AT A CRITICAL JUNCTURE in part one of Harriet Martineau's Berkeley the Banker, the fourteenth novel in her Illustrations of Political Economy series, there is a run on a country bank. The run is precipitated by a casual exchange in a local shop during which Mrs. Millar, the confectioner, is given a five-pound note to change. Her reply “Oh, I cant change that note [sic]” is misunderstood by others in the shop to mean that she is refusing to honor a particular bank's note while, in fact, she is simply not able to make change (169). The panic that ensues ruins Mr. Berkeley, the country bank's proprietor, and serves the novel's aim of demonstrating the precariousness of paper currency unbacked by the gold standard. In describing this incident, as well as through various characters' periodic lectures, the novel argues that only a gold standard could have prevented a calamity such as the bank run. Under a gold standard, citizens of the town of Haleham never could have misinterpreted Mrs. Millar's remarks–they would have known that the note must be honored and that, therefore, the confectioner merely lacked the correct change. Under a gold standard, in other words, the meaning of paper currency is not open to misinterpretation; its value is fully known and stable. Martineau may be convinced of the gold standard's ability to scuttle the dangers of textual ambiguity, but this moment also exposes the challenge of regulating the circulation and proliferation of meaning. The meaning of a speech act and the value of a banknote are both revealed as unstable and difficult, perhaps impossible, to regulate or manage.

Mr. Berkeley describes his bank's failure as a “pure accident…[t]he merest accident,” while his daughter Melea attributes it to the fact that “[p]eople's minds are in a state to be acted upon by trifles” (168). Neither of these explanations is an economic one; rather, they invoke the vagaries of mind and emotion as well as happenstance. The gold standard might have increased the difficulty of interpreting Mrs. Millar's comment, but the Berkeleys' acknowledgement that non-economic factors were involved, that a bank failure could happen by “pure accident,” suggests the limits of strictly economic preventative measures. After all, if the public can so easily misunderstand a speech act even when the referent is emphasized (“that note”), and if people are so easily given over to rampant speculation, it is hard to see how any regulatory standard could be fully successful. Throw into the mix destabilizing practices such as forgery, intentional misrepresentation, and financial speculation, as we see in this novel, and the viability of a gold standard becomes an open question.

In this essay, I am interested in how issues of literary, aesthetic, and economic value converge in Martineau's series of novels titled Illustrations of Political Economy, and, more specifically, how speculation both informs and complicates that convergence. Beginning with Martineau's contention that realism in political economy, like realism in the novel, is its “natural” form because they share an investment in making value stable, I argue that the novels' formal and thematic reliance upon speculation and the speculative forces us to rethink conventional theories of realism as an unsophisticated or transparent literary mode. In these novels, realism emerges as a speculative genre, a form that rests upon and is driven by all of the open-endedness and riskiness engendered by speculative logic.

IN 1831, AT TWENTY-NINE YEARS OF AGE, armed with an ingenious idea for a multi-volume series of novels based on the fundamentals of the science of political economy as well as a growing reputation as a social critic and reviewer, Harriet Martineau traveled to London only to be met with rejection from publisher after publisher. Eventually, she entered into a business arrangement with Charles Fox in which she assumed all responsibility for procuring subscribers for the series, in exchange for being allowed to disseminate economic principles through fiction. It is under these precarious circumstances that James Mill voiced his damning opinion.¹

While Mill's naysaying may have been proven wrong by the subsequent financial success of the Illustrations, Martineau's critics and reviewers have echoed his skepticism as to the suitability of political economy to novelistic narrative.²

Twentieth-century critics remain generally unconvinced of Martineau's merit as a novelist, her own biographer R. K. Webb opining that “[e]ven granting the necessity of some incredibly didactic conversations, her characters are for the most part wooden, the emotion is synthetic, and the rare attempts at humour are hopeless” (120). And, as Max Fletcher succinctly states, “The novels of most other writers have been intended first as works of art and only secondarily as educational tracts. Harriet Martineau's…stories, on the other hand, are primarily sugar coatings for tracts” (367–68).

Contemporary reviewers, however, proved much more of a mixed bag and more amenable to the Illustrations' particular mix of art and instruction. The 1833 review of Illustrations in the Quarterly Review praised Martineau's intentions and the “benevolent spirit” in which the novels were written as well as the “varied knowledge of nature and society, the acute discrimination of character, and remarkable power of entering into, and describing feelings of the poorer classes” that they display while also poking fun at “the absurd trash which is seriously propounded by some of her [Martineau's] characters, in dull didactic dialogues, introduced here and there in the most clumsy manner” (“Miss Martineau” 136). The Edinburgh Review was more kind in its assessment of the literary success of the series despite the reviewer's “horror of the Amazons of politics” (1). Indeed, the reviewer waxes poetic on the subject of Martineau's literary prowess, enjoining readers to exercise “a little moral restraint” as “the usefulness of the several stories may be injured by their beauty; and the importance of the end lost sight of in the agreeableness of the means employed for its attainment” (4). The reviewer, furthermore, in seeming anticipation of critics' objections to the overt didacticism of the series, suggests that Martineau's difficulties in marrying art and instruction are neither more nor less than those facing any other artist:

Martineau herself understood her novels as works of art wherein the educational intent of the piece and the realist form in which they appeared were perfectly in step. She maintained that any literary merit (in both artistic and populist terms) of the series was enhanced rather than compromised by its educational aims. Indeed, in an essay titled “On the Duty of Studying Political Economy,” Martineau emphasizes both the utility and beauty of political economy, arguing for the aesthetic value of political economy as well as its use-value (282). The utility of political economy, as Martineau describes it, is connected to an understanding of nationalist duty whereby the success of the English political system is predicated upon the common man's grasp of the fundamentals of political economy: “The people…must become practically acquainted with the principles of political economy, before they can expect to have their interests properly taken care of by the government” (275). The essay further argues that “enlightened and effectual” representation is not just a utilitarian requirement for democracy but that in it there is “great attractiveness and much elegance” (274, 282). She goes on to pose an extensive series of rhetorical questions to elaborate her theory of the aesthetic value of political economy: The suggestion here is that because political economy reveals the beauty of both nature and Providence, its function is intrinsically aesthetic as well as educational.

To return to the point made in the Edinburgh Review about the “conventional improbabilities” of literature in general, it is important to consider how the realist genre of the Illustrations may, in fact, place additional pressure upon the text to quash any sense of rupture or inconsistency for the reader. Whereas a French farce can produce a knowing, winking audience, the expectation is that a realist novel produces a type of textual transparency in which the world of the novel seamlessly mimics the “real” world of the reading audience. However, both the Edinburgh Review and Martineau herself suggest that the audience for Illustrations is a sophisticated one that can read on multiple levels simultaneously.

Because the Illustrations rely on the realist form to instruct the reader, they would seem to produce a form of realism that cannot tolerate misinterpretation. And, indeed, this is how the realist text has generally been theorized. Colin MacCabe offers up a succinct definition of the major principles of the nineteenth-century realist novel:

In this definition, the realist text is shaped by a dominant discourse (MacCabe's metalanguage) or a stable point of view through which a clearly defined relationship between reader and text is produced. In this relationship the metalanguage constructs itself (is “dematerialised”) so as to give the appearance of transparency; in turn, this transparency makes material what MacCabe terms “the identity of things.” In realism's case, the textual things that are materialized should be understood as principles or abstractions of human nature rather than simply a reflection of reality. In other words, realism is not as concerned with achieving a perfect mirror or mime of the real so much as representing those principles that structure the real. MacCabe makes this crucial point clear when he explains further that “in the claim that the narrative prose has direct access to a final reality we can find the claim of the classic realist novel to present us with the truths of human nature” (37). The dominant discourse of a realist text is invested in the production of a set of abstracted values and/or principles, which, through the effect of textual transparency, become truths. In this way, the realist text has an inherent educational function in so far as it makes truths visible to its audience.

MacCabe's formulation also reveals what is perhaps the greatest problem for realism. What happens when the metalanguage fails to become dematerialized and so sabotages textual transparency? What does failure to establish a dominant point of view mean to the realist text? MacCabe suggests that what results is proliferation of interpretation and meaning, multiple and competing meanings–a result that presumably would be antithetical to the aims of realism. Ideally, the realist text would function as a closed system of representation in which readings that run counter to the truths that structure it are refused. The reader within this closed system can be characterized as at once passive and powerful in terms of his/her relationship to the text. While the reader is perhaps passive in so far as his/her function is as a receptacle–or, more generously, as a student of the text–s/he is also, in MacCabe's words, in “the position of the subject in a relation of dominant specularity” (39). Although MacCabe uses the term “specularity” specifically with an eye to his later discussion of filmic realism, the term is nonetheless useful for literary analysis because it emphasizes the way the reader of realism is constructed as a dominant rather than passive subject who can see and know everything.

Unlike MacCabe, Roland Barthes is severe in his criticism of the kind of text that demands little other than dominant specularity from its reader. Terming these texts “readerly” rather than “writerly,”³

he claims that because they demarcate so absolutely the line between “the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader,” “[t]he reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness –he is intransitive…. [I]nstead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum” (4). While Barthes does not specifically identify realism as a perpetrator of the readerly, the implications for the genre are clear. In contrast to MacCabe's description, the reader of the readerly text remains wholly subject to the text (although Barthes does grant him/her the poor power of rejection).⁴ The reference to idleness in Barthes is particularly striking as it clearly indicts the readerly text for producing a passive reader, for doing all the work and thereby depriving the reader of the pleasure of signification.

Martineau's Illustrations would surely fall squarely under Barthes's definition of the readerly, given her educational aims. She takes on the question of the idle reader forthrightly, opening the first volume of the Illustrations with a defense of her position. In the preface to Life in the Wilds, she writes:

While Martineau here acknowledges that certain types of narrative may constitute a trap for the reader, she also asserts that this trap is one to which only the idle reader, the reader who both does not pay sufficient attention to narrative and is afraid of learning something, is vulnerable. Rather, Martineau constructs an informed and active reader for her texts and suggests that for this type of reader the Illustrations are works with literary merit–they do not merely “pretend to be stories.” She does not engage in a critique of an educational aim for narrative per se. She qualifies the defense of her literary endeavor by indicating that some kinds of knowledge will have an “undisguised form” in which to appear. This qualification is critical to her understanding of the relationship between political economy and the literary, particularly realism. If realism constitutes the most undisguised, and hence least deceptive, form, then the Illustrations will cease to be simply a didactic trap and become something else entirely, something organic and whole.

When Martineau goes so far as to invoke an ethical affinity between the genre of realism and the science of political economy because they are bound by a similar set of deterministic rules, she is relying upon realism to effect a certain representational stability.⁵

The Illustrations rely upon a theory of literature that values a stable yet active relationship between representation and the real as well as between the novel and the reader. This relationship will enable the reader to see the relevance of the described events and principles to his/her own life, a relationship that bolsters MacCabe's claims of the reader's dominant specularity. However, rather than readers then applying the principles to their own lives as convention would have it, instead Martineau's holistic theory of the marriage between political economy and realism suggests that the end result is that the reader be enabled to see those principles already in operation all around him/her. Rather than mirroring or miming, the text's form refracts and refocuses–altering the reader's perception of reality, making clearer what is really being seen.⁶

It is clearly no accident that Martineau writes in the realist mode. In explaining her choice of the realist novel form, she states that “[t]he reason why we choose the form of narrative is, that we really think it the best in which Political Economy can be taught” (Life in the Wilds xi). Later in the same novel, she further elaborates: “we have chosen this method not only because it is new, not only because it is entertaining, but because we think it the most faithful and the most complete” (xii). Realism not only entertains but also elucidates. The union between form and content is surely the impetus for her Autobiography's thorough (re)construction of Martineau as a natural-born political economist–she finds “that I had been teaching [political economy] unawares, in my stories about Machinery and Wages” (1: 105). And she recounts how, at age fifteen, “I was all the while becoming a political economist without knowing it” (1: 55). Even the family newspaper conspired in her unknowing development: “in its best days, when, without ever mentioning Political Economy, it taught it, and viewed public affairs in its light” (1: 54).

I HAVE BEEN ARGUING that Martineau's theories of political economy and realism advocate a self-contained, regulated system in which value and meaning are stable constants. Given this, it is hardly surprising that Martineau should also have been a great proponent of the gold standard.⁷

In Fictions of State, Patrick Brantlinger substantiates the connection between realism and the gold standard by claiming that “the realism that composes [realist fictions] is a linguistic medium that posits the direct convertibility of reference into referent, or of a sort of paper credit (words on pages) into the gold standard of reality” (144). Of course, realism and the gold standard are not strictly analogous in their functions. One obvious complication is that one might well argue the opposite of Brantlinger's formulation: it is the realist text that acts most like gold in its embodiment of principles and promotion of economic behavior. The ultimate collapse of the analogy is, in fact, suggestive in that it reveals a startling reciprocity between reference and referent, signifier and signified. After all, if it is not at all clear which is the gold standard, text or the real, paper money or gold, the very possibility of a referent is compromised. Nevertheless, it is clear in Martineau's novels that the gold standard and realism are mutually invested in regulation–they are at heart disciplinary (of value, of meaning, of behavior). They also straddle an uneasy distinction between prescriptive versus descriptive, purporting to be descriptive of natural principles while also describing the proper behaviors to ensure those principles.

Martineau's attentive concern with guaranteeing the proper reception of her prose acknowledges the work that must be done to regulate meaning and value. If realism does indeed rest upon a logic of direct convertibility, then it also remains under threat of convertibility's close relation to substitutability, which would entail the proliferation rather than containment of meaning. After all, convertibility is a necessary condition for substitutability. Thus, the very logic of realism, that of conversion, lays the groundwork for its own undoing–substitution or, as I argue, a speculative economy. What happens, for example, when representation is no longer merely mimesis but a more than adequate substitute, when paper becomes more or better than gold? The economy of substitutability is, in fact, speculative in nature. Because meaning and value are always deferred and always able to be substituted for, they can only be speculated upon. In other words, in an economy of substitution, value fluctuates and is generated through speculation, through risk.

So how does this thorny issue of convertibility versus substitutability manifest itself in the Illustrations? As mentioned earlier, by issuing a detailed set of instructions to the reader on how to read, Martineau tries to guarantee the convertibility of her descriptions of economic principles into real economic behaviors, intending to prevent the possibility of misrepresentation. As she does so, she also makes real the very possibility of an unsuccessful transaction between novel and reader. In addition, both parts one and two of Berkeley the Banker narrativize the dangers of a variety of related economic and representational problems–forgery, speculation, and misinterpretation– thus functioning as cumulative evidence for the trumping of unfettered substitution over regulated conversion. The novels enact the dialectical relationship between closed and open, the speculative representational systems that form the heart of both realism and the gold standard.

Though set some twenty years apart, both parts of Berkeley the Banker were published in 1833 and, of all the stories that comprise the Illustrations, are the only two that specifically address the gold standard and the Bank Restriction period. In 1797, the decision was made to suspend the convertibility of paper money into gold.⁸

Prompted by an alarming depletion of the Bank of England's gold reserves, the Bank Restriction led to the proliferation of country banks, partly in order to supply England's increasing need for paper currency in smaller denominations. Although the Bank of England had suspended gold payment, its paper money was still subject to a de facto gold standard: the notes were understood to be convertible to gold once the restriction was lifted. Country banks were generally less scrupulous in the issuing of paper currency with the effect that these banknotes were often supported by nothing much more than the issuing bank's good name, their public credit so to speak. Thus, even though England was ostensibly operating under a gold standard by which the value of paper currency could be fixed, there still existed a discrepancy in the street value (the amount for which these notes could actually be exchanged) of Bank of England versus local-bank issued notes. We can well imagine, as Martineau does, that this discrepancy would have exacerbated the tendency for the populace to hoard gold coins, which, in turn, would only worsen the already critical shortage of the Bank of England's gold reserves.

Not surprisingly, the scarcity of paper money in the Bank Restriction period (1797–1815) corresponded with a national epidemic of forgery. Economist Frank Fetter notes that:

In London and Middlesex between 1805 and 1814, a startling 32.1% of executed criminals were convicted for forgery, a figure made even more emblematic of the considered seriousness of that crime when, by comparison, the executions for murder constituted a mere 15.3% of total executions (Emsley 257). Clive Emsley explains the zeal with which forgers were apprehended and prosecuted as partially due to political economists like “Adam Smith, and others, [who] stressed the dangers to economic life if frauds attacking the circulation of promissory notes were allowed to increase and go unpunished, especially since paper was becoming more and more important” (255).

The lack of convertibility between various forms of paper money as well as the ease by which they could be forged are chief concerns of Martineau's. The central figure of pathos in both volumes, Hester Parndon, the wife of a forger, complains plaintively in the second volume: “What can look easier than to imitate such a note as this? The very sight of it is enough to tempt people to forge” (pt. 2, 71). Her defensive and desperate transference of the responsibility for forging from her husband to the look of the note itself is echoed throughout the novels in different contexts. Without a fully implemented gold standard, Martineau suggests, paper currency can never be as desirable as gold because it is merely a substitute and is easily substituted for. Unregulated paper threatened the English economy because it could generate its own capital–it could circulate and multiply in a way gold cannot–without being bound by a referent. The implications of Martineau's criticism of paper currency are far-reaching as it betrays skepticism towards any type of representation–any imitation constitutes an invitation to forgery, to infinite imitation.

This skepticism about representation informs the “Summary of Principles” that appends the first volume. In the “Summary,” Martineau argues that a “practicable” economy is “accomplished by making acknowledgments of debt circulate in the place of the actual payment: that is, substituting credit, as represented by bank-paper, for gold money” (188). She goes on to list a number of advantages to paper money, one of which is “that its destruction causes no diminution of real value…[it being] only a representative of value” (189). Because money has only representational value, she argues, it is easily disposed of and can only be substituted for rather than usurp gold's “real” value. Nevertheless, Martineau also clearly regards paper currency as a danger (“it is enough to tempt people to forge”), even if a necessary evil, because it so easily does the work of gold (it is the substitute that can displace that which it is being substituted for) and because, as we saw in the case of the forgery, it can reproduce without regard to gold. Paper money is disposable and not worth worrying about as long as its relationship to gold is fixed, but should paper begin to reproduce itself ad hoc, it becomes a problem of national proportions.

If the proliferation of paper currency can destabilize the value of gold, its strict regulation seems desirable. The gold standard is one of these regulative mechanisms, of course, but, as Martineau suggests, the gold standard must work in tandem with the citizenry's sound financial behavior. Behaviors such as forgery, hoarding, printing paper currency without the legitimate backing of bullion, and such are treasonous. Discourses of ethical financial behaviors dominate the Berkeley the Banker novels. It becomes one's civic duty to have good credit. In a national economy that is run, for the most part, on credit, it is paramount that one maintain the credit generated by one's good name and public confidence.

Henry Thornton in An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) explicitly yokes the value of gold “to the degree of confidence between man and man” (155), which, in turn, leads to domestic and international confidence in the nation. In his formulation, even gold is not above the market but subject to the market because its value is determined by confidence. Unlike gold, confidence cannot be accurately quantified; it is the product of speculation. Thornton's placing of gold within a market of fluctuating value should not be taken as an argument against the gold standard; in theory, he supported a gold standard but was not convinced that the unregulated proliferation of paper currency was the only factor in the discrepancy in value between paper currency and gold bullion. Like Martineau, Thornton was a proponent of increased regulation of currency. He believed that such regulation could be achieved through the systematization of banking, with the Bank of England, London banks, and country banks working together to control the market. What is most interesting in Thornton's Enquiry with regard to Berkeley the Banker is the similar way each posits a circular logic by which the economic stability of the nation is intimately connected to the optimism and confidence of its public, which is predicated on the nation's economic stability. This is an economic philosophy of good faith, a scientific economic model that is also essentially humanistic (in its concern with ethical values) and speculative (in both its hopeful dependence on citizens acting appropriately and its interest in capital accumulation). Thornton's explanation for England's economic advantage over other nations is that it depended partly “on the degree of expectation which was kept up abroad of the future improvement of our exchange [and that, unlike other countries,] we have anticipated a period when an intrinsically valuable and specific standard would be restored” (158). In other words, England's economy is in no real danger because it inspires an expectation of improvement. There is an inherent contradiction here between Thornton's support of both the gold standard and the economy's dependence on future improvement. In the logic of the gold standard, value is fixed and stable, whereas the speculative logic of anticipation, expectation, and future improvement is predicated on shifting values, on the potential for gaining (or, conversely, losing) value and thereby incurring profit (or loss).

The dialectical tension between a regulated and speculative economy recurs especially in the way that the Martineau narrates speculative activity as dangerous and risky but sometimes necessary. Thus, the potential benefits of speculation are reluctantly acknowledged, particularly if undertaken with circumspection and in service to the nation. Speculation threatens the integrity, the very possibility, of a gold standard. Yet speculation also provides the condition for potential profit, for accumulation and proliferation. Similarly, the speculative is both disabling and enabling for realism: speculation generates narrative that, in turn, generates meaning that, in turn, provides the condition for the possibility of misreading and misinterpretation.

BERKELEY THE BANKER OPENS onto a domestic scene in the small town of Haleham. The Berkeley family is discussing Mr. Berkeley's decision to open a local bank.⁹ Retired, Mr. Berkeley is lured back into business by the prospect of doubling his daughters' small fortunes with what he assumes will be little risk and even less labor. His son Horace encourages the enterprise by arguing that it is a secure choice in business –“you can scarcely lose any thing, however little you may gain” (8)– and Mr. Berkeley concurs, stating that “this will not be like my former business, now up and now down” (9–10). Unfortunately, their mistaken assumption regarding the risk-free nature of local banking is exposed when the Cavendish family moves into Haleham and the patriarch decides to open a rival bank. His unscrupulous dealings–foreshadowed by the nebulous description of Cavendish's bank as being supposedly “supported by some very rich people at a distance, who were glad to be sleeping partners” (16) and consisting chiefly of the proliferation of local banknotes with nothing to guarantee their value–eventually lead both banks to fail. The banks' failures are directly attributed to Cavendish's lack of restraint and his refusal to back his notes with gold. It is equally true, however, that the bank failures are produced by a series of false assumptions made throughout the novel, not just by Cavendish but by the Haleham populace at large. This spreading of responsibility throughout the town supports Martineau's contention that every citizen must understand the principles of political economy and act in accordance with those beliefs. It also implies that the failure of a financial institution is contingent not only on proper financial behaviors but also on various social behaviors that do not seem to have all that much to do with money but rather with the unpredictability of representation in general.

Mr. Berkeley makes his first mistake by failing to understand the nature of his venture into finance capital. He sees his bank as secure and stable rather than as what it really is, a speculation. Indeed, by the end of the first part of Berkeley the Banker, the competing banks are acknowledged to be as much speculations as the commodities upon which they speculate. The narrator tells the reader that “there was quite as much speculation abroad respecting the stability of the banks as about the supply of corn” (163), the commodity on which Cavendish has heavily speculated, suggesting that the speculator is inextricably linked to his investment in a relationship of mutual risk and suspicion. The chief example of the vulnerability of Berkeley's bank is, of course, the utterance-gone-badly-astray of Mrs. Millar, to which I referred earlier– “I cant change that note” (169).¹⁰

The collapse of the bank is not caused by the public's economic knowledge and expertise but rather by a linguistic ambiguity coupled with a general distrust of paper currency. And why is it that “minds are in a state to be acted upon by trifles” (168) but that the level of public confidence, which Thornton cited as crucial, has reached a critically low level, fed by the growing suspicion that the value of paper currency has plummeted in relation to gold. And, as the level of public confidence in the value of paper evaporates so too does the citizenry become increasingly susceptible to linguistic misunderstandings. In this way, Berkeley the Banker mutually implicates political economy and linguistic representation in a national project of safeguarding sentiments of well being.

Exacerbating the problem of misreading is that no one and nothing in the Berkeley the Banker volumes are quite what they seem. Identity and value shift constantly. Mr. Cavendish pretends to be more than he is by his unprincipled printing of paper currency, while his family assumes a morally and financially unwarranted dominant social position in Haleham. Indeed, everything about the Cavendishes is suspect: Mr. Cavendish's church attire is a “costume [that] had something of the appearance of a fancy dress” (pt. 1, 15); Mrs. Cavendish, “the great banker's lady,” feeds her servants and even her own children “fragments of very dark brown bread, whose hue was extensively variegated with green mold” (64); and when his failed speculation on corn fatally ruins his bank, Cavendish tries to stave off his creditors by spreading a false story about a clerk's embezzling from him. Yet, with characteristic resilience, at the conclusion of part two, the Cavendishes are “flourishing at New York” (pt. 2, 171). Even the upstanding Horace Berkeley's value shifts from someone who initially “always says less than he means” (pt. 1, 8) to someone of whom his sister says, “I had no idea he could have been so appreciated” (200). And Hester Parndon, who began as “an ornament to the little town” (38), loses her good name through marriage to Edgar Morrison, a forger thought to be “so well-dressed and handsome [with] a good place” (39).

These appreciating and depreciating characters can be read as part of Martineau's critique of an economy with no gold standard. Because the economy relies on speculation (whether on something as esoteric as public confidence or as material as corn), however, and thus depends on appreciation and depreciation, any representative currency's value must necessarily fluctuate. Even the price of gold is not always the price of gold. The subtle ambivalences in Martineau's argument for a gold standard are nowhere more evident than in her treatment of Mrs. Parndon's hoarding of gold guineas. While hoarding is clearly a problematic activity for political economy because it is an attempt to refuse the circulation necessary to ensure the reproduction of capital, Mrs. Parndon's hoarding receives a certain amount of grudging approval. Enoch Pye, Haleham's bookseller, admits that Mrs. Parndon may even be speculating intelligently through her activity:

A guinea, because it is gold, is worth more than a guinea, and Mrs. Parndon's proclivity for keeping them near her is entirely reasonable. When she cashes in a portion of her stash in order to help Hester, she is cheated as she receives a number of forged notes. This unequal exchange can be read as part of the novel's critique of paper rather than as a punishment for her hoarding. After all, she is the one character who remains unscathed by the bank failures and who surprisingly, given her age, is rewarded in the novel with a happy marriage to the sympathetic Pye.¹¹

In a speculative economy, fluctuation generates capital and the notion of a perfectly regulated economy (where a guinea is presumably always worth a guinea) is a fiction. Credit or worth or both are no longer an indication of the amount of holdings one has in reserve but rather indicative of a number of factors including public confidence, one's good name, and one's perceived talent for speculation or capital accumulation or both.¹²

What unites Cavendish and Berkeley is that they are both speculators, but what separates them is Cavendish's greater ability to land on his feet, which is enabled by his dubious sense of ethics and flair for the dramatic.

It is the speculator Cavendish who is in the better financial position at the end of the volumes despite the loss of his good name. Cavendish is the one who really understands how speculative finance functions and who maximizes his earning potential. He is the epitome of Adam Smith's “speculative merchant [who]…exercises no one regular, established, or well-known branch of business. He is a corn merchant this year, and a wine merchant the next, and a sugar, tobacco or tea merchant the year after” (216). Smith goes on to describe the speculative merchant as an increasingly common species, a figure who disrupts traditional concepts of labor and conventional modes of generating capital. He is a chameleon, able to move with ease from corn merchant to wine merchant to sugar merchant. Because the speculator's relationship to what he is selling is an arbitrary and temporary one, he can occupy various and multiple positions within the economy. Likewise, Cavendish moves from disaster to triumph to disaster, from nation to nation, and from occupation to occupation.

What must ultimately regulate speculation for Martineau is ethics, the gold standard of behavior. Berkeley, while he loses his money, has acted honorably–he has kept his good name. Cavendish, on the other hand, has lost his name. Indeed, he is so thoroughly divested from the notion of even needing to maintain one's good name that he readily takes another. Martineau redresses this problem of discordant interests by assuring readers that their interests lie in a common interest (usually that of the nation), that their interests are best served when serving others' interests. So, while Cavendish speculates more skillfully than Berkeley, the deviousness of his practices ensures his difficulties, chief among them his necessary emigration to the United States. He is positioned as a foreign interloper who, because he feels unbound by English national interests, is consequently expelled from its auspices.

Both novels, interestingly, mount an effective and sustained argument against foreign contaminants, external threats to the economy, in which, not surprisingly given its recent history, the French and their supposedly cavalier treatment of money are featured. In this way, the discourse of political economy with regard to the gold standard has a decidedly nationalist agenda. Further, the gold standard is conceived as a necessary step for continued economic imperialism, especially with the emergent transcendence of free trade practices. Some thirty years earlier, Edmund Burke was already castigating the French for their use of paper money untied to any standard. The post-French Revolution currency of assignâts–which Burke dismissed as “fictitious representation” (357)–was eventually banned from circulation in England in 1792 and exemplified for Martineau the worst consequences of the lack of a gold standard. In an exchange between Berkeley and the local curate, the assignâts are described as “a vicious currency” that had “plunged [France] into poverty” (217). The ultimate blame for their viciousness is laid at the door of the government that had made them legal tender (a law that the Berkeleys term “stupid” and “barbarous” [219]). Mrs. Berkeley even claims that the legality of the French money was only rescinded once “more murders had been committed by the paper money than by their guillotine” (222). Later, daughter Melea inquires plaintively, “How could a representative currency actually represent nothing?” to which Mrs. Berkeley responds that “there was nothing specified which they could represent” (217). But, of course, the assignâts did not represent nothing; rather, they were a product of a nationalist agenda in which citizens could more easily purchase property seized by the new government.

Judging a nation by its paper representation is a commonplace of Martineau's. In How to Observe. Morals and Manners, the author claims: “National literature is national speech. By this are its prevalent ideas and feelings uttered” (122). And, in the case of nations where there is no “copius classical” tradition of literature, she reasons that they may be “barbarous” or “politically oppressed” or “young” (122–23). Given that she allows that nations may be observed not only through their literature but by “such other means of utterance as they may have” (122), it is not a stretch in logic to argue that paper currency in addition to the novel, both crucial forms of representation, might also function for Martineau as symptoms of national well-being. The problem that she attributes to national utterances other than literature, however, is that “there is a far greater danger of their being misunderstood” that would seem to accord the novel a unique status among forms of representation as the one best understood (123). Again, Martineau is emphatic in valuing representation for its substitutability, its ability to stand proxy for its referent. What is unacceptable is that the substitute will, like the assignâts, come to represent nothing.¹³

In promoting the implementation of a gold standard together with a set of ethical (rather than strictly financial) principles, she describes in detail the dangers of uncontrolled and proliferating representation, situating these dangers as a threat to the very nation itself. What becomes clear in the novel, however, is that the regulatory power of the gold standard in managing representation is a strategic fiction proffered in an attempt to uphold the reader's faith in representation while acknowledging the narrative's and the economy's dependence on the speculative.

Although Martineau tends to demonize speculation as the nemesis of realism and the gold standard, I believe it is more useful to recast this opposition as a dialectical and generative relationship, a relationship that is integral to understanding and valuing realism. In The Coiners of Language, Jean-Joseph Goux contrasts Zola's Money with Gide's Counterfeiters, describing the first novel as embodying “truthful realism based on the solid support of gold” and the latter as a “critical and reflexive novel whose monetary theme is conceived within the regime of false coins or banknotes” (92). Within his logic, Counterfeiters is valued in that it “simultaneously dismantles the illusions of realism in language and convertibility in money” (93), and Money becomes a poor, deluded literary cousin who maintains faith in the transparency of language. Goux acknowledges that all fiction “entails a risk” (91), but he is careful to draw a distinction among modes of fiction, citing the examples of “deceptive fiction (an operation without reference to any stores of gold) and truthful realism based on the solid support of gold” (92). The line Goux draws between Money and Counterfeiters seems very fine indeed if we take seriously the possibility that what he terms “realist representation” may well be engaged in the very same dismantling and reflexivity that he ascribes to Gide's text. If the realism of the Illustrations can so clearly address its own formal contradictions with its complex discourse regarding representation, it is less clear why the realist text cannot be as much a deceptive fiction–a knowing and self-reflexive fiction–as a non-realist text.

Hester Parndon begins as just another naïve young girl in just another love story, an “ornament” who is betrothed to a handsome young suitor, but she ends as a savvy widow whose ideas of economy, representation, and romance have matured. We see her early on upbraiding Enoch Pye for his refusal to print love stories–“‘Mr. Pye will not print any stories about lovers,’ observed Hester, sorrowfully” (pt. 1, 30)– clearly positioned on the side of romance, sentimentalism, and mass-produced narrative. The Hester of the second volume is much changed by her failed romance with her forger-husband and her witness to the successful romantic coupling of her money-hoarding mother. She is now someone who reads yet relies upon paper money as a fictional romance of imitation and substitutability, who understands the unpredictability of value under speculation. Hester is an occasion for the novel's educational aims, and, more importantly, she is also a figure through which complex and unresolved debates about representation, value, the economy, and nationalism are articulated.