The “day in the life” format is more usually encountered in books addressed to the general public, especially as a device for collating disparate sources from different points in time into an approachable narrative. In Anne Murphy's examination of the operational arrangements of the late-eighteenth-century Bank of England, however, the device is no mere conceit for appealing to such a wider public. For one, her choice is justified by her central source: the voluminous 1783 minutes and Report of the Committee of Inspection set up by the Bank to report on all aspects of its operations. As these especially involved the daily activities of its staff, from the hours they kept and the procedures they followed in their clerical tasks, down to the cleaning of the building in the morning and its physical securing at night, Murphy's choice of a 24-hour sequence in organizing this information is both justified and instructive. It also helps underline one of the main points of her analysis: that the Georgian Bank of England provided a space (both physical and more generally institutional) for a wide and rapidly diversifying array of financial activities perceived as vital for the security and prosperity of Britain. The commissioners, all active Directors of the Bank at the time, specifically aimed to pre-empt accusations of public financing failures amidst recriminations over the British defeat in the War of American Independence, but aspired more generally to affirm the Bank's position as the “Guardian of Public Credit.” By 1783, this term was expanding beyond the Bank's original and still paramount role as an integral partner of the British fiscal-military state, to include the facilitation and oversight of private financial markets as well.

Murphy demonstrates how the Bank pursued different business lines at distinctly defined times of the day and in spaces kept consciously separate from each other, decades before the 1844 Bank Charter Act formally split it into distinct note issuing and banking departments. The first business of the day centered on the discounting of commercial bills of exchange, with clients having access to this important source of liquidity transacting in the dignified surroundings of the Banking Hall and its adjacent offices. The interpersonal nature of this “polite banking” extended beyond the Bank's premises, as out-tellers went about London to personally collect from those countersigned on maturing bills, and contrasted with the more raucous proceedings in the Rotunda which became the focus of business in the late morning. Here the Bank morphed from a proto-central bank into a securities exchange, with dealers in government debt and the Bank's own stock transacting in plain sight of bystanders. The performativity aspect of this operation was as important as the need to provide a secondary market for the securities that were the very embodiment of “Public Credit.” The purely financial motives of providing liquidity and a price discovery mechanism could be served elsewhere, as indeed they were when trading moved on to the Royal Exchange and the coffeehouses of Exchange Alley in the early afternoon. More exotic (and technically illegal) transactions like time bargains could also be closed there, while dealers could use margining to effect leverage to an extent that was not possible in the official market. None of this was especially original, nor of British origin: Joseph de la Vega had described such distinct markets in Amsterdam a century earlier. The particular Bank of England innovation was the maintenance of a theatre of financial openness and inclusivity under the same roof: the “Public Credit” of a “commercial nation” (another common term in contemporary British discourse) was a collective endeavor that involved noisy broker-dealers in securities, as much as dignified bill discounters, or the long stream of rentiers who arrived after the activity in the Rotunda had died down to collect on their dividends.

Not every discussion in the book fits easily in its 24-hour format, but Murphy is wise not to be unduly restrained by her own chosen presentation device. A good example is her analysis of the gradual development of professionalism (to use a modern term) for Bank staff, and the methods by which they were motivated to persevere in otherwise poorly paid employment while remaining on the whole honest and loyal. Despite some notable cases that Murphy highlights, on the whole, the Bank was successful in avoiding the notoriety that plagued the East India Company in the same period. Integrity and perspicacity among its personnel were crucial aspects of the image as “Guardian of Public Credit” that the Bank sought to cultivate, so fraud, especially if it involved collusion from Bank staff, would have been a serious problem. This is an important point that underlines one of the main arguments of the book, even if it is somewhat artificially inserted in its daily format.

Anyone who has worked with the Bank's documents from this period, either in person or by using its expanding digital resources, should find much enjoyment in reading about the people and procedures behind records that are usually viewed under a consolidated institutional lens. These may be “the Bank of England's” accounts and minutes, but knowing more about how they were compiled, and what checks and fail-safes ensured that errors or fraud were avoided, can provide valuable insight on the workings of the Bank just before the Restriction and Charter Acts ushered in its transformation to a modern central bank. Non-specialists will find a well written and compelling argument on the development of institutional identity and memory in a mainstay of the modern financial world, supported by a wealth of fascinating detail and excellent period context.