Poovey 2008

Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

…it was not until Literature was declared to be a different kind of imaginative writing that a secular model of value completely at odds with the market model was articulated. When this occurred, Literary writing gave up its claim to be valuable in the old sense, precisely by insisting that it was more valuable in another, more novel sense.

As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, economic writers as a group were able to achieve a greater degree of what a modern sociologist would call professional organization than imagi- native writers were.

Economic and Literary genres did not undergo naturalization in exactly this way, for neither set of genres has completely lost its visibility as writing. The former, as explanations or accounts of the credit economy, came to seem most credible when its writing appeared to be transparent—that is, when texts seemed simply to describe or refer to economic and financial matters rather than calling attention to themselves as writing or books. The latter, by contrast, increasingly succeeded precisely to the degree to which its writing was not transparent and, sometimes, primarily because of its material embodiment in a beautiful or rare book.

Instead of making their status as writing disappear, as in the case of monetary genres, naturalization has erased the historical relationship between these two sets of genres; it has effaced the common function that once linked them and the historical pro- cess by which they were differentiated and ranked.

What economic writing and Literary writing share, both historically and theoretically, is an engagement with the prob- lematic of representation. This phrase—the problematic of representation—will be familiar to Literary critics, for it has become one way scholars describe the gap that separates the sign from its referent or ground (of value or mean- ing), whether the gap takes the form of deferral, substitution, approxima- tion, or obscurity. Unlike most Literary critics, however, I do not present the problematic of representation as a property of all systems of representation.

Instead, I argue that representation becomes problematic—it presents prob- lems that are both social and epistemological—only at certain times and under conditions that are historically and socially specific. A system of representation is experienced as problematic only when it ceases to work— that is, when something in the social context calls attention to the deferral or obfuscation of its authenticating ground.

When the problematic of representation becomes visible—as it did in the episodes just described—this can have grave implications for a soci- ety’s economic and political stability, for it can jeopardize the prevailing model of value, the conventions that facilitate trust, and the signs that con- vey creditworthiness—monetary, social, legal, and political. The kinds of writing that eventually became economic and financial writing, on the one hand, and imaginative—then Literary—writing, on the other, were intimately involved in managing these troubling effects.

…the monetary counterpart to what became the distinction between fact and fiction was the distinction between valid and invalid monetary instruments; and, even though this distinction has never been established in such a way as to permit effective enforcement, as a conceptual and practical necessity it preceded and helped model the dichotomy that was gradually created in the other two types of writing, that between fact and fiction…

…as the bulk of this book chronicles, economic and Liter- ary writers began to distinguish their work increasingly from each other’s writing, rather than to belabor the founding distinction between valid and invalid, which remained crucial for monetary instruments. In the course of the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth, economic and Literary writers developed what we might call a primary relationship to each other, through which each group of writers increasingly defined the uniqueness of its own products by differentiating these from the products produced by the other set of writers.

News sheets that listed the market prices of commodities originated in Antwerp and Venice in the sixteenth century; by 1608, they were being printed in London, and, by 1716, a London merchant would have been able to subscribe to as many as seven weekly or semiweekly news sheets, at a cost of about £6 a year. From these news sheets, the merchant would have been able to obtain information about ships, cargoes, prices, and exchange rates across the trading world.

Beginning in earnest in the 1780s, writers began to use newspapers as a forum to discuss commer- cial subjects, such as whether Britain should export wool. By the end of the century, the reading public was accustomed to reading about financial and commercial topics in its local papers—a fact, it has been suggested, that contributed to the emergence of political economy (or economic theory) in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Sparked by a dramatic increase in the number of publicly traded stocks in the early years of the nineteenth century, newspaper editors began to make writing about finance a regular part of their papers. Unlike the numerical tables and lists of market information that appeared in eighteenth- century newspapers, however, the new City columns treated the financial world as a distinct culture, which writers strove to make interesting even to readers who did not need to know about international exchange rates or economic theory.

Financial journalism, then, con- stitutes a mid-nineteenth-century example of an economic genre that bor- rowed liberally from imaginative writing, which had become a recognizable set of genres by 1850. While they were not the only writers who tried to explain manias and panics, financial journalists help us see how the disci- plinary divide whose development I trace in this book could be crossed by writers who knew that their readers consumed numerous kinds of writing that offered different views of a single event.

A second important generic innovation of the last part of the nineteenth century presented economic theory in a highly technical, often mathemat- ical format that was specifically intended for expert—usually professional— political economists.

This is why nearly every nineteenth-century handbook on banking includes one or more chapters devoted to helping the banker distinguish good bills from bad—a practice of interpretation that writers referred to as learning to “read” the bills.

Scriveners (also called brokers or notaries) concentrated on one of the few areas in which handwritten documents continued to be important after the advent of print: conveyancing, which involved both drawing up and regis- tering the title deeds to land and money bonds.

The second group of early financiers, the goldsmiths, also accepted de- posits—of plate and other valuables as well as gold and silver coins—and they also issued receipts for the goods they held.

The two ancestors of private banking—the scriveners and the goldsmiths— were, thus, associated with a number of written documents, some of which were or became monetary instruments: conveyancing records; receipts for deposit; international and inland bills of exchange; and checks (or “cheques”), which both groups issued to borrowers for limited use against deposits.

As we will see in chapter 1, the Exchequer initially used tally sticks to record incoming loans, and it supplemented this recording system with paper notes in the 1690s.

Even more than bills of exchange, which were always drawn to order, the Bank’s early notes were intended to be general or all-purpose notes—that is, to circulate without a named acceptor or endorser.

The general nature of the Bank’s notes also made them vulnerable to forgery and fraud. To reduce the possibility of counterfeit, the Bank began to introduce the material and stylistic in- novations that (ideally) made Bank notes both interchangeable with other notes of the same denomination and distinct from rival (counterfeit) notes.

The first innovation intended to foil counterfeiting and make the Bank’s notes pass as cash was material: within two weeks of the first issue of its new notes, Bank officials began to require that notes be issued on marbled, indented paper rather than easily obtainable plain paper. This

innovation was soon followed by a second material change: the adoption of paper watermarked with a looped border and inscribed with a scroll on the left side and a panel containing the words Bank of England at the bot- tom. This paper was produced and supplied by Rice Watkins. Soon, a third innovation was mandated: the use of partially printed, instead of hand- written, notes graced with a medallion of the seated Britannia holding a spear and an olive branch.

This meant that a majority of eighteenth-century Britons, especially those who lived outside London, did not see a single Bank of England note during their lifetimes.

…the campaign to naturalize Bank of England notes—to render them identical to each other, so familiar and trustworthy that recipients would not hesitate to accept them, and both sufficiently numerous and user-friendly that they could be taken for granted—was still under way in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, this campaign did not begin in earnest until the first decade of that century, for, during the eighteenth century, the Bank was content to circulate its notes alongside other kinds of paper money, issued by a variety of individuals and compa- nies for local use. Much of this paper was informal, taking the form of paper tokens issued by shopkeepers or employers.

Even after the passage of the 1844 Bank Act, however, the campaign to naturalize the Bank’s notes still had to be waged, for the Bank Act did not lay to rest all the questions about the currency. Nor was it yet technically possible to make Bank notes identical—that is, to make one ten-pound note indistinguishable from every other ten-pound note. Even though the Bank’s Printing Department had been working on a new note design since 1842, the wear that continued use inflicted on the Bank’s plate transfer press meant that two notes of the same denomination could still look quite different. It was not until the 1855 issue, which deployed a new printing technology, that identical notes could be produced.