Alexander Dick

“The Ghost of Gold”: Forgery Trials and the Standard of Value in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy

I read the famous lines on paper money and forgery in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy as one of a number of responses to the government and the Bank of England’s disastrous campaign of forgery prosecutions in the wake of the suspension of cash payments. Many economic writers claimed that the value of money could not be secured by law but only through the operations of the free market, at the center of which was the gold standard, passed into law in Britain for the first time in 1816, but not put into practice until 1821. Radical journalists like Cobbett and Wooler, by contrast, argued that the real standard of value lay with sincere understanding and fellow feeling: any government imposed standard was tantamount to fraud. Shelley agreed in principle with both of these recommendations. But he did not recommend either a gold standard or a moral standard but rather a literary standard. The market should be regulated not by economic forces but by a collective consciousness of natural rights enshrined in the productions of imaginative geniuses.

Romantic Drama And The Performative: A Reassessment

ONE OF the most controversial statements of antitheatricalism ever pronounced comes not from Charles Lamb or Joanna Baillie but from the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin in How To Do Things With Words, the founding work of the theory of performative language. Having introduced the category of “the performative”—words like promises and greetings that do things rather than describe things—Austin tries to isolate the criteria that make performatives work. One of these is that they must be spoken in real-life situations; they must not be lies, for instance, nor imitations such as in literature and theater. Austin says:

Theory and practice in the eighteenth century : writing between philosophy and literature

This collection of essays by leading eighteenth-century specialists considers the Enlightenment in its historical and rhetorical contexts. Using literary interpretation and discourse analysis, the collection presents eighteenth-century philosophy as a material practice of writing, publication, conversation, and dissemination. The essays analyse how Enlightenment philosophers viewed their own writing; how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness; and how their insights into the nature of philosophical writing constitutes our own academic legacy. Eighteenth-century empiricists and common-sense philosophers, who were concerned fundamentally with problems of communication, information management, education, and publicity, offer a crucial illustration of the way linguistic action underlies philosophical ideas.Alexander Dick and Christina Lupton have brought us a most welcome collection of astute essays on the intersections of philosophy and literature in the eighteenth century. As they tell us in their introduction – and this is a point that bears much repeating – it ‘is not simply that philosophy and literature were on friendly terms during the eighteenth century but rather that the questions posed by each were the condition of possibility for the other.’ With the aim of presenting us with a concrete reminder of how crucial those ‘conditions of possibility’ are, not simply for both (ill-defined) disciplines in the eighteenth century, but also to the current state of the field, Lupton and Dick collect a series of thirteen important essays, twelve new and one reprinted. The essays are organized under three heads: ‘Writing Philosophy,’ ‘Reading Hume,’ and ‘Thinking Literature.’ Though occasionally the articles seem a bit oddly assorted – ‘Thinking Literature’ moves from Maureen Harkin’s ‘The Primitive in Adam Smith’s History’ to Adam Potkay on music and conscience in Wordsworth – the essays themselves meet a very high standard. All deserve attentive reading, and I was happy to be reminded of one deserving attentive rereading as well. The editors’ brief introduction very ably introduces both the major issues in this area of study and the individual papers at hand. More care might have been taken to ensure clarity here, and careful proofreading might have prevented a couple of awkward errors, but these are minor quibbles. Many of the contributors to this volume need no introduction. Essays by John Richetti, Adam Potkay, Nicholas Hudson, Maureen Harkin, Mark Blackwell, Nancy Yousef, Eva Dadlez, and Jonathan Kramnick are very fine. These scholars are joined by a group of newer scholars to whose work I want to draw more particular attention. Joseph Chaves, in an essay on Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711), argues intelligently for the dependency of Shaftesbury’s notion of the self on the formal, rhetorical structures associated alternately with philosophical and belletristic writing. While Shaftesbury’s philosophical mode maintains the necessity of an impenetrable, bounded self built on innate ideas, his irrepressible sociability, marked by the checks and balances of witty literary society, theorizes a permeable, socially constructed self. Jonathan Sadow’s essay, ‘The Epistemology of Genre,’ links Locke’s ‘mixed modes’ with a new generic indeterminacy that characterized both the novel and philosophy. Brian Michael Norton has contributed an exceptionally clever and convincing essay on philosophies of happiness in the humanities 345

Romanticism, liberalism, criticism

In this paper, I outline a genealogy for the liberal temperament of English literary criticism and cultural studies in the Romantic‐era debates over the standard of value.

‘A good deal of Trash’: Reading Societies, Religious Controversy and Networks of Improvement in Eighteenth‐Century Scotland

Scholars generally agree that the reading societies that developed with Scottish improvement in the eighteenth century signal that countrys secularisation. Yet historical evidence suggests that devotional or ‘covenantal’ reading practices, derived from Calvinist theology, persisted in reading clubs and societies, especially in rural areas, alongside the ‘emulative’ reading being encouraged by the denizens of improvement and enlightenment. This paper tracks the tensions and intersections between these two practices in the Scottish improvement network. It ends with a reading of a poem by Burns illustrating the way these reading practices intersect.

The Idea of Paper Money

‘Great have been the advantages to this country by commerce’ Coleridge declared in his 1819 Lectures on the History of Philosophy: ‘Next to the Church it has been the great source of information (and art and science...) but most assuredly the main support of freedom, nay, the very cause of freedom as actual and as practicable throughout the country, and of that general diffusion of knowledge which, if we have fewer wells now, fewer reservoirs, makes us have a hundred more frequent brooks which may be shallow but yet go bubbling and chattering and conveying fertility where they go.’ In some ways this is a surprising thing for Coleridge to have said. We are used to thinking that his mature phase was conservative, even reactionary. Though not necessarily opposed to commerce, he was at least resistant to its democratic potential. But Coleridge clearly believed that a liberal economy benefited the nation by making the exchange of goods and information faster and easier. This liberal economy was also a standardized economy: ‘I feel that you may pass from one end of England to the other and scarcely know you are twenty miles from London, from the general uniformity of language, habit, and information. I feel that by the confidence made necessary between man and man, it has given a physical strength to the country perfectly new and unknown in any periods of the history of the world.’1

The Bullion Controversy

The ‘bullion controversy’ was a pamphlet debate about money, banking, and the standard of value prompted by the publication of the Report of the Select Committee on Bullion, better known as the Bullion Report, in June 1810 and lasting until the recommendations of that report were defeated in the House of Commons in May 1812.2 As the opening of The Bullion Debate: A Serio-Comic Poem (quoted above), published in 1811 by the Birmingham agricultural surveyor William Pitt, tells us, the bullion controversy involved an array of participants representing many theoretical and ideological perspectives.3 At least 800 pamphlets on the subject were published between 1797 and 1821, more than 100 between 1809 and 1812. Extend these dates to between 1790 and 1840 and the number is well over 1,000. Including articles, reviews, letters, speeches, and poems doubles it again to 2,000. Participants included bankers, accountants, merchants, lawyers, politicians, academics, and farmers. Some supported the suspension, others saw it as a catastrophe or had middling views. Many of their questions and concerns were practical in nature. Did a rise in the price of gold mean that money was ‘depreciated’? Did increases in banknotes cause inflation? But they also asked larger questions. How is the economy affected by war? How are paper and gold related? Is value determined by labor or desire? What about land? What is money anyway?

Conclusion: A Romantic Economy

In this book, I have been documenting the contributions of Romantic authors to debates about money and standardization. For the most part, the purveyors of the literary arts were undecided about whether the standard should be something static and universal or something malleable and governable. How then is it possible that this thing we call Romanticism could also be the standard? The answer is that it was no more the standard than gold was. Rather, much of the literature of this period was committed to the idea that a standard was possible and necessary in an era of relativity and choice, though it expressed that commitment more by describing what the standard was not rather than explaining what it was. But once the perplexities of the economic debates of the Romantic period had overwhelmed the general sense of confidence advocated in Enlightenment economics, the debate could be at least quelled or tamed by the notion that consumers could choose to believe in something that would help them to measure or model other forms of value. Like Christianity or, as Coleridge contended, as Christianity, literary knowledge did not have to be in play in order to be the standard. It merely had to stand as a reminder or point of agreement that could quell controversies and disputes. It was a way, to paraphrase Ricardo, to avoid the embarrassment of not having a standard.

Realms of Gold

In June 1816, the British Parliament did something no one had ever done before: it officially introduced a gold standard. Until 1816, ‘money’ in Britain comprised a massively heterogeneous network of varying exchange practices and social conventions. It existed in a variety of forms: bullion, coins, tokens, bills of exchange, promissory notes, government bills, and banknotes. These were exchangeable in a number of different institutions: goldsmiths, shops, country and metropolitan banks, factories, and agencies. Forgery was a crime and a nuisance, but for many people it was also a way to facilitate commerce where sanctioned practices were inaccessible. Money also had social meanings. In early-modern times, money was conceived metaphorically as blood, food, animals, and birds. Money was life. It could also be death: ill-got riches were wounds; excessive debt was a disease. Francis Bacon once remarked that ‘money is dirt’ in both senses of the term, land and muck. Money was a means for people to calculate their social worth. It was a way to distinguish the rich from the poor, men and women, husbands and wives. Money could be given as a gift, received as a token of gratitude, held up as a pledge of honor, and hoarded as a form of rebellion. The ability to create money was a sign of ingenuity; destroying it meant power. Money was a means of escape and a mark of bondage, a charm and a curse, a ticket to ride and a prison sentence.2

Monetary Forgery and Romantic Poetics

Forging banknotes was a capital crime in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only during the Romantic period, however, was the death penalty routinely enforced. In 1796, no one in Britain was hanged for forgery. By 1818, 313 people had been sent to the gallows. A further 512 were transported to Botany Bay for passing forged notes. Considering that more than a thousand people were arrested for forgery, the conviction rate was very high. But it pales in comparison to the 300,000 forged notes the Bank of England received between 1797 and 1834. The circumstances surrounding the high incidence of banknote forgery in the period were equally unsettling. Following the suspension of cash payments, the bank issued — for the first time — one- and two-pound notes. They were poorly designed and easy to forge. To deter forgers, the Bank pursued a vigilant campaign of prosecution. This put it in a strange situation legally. The Bank was protecting the currency, but its own policies were behind the high incidence of forgery in the first place. The crisis finally came in December 1818 when two juries, acting against the advice of the judges, acquitted because they could not tell the difference between forged notes and the Bank’s. The acquittals led to reforms that curtailed juries’ ability to act with such discretion.1 Nevertheless, the statutes relating to forgery were not significantly altered until 1829 and even then forgery remained a capital offense.