the virtues of this work is that it brings to the reader a mass of obscure works of fiction featuring the City, or City-located characters.'
– James Gregory, Reviews in History
(read the full review here, and Ranald Michie's response here)
'The author takes the unusual but inventive approach of mining the period's novels as source materials for this financial history, using an extensive array of British fiction ... Recommended.'
– E J Jenkins, CHOICE
'This book can be recommended to anyone seeking to understand shifts in popular attitudes toward finance and the strengths and limits of using literary evidence for this purpose.'
– Leslie Hannah, EH.net
Related titles
