Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4rdrl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T17:04:00.456Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Vulgarity and money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2011

Carolyn Dever
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Lisa Niles
Affiliation:
Spelman College, Atlanta
Get access

Summary

Anthony Trollope’s novels reflect, with more nuance than almost any other works in the Victorian canon, the complex English reaction to the fact that, in the period when he was writing, “for the first time in history, non-landed incomes and wealth had begun to overtake land alone as the main source of economic power.” Associated with England’s rise to world dominance as a financial power, these economic changes triggered a powerfully ambivalent response. The English were at one and the same time proud of their country’s commercial achievements and fearful that those achievements meant they were living in a plutocracy, a nation ruled by wealth. Trollope’s novels capture this ambivalence with peculiar intensity. They show all the good things that money allows individuals to do and acquire, while at the same time underscoring the culture’s propensity to both worship and misuse the forms of wealth that developed as England’s financial power began to rest in banking and sales rather than land and production. Trollope’s emphasis on the positives and negatives of the new wealth led critics to perceive him as excessively concerned with money; “no other novelist . . . has made the various worries connected with want of money so prominent a feature in most of his stories” (Crit. Her. 216). In a world that wanted to deny and rise above the power of wealth, Trollope insistently reminded readers of the material sources that fueled England’s greatness. For Victorian critics, the word that most accurately conveyed the dangers of Trollope’s materialist leanings was vulgarity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×