Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century

by Colin Nicholson

• ISBN13: 9780521453233
• ISBN10: 0521453232
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-07-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The early eighteenth century saw a far-reaching financial revolution in England, whose impact on the literature of the period has hitherto been relatively unexplored. In this original study, Colin Nicholson reads familiar texts such as Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera and The Dunciad as 'capital satires', responding to the social and political effects of the installation of capitalist financial institutions in London. The founding of the Bank of England and the inauguration of the National Debt permanently altered the political economy of England: the South Sea Bubble disaster of 1721 educated a political generation into the money markets. While they invested in stocks and shares, Swift, Pope and Gay conducted a campaign against the civic effects of these new financial institutions. Conflict between these writers' inherited discourse of civic humanism and the transformations being undergone by their own society, is shown to have had a profound effect on a number of key literary texts.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	x
Preface	xi
List of abbreviations	xv
Introduction	1	(26)
A culture of commodities: `trivial things' in The Rape of the Lock	27	(24)
Cultivating the bubble: some investing contemporaries	51	(40)
`Some very bad effects': the strange case of Gulliver's Travels	91	(32)
`Bilk'd of virtue': the Beggar's Opera	123	(16)
`Abusing the city's best good men': Pope's poetry of the 1730s	139	(38)
`Illusion on the town': figuring out credit in The Dunciad	177	(25)
Bibliography	202	(10)
Index	212