This book is a mixture of literary criticism, a cultural history of finance, and four biographical studies. It explores how, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, the culture of investment permeated familial relationships. It builds on and extends research into women investors, investigating how many such women there were, and also highlights how Victorian financial cultures were represented in Victorian fiction.
As the author points out, there is now a flourishing literature on women investors in Victorian times, with data gleaned from shareholder records, personal correspondence, and corporate archives. Such discoveries have weakened the so-called “separate spheres view” of Victorian women, in which they remained at home, angels of the hearth, leaving the men to face the realities of the business world alone. However, Nancy Henry argues that the separate spheres view of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is not refuted, merely more complex than the current debate allows.
Similarly, literary criticism has been slow to acknowledge the importance of money and investment to women in English literature. Critics of Victorian fiction preferred, until the early years of the twenty-first century, to concentrate more on representations of workers and factory owners than on the importance of inheritance, investment, speculation, prosperity, and failure, which, Henry points out, were the hallmarks of the British middle class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until recently, literary criticism of authors also failed to take into account the financial aspects of the lives of those very authors who wrote what can be termed financial fiction.
After an introduction, the book has six main chapters. Chapter 2 outlines the financial context in Victorian times, summarizing the increasing importance of women investors, and the relative freedom with which single and widowed women—and, after the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, married women—could engage with financial instruments. Chapter 3 considers the role of women and money throughout the Victorian era, as represented by Dickens and Thackeray in the 1840s and 1850s and later by Trollope and Gissing. What emerges is that each author discussed had personal or close family experience of the impact of financial failure and success on individual lives: Thackeray made unsuccessful investments, Dickens's father went bankrupt, Trollope's mother was forced to write for a living after her husband had to leave the country to avoid bankruptcy, and Gissing agonized about ethical investment, having seen the working conditions of South African gold miners firsthand.
The core of the book is contained in chapters 3 to 7, each chapter devoted to a female author. These are Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, and the less well-known Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant. For each author, Henry interweaves the financial aspects of their personal lives with their own financial fiction. Each chapter's subheadings related to the novels under discussion. For example, for the George Eliot chapter, the subheadings include “The Loss of Inherited Money” and “Dirty Money.” Chapter 8 concludes.
Henry argues that women had more freedom in investment than they did in other spheres of life—they were able to choose investments, to go to annual general meetings, to take advice, to manage their portfolios, to plan their own financial futures. She shows, in the critical biographies of these four female authors, how they were affected by financial decisions and sometimes by financial difficulties. Gaskell, for example, relied on the income from her investment in St. Katharine Docks Company to finance a costly second home. Eliot had accrued a substantial portfolio at the time of her death, and bequeathed much of it in trust to the widow and children of her stepson, Bertie, after he died trying to make a living from a South African farm, and also a significant sum to her niece, Eliza. Both Gaskell and Eliot received good investment advice and invested in similar portfolios, made up of British, colonial, and some American securities.
Both Riddell and Oliphant had to write for money to pay for their husbands’ respective unsuccessful business ventures, which helped them to understand, and write about, business and money in their novels. Indeed, Riddell lived in the city and wrote expertly about the activities and professions of those who lived and worked there. One critic commented on her “fearful and wonderful knowledge of matters financial.” Her novels reflect her strong views on the Bankruptcy Act of 1869, which worsened the impact of her husband's bankruptcy, and the 1870 Married Women's Property Act, which she tried to use to protect her earnings from her husband's creditors. Oliphant, whose husband's stained glass company (which she had financed) failed, became a single mother on his death, also looking after her brother and his children when he, too, went bankrupt.
Throughout these chapters, Henry emphasizes the impact of geography on these women, arguing that both Riddell and Gaskell, for example, spent time or had family in Liverpool, a city in the north of England redolent of Empire and of international trade—as well as slavery. A Gaskell novel is even entitled North and South. Eliot, too, shows how financial events that might have started far away, in London or even overseas, impacted women's lives in provincial and rural England. And, reflecting the real world, characters in the novels lost money by investing in insurance, bank, and shipping shares.
The ethics of investment is another theme embedded in the novels of all four authors. For example, Riddell has the heroine of her novel Miss Gascoigne returning from the South of France after receiving news of an accident at the mine in which she was an investor, and Eliot, in Daniel Deronda, describes the inheritance and loss of a Jamaican fortune built on slavery. Henry argues that although the authors wrote poignantly about the wealth and income discrepancies they observed in daily life, and deplored greed and corruption, these women were reluctant to openly condemn the capitalism that allowed them to earn and to invest those earnings, giving them financial independence. For example, both Gaskell and Eliot held St. Katharine's Docks securities; in order for the docks to be built, eleven thousand people were forcibly evicted and a famous church demolished.
This is a fascinating book, with new material, particularly on Riddell's and Oliphant's lives and novels and original critiques of their financial writings as well as those of Gaskell and Eliot. Henry shows that investment—for the authors themselves and for the women in their novels—could be a source of financial independence but also of financial obligations, due to financial losses incurred by family members. What comes out clearly is the sheer complexity and prevalence of finance in the Victorian period, not so obvious today, with salaries, pensions, and welfare payments cushioning the financial risks our predecessors endured.
