Tamara S. Wagner
“In the great scheme of commerce”: Elizabeth Gaskell and Victorian Fictions of Speculation

The materiality of production, from carts of processed cotton obstructing the streets to the almost graspable “unparliamentary” smoke hanging over Darkshire, forges the cityscape of Gaskell’s North and South with such a pervasiveness that the centrality of the notoriously intangible new credit economy in the novel has passed almost unnoticed. As a result, it has commonly been read as a social-problem novel that emphasises the plight of the industrial worker, while offering a redefinition of the self-made “New Man.” Its parallel exploration of the promotion of “white-collar crime” by a wider range and greater accessibility of financial speculation, however, is as pivotal to its exposure of exploitative investments in hunger and greed, supply and demand, as the violence caused by, and done to, various forms of related industrial action. Tied up with and in each other, industrialisation and the formation of an evolving credit economy in nineteenth-century Britain, in fact, worked together to generate not only central anxieties, but also new plots, new or redefined villains, new opportunities for domestic heroism and moral failure: in short, new cultural fictions. Risky speculations and their repercussions in a renewed taking stock of emotional and economic exchanges are part and parcel of Gaskell’s Milton, a centre “in the great scheme of commerce” as well as for industry, as its New Man stresses. From its introduction as a city of the industrial North and Margaret Hale’s rejection of trade as an honourable profession precisely because it involves a “passing off inferior for superior goods, […] of assuming credit for wealth and resources not possessed,” to the risky speculations on which Mr Thornton embarks in a suggestive moment of desperation, Milton’s machinery for the manufacture of wares is implicated in speculation: “Ugh! Cotton, and speculations, and smoke, well-cleansed and well-cared-for machinery, and unwashed and neglected hands.”

By reassessing the ways in which North and South capitalises on a new interest in the cultural fictions of speculation, the proposed paper situates Gaskell’s fiction among the only recently acknowledged subgenre of the Victorian business or stock-market novel. This category partly intersects with, but ranges beyond, social-problem and political novels, comprising fiction by Dickens, Trollope, Oliphant, and Charlotte Riddell, among others. Reading Gaskell’s works in the contexts of this subgenre sheds a revealingly different light on their representations of Victorian capitalist enterprises.