Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Banking on panic: the historical record and a theoretical frame
- 2 Gothic economies in Bagehot, Marx, and Lord Overstone
- 3 The ghost and the accountant: investing in panic in Villette
- 4 “The Whole Duty of Man”: circulating circulation in Dickens's Little Dorrit
- 5 “Bankruptcy at my heels”: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the bankerization of identity
- 6 Bankerization panic and the corporate personality in Dracula
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
4 - “The Whole Duty of Man”: circulating circulation in Dickens's Little Dorrit
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Banking on panic: the historical record and a theoretical frame
- 2 Gothic economies in Bagehot, Marx, and Lord Overstone
- 3 The ghost and the accountant: investing in panic in Villette
- 4 “The Whole Duty of Man”: circulating circulation in Dickens's Little Dorrit
- 5 “Bankruptcy at my heels”: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the bankerization of identity
- 6 Bankerization panic and the corporate personality in Dracula
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
There is no more striking symbol of the completely dynamic character of the world than that of money … When money stands still, it is no longer money according to its specific value and significance.
If we were in a more primitive state, if we lived under roofs of leaves, and kept cows and sheep and creatures, instead of banker's accounts… well and good.
Written and published between May 1855 and May 1857, just preceding by six months the crash of 1857, Little Dorrit, a novel about debtors' prison, a banking crash, and the circumlocutionary ineptitude of government as agent of business, portrays the rough cycle of trade. As pointed out in the last chapter, the early to mid-1850s were the proverbial years of financial equilibrium: the Victorians' burgeoning export trade sent “British-made goods all over the globe.” With the speeding up of life through the massive production of railways all over England, concomitantly there was a need for the speeding up of the circulation of capital to keep railway and train production in gear, as it were. Banks also had to find better means of keeping up with the economic needs of industry. To give a sense of the sharp increase in industrial and banking transactions, Charles Kindleberger notes that between 1852 and 1857 the deposits in a set of five London banks grew from £17.7 million to £40 million and the typical amount of bills of exchange that were in circulation increased to 200 million from just 66 million.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Dickens to DraculaGothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction, pp. 71 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005