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THE SOCIALLY-EMBEDDED MARKET AND THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH CAPITALISM IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2014

Denise Lovett
Denise Lovett*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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With its biting portrait of mid-Victorian greed, foolishness, and the obsessive pursuit of wealth, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now is often read as both a eulogy for traditional English society and an attack on rapacious capitalist values, particularly as they manifest themselves in the market for finance capital. Indeed, in the novel, the market mechanism seems to have run amok: social status, titles, and reputations circulate like commodities in a sea of new money that swamps traditional distinctions between creditworthiness and social capital, investment and speculation, and commerce and graft. The pervasive sense that everything has its price extends to intimate social relations, including courtship and marriage. Penniless, pretty women of good families, such as Julia Triplex (later Lady Monogram) and Lady Carbury, much like penniless, titled men such as Lord Nidderdale and Lady Carbury's handsome son Felix, recognize that, for them, marriage is a business arrangement in which the pretense of sentiment between the parties is little more than a social convention. Yet, the novel also suggests that the frenzy that free-for-all market forces have unleashed will exhaust itself, just as the speculative price bubble in railway shares central to the narrative eventually collapses. Countering its satire of capitalist excess is the novel's more optimistic treatment of exchange, which implies that fraud in the share market can be contained through the imposition of standards of behavior that foster honest commerce.

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Research Article
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Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 2014, pp. 691 - 707
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

With its biting portrait of mid-Victorian greed, foolishness, and the obsessive pursuit of wealth, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now is often read as both a eulogy for traditional English society and an attack on rapacious capitalist values, particularly as they manifest themselves in the market for finance capital.Footnote 1 Indeed, in the novel, the market mechanism seems to have run amok: social status, titles, and reputations circulate like commodities in a sea of new money that swamps traditional distinctions between creditworthiness and social capital, investment and speculation, and commerce and graft. The pervasive sense that everything has its price extends to intimate social relations, including courtship and marriage. Penniless, pretty women of good families, such as Julia Triplex (later Lady Monogram) and Lady Carbury, much like penniless, titled men such as Lord Nidderdale and Lady Carbury's handsome son Felix, recognize that, for them, marriage is a business arrangement in which the pretense of sentiment between the parties is little more than a social convention. Yet, the novel also suggests that the frenzy that free-for-all market forces have unleashed will exhaust itself, just as the speculative price bubble in railway shares central to the narrative eventually collapses. Countering its satire of capitalist excess is the novel's more optimistic treatment of exchange, which implies that fraud in the share market can be contained through the imposition of standards of behavior that foster honest commerce.

In opposing the wholesale application of free-market ideology to English society, The Way We Live Now undermines the idea that markets are naturally self-regulating and makes an indirect case for reforming limited liability legislation to ensure that investors are protected and joint-stock companies engage in legitimate business.Footnote 2 I argue in this essay that Trollope's depiction of exchange in The Way We Live Now reassures the reader that unregulated financial markets are neither essential nor sustainable features of a capitalist society and that those markets can be constructed through regulatory mechanisms to be consistent with traditional English notions of commercial and personal honesty. The novel suggests through its depiction of how markets function that a particularly English form of capitalism – one compatible with English notions of commercial morality – is possible. Trollope's seemingly anti-capitalist novel rejects the idea of the self-regulating market to teach the reader that markets – including financial markets – are not and cannot function as self-regulating entities, but instead are structured by the conventions, laws, and regulatory policies that govern commercial activities. That is, Trollope's depiction of exchange suggests that markets do not operate independently of normative standards of behavior or the institutional framework – laws and regulations – of the market. In The Way We Live Now, exchange fails when, for example, the representative legal function of a signature is violated.

Trollope's novel represents economic exchange as a fundamentally social activity, not one that takes place in a sphere separate from the social and legal relations of the exchanging subjects. The novel implies that the railway share fraud it depicts is a regulatory failure and that the legislation governing joint-stock limited liability companies requires reform to ensure that the capital market conforms to English notions of honest commercial practices. In contrast to my reading, scholarship on Trollope's representation of developing capitalism assumes, in general, that modern capitalist markets operate in opposition to traditional English culture. Virtually no critical energies have been applied to the examination of this assumption itself but rather to issues that build on it such as Trollope's representation of the exchange of women (Delany and Lindner), the cultural “misrecognition” of commercial interests (Michie), the stock market as an index of class identity (Jaffe), and the financial markets as impersonal forces (McGann). None of these discussions have examined the epistemological assumptions Trollope brings to his representation of capitalist markets in The Way We Live Now. This paper turns the dominant critical focus on its head by reading The Way We Live Now not as “a lament for the passing away of the old prestige order where identity depends on one's rank, lineage, and connection to the land” (Delany Literature, Money 19), but rather as a critique of the institutional and cultural framework within which capitalism functions – and an implied argument for how a mature English form of capitalism might develop. My argument implies that we should read the novel as forward-looking and its critique of financial capitalism as far more nuanced and profound than has been recognized. The Way We Live Now represents markets not as inimical to English culture, but rather represents emergent capitalism as a social-embedded development whose dynamics are shaped by social and political institutions.Footnote 3

By the time Trollope began writing The Way We Live Now in 1873, the idea that the market mechanism operates automatically and without government regulation had begun to lose its earlier gloss.Footnote 4 The widespread fraud and embezzlement in the decades that followed the passage of the Limited Liability Acts of 1855–56, which introduced limited liability incorporation, and the growth of increasingly complex financial markets, made the idea of the self-regulating market seem implausible and simplistic. Commentators realized that a philosophy of caveat emptor simply did not fit a world in which the “investing public had to submit itself to the tender mercies of professional stockbrokers, bankers and company promoters who alone possessed the requisite ‘expertise’ to operate in the inscrutable world of high finance” (Robb 23).Footnote 5 For The Way We Live Now, Trollope had a wealth of material on which to draw at a time in which the very notion of what a market is and does was in flux. An 1870 article in Fraser's Magazine distinguishes these new, complex markets from exchange among individuals who know one another and deal in commodities they see and understand:

A man is the best judge of his own interests in those cases only where he has some special knowledge. A country gentleman can buy his own horses, but he must take the qualifications of his physician upon trust, and he is absolutely incompetent to decide upon the solvency of a company in which he may wish to take shares, or of an insurance office in which he may wish to effect a policy. (qtd. in Searle 254)

Similarly, in The Way We Live Now, investors in the share market have no way of knowing that Augustus Melmotte's South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway exists purely to profit its directors, as the narrator remarks, “not by the construction of the railway, but by the floating of the railway shares” (78).Footnote 6 Complex financial markets drew Victorians’ attention to the idea that exchange is neither a stable nor a naturally self-regulating activity, but is a phenomenon that depends on the social context of trade, and it is this epistemological instability that The Way We Live Now explores.Footnote 7

In The Way We Live Now the idea that exchange is a formulaic phenomenon that unfolds according to an automatic mechanism contrasts with the idea that exchange is complex and uncertain because it is carried out and structured through the relations of the exchanging subjects. Thus, the novel juxtaposes the notion that an exchange manifests the unproblematic desires of self-interested subjects – the notion implied in the idea of the self-regulating market – with a far more ambiguous process that unfolds over time and space.Footnote 8 The novel does not confine its attention to these contrasting ideas to its portrait of the financial markets. Rather, The Way We Live Now examines more generally the exchange practices that structure social relations – almost all of which have to some extent economic interests at stake. For example, in the world of the novel, so frequently have courtship and marriage come to resemble a business deal that Trollope's narrator, referring to the impecunious Lord Nidderdale, remarks:

His father and his grandfather had both been extravagant men, and he himself had done something toward adding to the family embarrassments. It has been an understood thing, since he had commenced life, that he was to marry an heiress. In such families as his, when such results have been achieved, it is generally understood that matters shall be put right by an heiress. It has become an institution, like primogeniture, and is almost as serviceable for maintaining the proper order of things. Rank squanders money; trade makes it – and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour. (435)

Yet, Trollope's neat description of the seemingly straightforward practice of exchanging rank for money in marriage implies a simplicity that is belied by the novel's narration of the intricate dance that enables such unions. As Lady Carbury remarks to Felix of his pursuit of Melmotte's daughter Marie, “you don't know how many slips there may be between the cup and the lip” (177). Such marriages of convenience are, in the narrative, complex to negotiate, particularly when there are many contenders for an heiress who, like Marie Melmotte, has a mind of her own. For every successful meeting of cup and lip, Trollope suggests, there are as many failed attempts at uniting rank and money.

This contrast between Trollope's glib précis of the exchange of economic capital for social assets and the narrative's depiction of the uncertain and complex events that lead to the realization or breakdown of such an exchange illustrates the tension between the mechanistic notion of exchange implied by the idea of the self-regulating market and a far messier process in which “slips . . . between the cup and the lip” may at any moment sever negotiations and send the parties packing. In the case of marriages between the titled and the moneyed, the novel juxtaposes two relationships between Christian English women of aristocratic families and wealthy Jewish bankers. Lady Julia Start marries the young Lionel Goldsheiner, while Georgiana Longstaffe bungles her engagement to Goldsheiner's father's partner Ezekiel Breghert. Lady Julia's marriage is achieved, in part, because her mother arranges an elopement, thereby avoiding the social awkwardness of a wedding between her Christian daughter and the Jewish groom. Georgiana's engagement is unsuccessful, in part, because her parents are furiously opposed to the match and provide no assistance or resources. After Julia and Lionel return, there appears to be a family effort to have Goldsheiner Anglicized and assimilated into Lady Julia's social circles and socially segregated from his Jewish connections. As Lady Monogram points out to Georgiana, “Mr. Goldsheiner has, in some sort of way, got himself in. He hunts, and Damask says that he is one of the best shots at Hurlingham. I never met old Mr. Goldsheiner anywhere” (458). In contrast, Breghert, a portly, middle-aged widower with five children who “looks” more Jewish than young Goldsheiner, is less amenable to assimilation. The final blow comes when, after deciding to go through with the marriage despite her parents’ disapproval and threats, Georgiana sabotages the betrothal by demanding that Breghert provide her with a house in London in addition to his Fulham residence. Lady Julia's successful marriage and Georgiana's broken engagement suggest that strategic behavior, timing, and resources, as well as other social factors, including appearance, age, and gendered norms of behavior make the “institution” that rank marries trade a far more complex and uncertain matter than primogeniture.

My argument that representations of exchange in The Way We Live Now reassure the reader that commercial recklessness and criminality are not inherent features of capitalist markets builds on the idea that these representations function as both a formal and a referential feature in the novel. The novel's portrait of exchange as, on the one hand, an activity that can be described as following a simple formula (the “institution” that rank marries trade), and, on the other, as a complex process hindered or facilitated by numerous social factors, invites the reader to examine the essential work that enables an exchange (and thus to consider how and why particular exchanges succeed or fail) and it tells a larger, extra-textual story about the English experience of becoming a modern capitalist society. Cultural work is as essential to the achievement of a marriage of convenience, the novel suggests, as collective social purpose is to the channeling of capital to beneficial projects. Trollope implies as much with respect to the share market when Fisker approaches Melmotte with the proposed railway flotation. The narrator remarks that Fisker's prospectus makes “no reference at all to the future profits of the railway, or to the benefit which such means of communication would confer upon the world at large; but applied solely to the appetite for such stock as theirs, which might certainly be produced in the speculating world by a proper manipulation of affairs” (72). By implication, a market in which capital flows to a company that builds projects that benefit others as well as produce profits for its investors is consistent with English notions of commercial honesty. However, the novel makes few such explicit references to extra-textual financial markets, instead depicting the complexities of exchange in more familiar contexts, including courtship and marriage.Footnote 9

The novel thus invites readers to understand exchange as a complex social process, rather than a mechanistic one, and so to understand the financial markets also as socially-embedded.Footnote 10 This understanding of exchange contributes, of course, to the novel's comedy. It is fun to watch the titled and the moneyed engage in their dance of courtship, each negotiating or repudiating the economic and social interests motivating the exchange. Trollope's reduction of a complex social practice to its bare bones in his “rank marries trade” observation is as amusing as it is simplistic and it encourages the reader to judge, and enjoy judging, the courtship dance as spectacle. But, equally, the contrast also illustrates an important point in the novel, namely that exchange is not mechanistic – even when it appears to the spectator to follow an autonomous mechanism based on the simple expression of self-interest. The novel's representation of exchange as a complex social activity and markets as socially-embedded underpins its portrait of Melmotte's fraudulent railway company as predicated on the ease with which such a company can be floated. In contrast, a mechanistic notion of exchange marginalizes the social context of exchanges. The novel's representation of exchange implies that the “profits” and “benefit” a company generates are not the inevitable outcomes of an autonomous market mechanism but structured within the legislative and regulatory framework that creates the share market.

In exploring the novel's contrasting portraits of exchange and the story they tell the reader about the development of capitalism, I examine two informal markets, in addition to the marriage market. First, I discuss the exchange of IOUs at the Beargarden Club and, second, the impromptu trading in the eight hundred tickets issued to the “evening entertainment” Melmotte hosts for the Emperor of China (217). Each of these markets explores the novel's dual description of exchange and each contributes to the novel's larger point that exchange is an inherently social activity and that financial markets are, consequently, neither naturally self-regulating nor operatively independent of social norms and moral standards. The Beargarden Club IOUs illustrate that the exchange of textual representations of economic value is created and structured by the participants themselves. The Beargarden Club acts as an analogy for the transition from an economy of individuals known to one another to a world of incorporated entities and global, anonymous investors. The club's members adjust to a new world in which the value of their IOUs comes under the scrutiny of exchanging subjects outside their private social network by changing the rules under which they exchange. The members themselves create the structure of the market for IOUs and adapt the conventions under which they trade when circumstances change. Similarly, the novel suggests, financial markets not only can develop a framework which is consistent with English culture, but that any framework within which exchange takes place is not the product of autonomous economic “laws” but of the culture – and conscious decisions – of the social body that creates that framework.

The market in the Emperor's party tickets suggests that social relations cannot be reduced to the formulaic expression of economic self-interest. The market in the party tickets illuminates the exchange practices that social relations normally conceal – the rules through which relationships are built. This market depends not on self-interest but on an underlying agreement among the exchanging agents that the purpose of the market – the party – is valuable – i.e., worth their effort to obtain a ticket. That is, trading in the tickets can only take place as long as the participants agree that it is socially desirable to be seen at Melmotte's party, and even though the exchanging subjects trade on the basis of self-interest (by negotiating the best terms possible), they only do so because they agree that the underlying purpose of the market – attending the party – is socially beneficial. Because in the market for party tickets, social capital, not money, represents the currency of exchange, any attempt to reduce social relations to economic self-interest by offering money for a ticket will diminish the parties’ social standing in one another's eyes. The important role the guests’ social capital plays in obtaining tickets suggests that a formulaic rule such as “rank marries trade” cannot capture the nature of exchange, which is not simply rooted in, or motivated by, economic self-interest or the expression of economic power. Rather, the market in the party tickets demonstrates that exchange in the novel is justified and structured by the belief in the social benefit the exchanging subjects derive from participating in a particular market. Exchange is, ultimately, a vehicle through which social relations are created and sustained. The decline in the value of the party tickets, a value which is a barometer of Melmotte's social standing, teaches readers that it is the social foundation of trade, which is the underlying purpose that the market serves – not merely the participants’ desire to benefit themselves.

The Beargarden IOUs

When Hamilton A. Fisker, Melmotte's American counterpart in the floating of the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, joins the members of the Beargarden Club for a game of cards, he disrupts an established system of exchange – an informal market in the club's members’ gambling IOUs. Fisker wins at cards and, because he is not a member of the club, the losers must pay him in cash. This event sparks off the creation of a new paradigm of exchange in the Club, much as the general introduction of limited liability destabilized exchange practices in English capital markets. Just as the Beargarden Club members do not know Fisker, nor he them, and they share no social ties, excepting a transitory and expedient relationship with Melmotte, so does the introduction of modern financial markets bring together exchanging subjects who know little of one another. The change in the underlying social conditions of the club corresponds to Britain's transition from an economy of individuals, and partnerships of individuals who know one another, to a modern capital market of anonymous investors.

The Beargarden Club members are acquaintances or friends, all broadly of the same social class, and united by the desire to play cards for money. Until Fisker's entry into their world, they accept one another's IOUs for gambling debts without discrimination: their social capital is their common bond and a signature suffices to offer paper in lieu of cash payment. The members do not question the ability of the issuer to make good on his IOUs because they know one another, and thus have a good idea of each other's creditworthiness, and because the purpose of their association is not to redeem IOUs but to play cards. Because the men are only intermittently flush with cash, the rules of redemption are ill-defined. All the members realize that a man's ability to pay may vary with his immediate circumstances. Thus, a member's signature represents his social capital, rather than his economic capital, even if it also represents his promise to pay at some future time. As a result, an IOU does not represent the issuer's underlying economic creditworthiness, but he may offer it because the players each accept the framework of the marketplace, which stipulates that social capital entitles a member to issue an IOU.

When Fisker wins at cards, the Club's members realize that they are “not entitled to pay a stranger with documents which, by tacit contract, were held to be good among themselves” (81). Not only is Fisker a foreigner, but he is also about to leave the country to return to America. Fisker's winning changes the club's closed social world into one in which people who neither know each other nor share social class have financial obligations to one another. Lacking ready money with which to pay Fisker, the losers turn to the club's manager Vossner, who readily advances the money that Lords Nidderdale and Grasslough owe Fisker. Vossner, however, requires the other club members to co-sign a note for Miles Grendall, who has also lost money and “whose impecuniosity extended to the absolute want of credit” (82). As a result, the two lords, as well as Felix Carbury and Paul Montague become responsible for Miles's debt to Vossner.Footnote 11 With Vossner's intermediation and the members’ payment to Fisker, the Beargarden Club members can no longer ignore the financial liability an IOU represents: they are now indebted to a party who will demand timely repayment.Footnote 12 Vossner's loan demolishes the convenient fiction that the values of all IOUs of the same denomination are equal, a fiction that has allowed the IOUs to circulate freely up to this point.

For sometime, the young men do not realize that the context in which they exchange IOUs has changed and continue settling their losses as before because they all seem to have a supply of Miles's IOUs. This situation illustrates that traditional social relations can endure for some time, even in the context of change in underlying socio-economic conditions – a fact to which the investors who believe that the names on Melmotte's company's prospectus signals its credibility might attest.Footnote 13 When however, sometime later, Paul Montague prepares to settle his losses to Miles in cash, the prospect that Miles may receive cash for an IOU when the other members have co-signed a loan for him prompts a crisis: the fiction that all the IOUs are equally creditworthy cannot endure when the actual cash which will be paid for paper is less than the nominal value of the IOU. At this point, Felix proposes that Montague buy some of Miles's IOUs from the other members for ready cash since “[t]o Montague it would have no difference and he did as he was asked – or rather was preparing to do so when Miles interfered” (191). Miles objects to Felix's proposal: “I won’t,” he declares of his IOUs, “have them handed about the table to be changed” (191). Miles resists recognizing that, because of Vossner's loan, his paper can no longer circulate as if it has the same value as the other members’ IOUs. Up to now, his position in the club has rested on the pretense that his IOUs are as good as anybody else’s. Now that his poor credit has been unequivocally established and his debt undertaken by others as a personal liability, he can no longer count on them to accept his paper; but any refusal to accept his IOUs at their face value would also put his status as a gentlemen in doubt. In other words, Miles's status as a gentleman in these new conditions no longer suffices to guarantee his IOUs.

This crisis does not, however, end the game because the purpose of the market in the IOUs is not to make money; rather, the market exists because the members want to play cards and enjoy one another's company. Miles's paper is virtually worthless but the players want to continue to play and, because they are linked socially, do not want to exclude Miles. This new context, however, requires the members to change the rules under which they play – and they do so in order to avoid devaluing Miles's social position while still recognizing that his paper is worthless. The players decide that Miles should be required to pay off a “regular percentage to the holders” of his IOUs whenever he wins cash at the table (192). There is no particular rationale for the members’ solution to the problem, other than it seems sustainable and that they manage to agree on it. In other words, in the novel's analogy between the exchange of IOUs and the market in capital, the rules of the marketplace are not imposed by some external mechanism, but are created by the participants themselves. Moreover, in allowing Miles to continue to play, these rules accommodate their English notion of a gentleman, which is defined by a man's social connections, not his wealth. Soon, when the men “become sick of paper” and after the IOUs are “nearly all converted into money,” except for Miles’s, they find that the new rule is no longer viable. They then change the rules of the game again by deciding that Miles must in the future play with ready money and that for the others the “play should be somewhat lower, but the payments punctual” (381). The establishment of new rules allows trading to continue until Vossner sells the members’ IOUs to Flatfleece, a bill discounter, and vanishes.

This representation of the market in gambling IOUs illustrates the complexity and dynamism of exchange practices and suggests that markets are created by, and serve the interests of, those who participate in them. The novel contrasts this portrait of exchange with a simplistic, formulaic notion of exchange when Lady Carbury, thinking of her son's card-playing at the Beargarden Club, wonders why “should not Felix learn to do his gambling on the Exchange, or among the brokers, or in the purlieus of the Bank?” (96). Lady Carbury's naiveté with respect to the financial markets, which she demonstrates elsewhere, hints at the simplicity of this comparison.Footnote 14 Lady Carbury equates gambling with trading in Melmotte's railway shares simply because both involve exchanging money for paper tokens for which there are no apparent or easily verifiable assets. But Lady Carbury knows that worthless paper cannot circulate indefinitely because she knows that IOUs must be paid even if she does not apply this logic to the market for shares in joint-stock companies: she does not realize that investors would not want to buy shares that are likely to be fraudulent nor would they be likely to participate in a market whose rules are stacked against them. Lady Carbury takes Melmotte's scam as an example of a normally functioning capital market rather than what it is – a fraud. Lady Carbury's simplistic notions about finance invite the reader to understand that the structural change that the Beargarden's market in IOUs undergoes as a result of Fisker's intervention links the club to the novel's world of finance capital, and does not indicate a correspondence between gambling and investing or speculating.Footnote 15 Gambling at the Beargarden Club teaches readers that exchange practices based on traditional relationships can change in ways that accommodate specific cultural norms – such as the English idea of what constitutes a gentleman.

Melmotte's party tickets

If the Beargarden Club's market in IOUs suggests that exchange is neither naturally self-regulating nor independent of the social context of the market, but rather is structured by that context, the trading in the eight hundred tickets to Melmotte's “evening entertainment” for the Emperor of China (217) suggests that trade springs from, and is fundamentally rooted in, relations among the participants. In both the Beargarden Club and the trading of the party tickets, the economic payoff is secondary to the purpose of the exchange, which is to affirm and build social ties. The market in the party tickets complements the novel's representation of the Beargarden IOUs by showing that it is this underlying social purpose, not merely self-interest, that sustains exchange. Together, these two examples suggest that in the world of the novel, even when a market allows economic self-interest to dominate the participants’ behavior – as in financial markets – the purpose and foundation of the market is fundamentally social. Like the market in the IOUs, the market in the party tickets emerges from its underlying rationale: the desire to attend the event in the latter case corresponds to the desire to play cards with friends in the former case. And, similar to the exchange activity in the Beargarden Club, the market in the party tickets would not exist in the absence of this rationale. However, in addition, the party tickets make the larger point that self-interest alone cannot sustain a market.Footnote 16 The market in the party tickets demonstrates that it is the participants’ collective affirmation of and agreement on the purpose of the market on which exchange takes place, i.e., to bask in “Melmotte's glory” (267), that justifies and sustains trading, not self-interest. By extension, the novel suggests that an organized market, such as one in shares in limited liability joint-stock companies, cannot be sustained merely because some participants can make money at the expense of others: a market in shares is sustainable only when the rules of the market, such as what kind of information companies make available to investors, are collectively acknowledged.Footnote 17

The two hundred tickets for Melmotte's dinner for the Emperor are strictly distributed among the Chinese entourage and British royalty, the Cabinet and politicians, ambassadors, peers, and others with too much prestige to be excluded: there is no possibility of obtaining one except by invitation. The eight hundred additional tickets for the “evening entertainment,” however, are distributed to those close to Melmotte, who then can pass them on. Both events are highly prestigious: they are designed to show the Emperor “what an English merchant-citizen of London could do” (270) and to exhibit English culture, affirm the country's international prestige, and showcase the City as a global economic epicenter. As a result, a “burning desire” (272) for the party tickets spawns an impromptu market. Melmotte's role is central to the events because he represents the intersection of political, economic, and social success: his performance is intended to enact the narrative of the English gentleman who embodies economic and political power. The market in the tickets is, in effect, a market in the opportunity to be part of the narrative that Melmotte represents. Thus, the benefit of attending the event is a public affirmation of each guest's social prestige: to be seen in the company of the Emperor, royalty, and the Prime Minister testifies to one's social status and also enhances it. The rationale for the market rests on the collective belief that Melmotte's reputation is commonly recognized, a belief that is validated by the presence of individuals with unquestionable social capital.

Just as in any social relation such as courtship or friendship in which the “payoff” of the exchange is the creation of social ties, the exchange of a party ticket requires both parties to acknowledge one another's social position. Because the possession of a party ticket is the promise of a well-publicized assertion of the holder's social capital, the holder cannot simply sell the ticket for money, for to do so would cause him to appear unforgivably vulgar. An attempt to negotiate a monetary price for the ticket would be tantamount to admitting that one's social capital is reducible to “filthy lucre,” much like a discounted bill or a share on the stock exchange. Such an admission would equate social position to such economic components as, for example, servants’ wages and other household expenses, or the mere economic value of one's estate or the amount of one's income. In other words, an offer to sell a party ticket for money tells the counterparty in the exchange that the ticket holder considers his or her social capital without value.

In this market, then, exchange can only take place by putting forth one's own social capital and recognizing the social capital of other exchanging subjects. The currency of trading in the party tickets is thus each party's social capital. For example, Georgiana Longestaffe gives her two extra tickets to Lady Monogram, who, in turn, “was to undertake to chaperon Miss Longestaffe at the entertainment, to take Miss Longestaffe as a visitor for three days, and to have one party at her own house during the time” (458); and Mr. Cohenlupe's ticket commands a dinner with two peers and a countess (465). The negotiation over the exchange value of a ticket boils down to determining the value of each party's social capital relative to one another. Georgiana's three days and house party with Lady Monogram represents both Lady Monogram's willingness to be in Georgiana's presence and the value Georgiana associates with Lady Monogram's company. These negotiations are highly personal because each party's social capital is individual and might change according to circumstances. For example, Marie Melmotte's ticket elicits a lady's offer of a week in the country “but this was before the [attempted] elopement [with Felix Carbury]” (465); the narrator implies that Marie's failed elopement with the impecunious Felix has reduced the value of her ticket because her social standing has fallen. The exchange of party tickets thus represents an agreement on the value of the social capital of seller and buyer and of the social capital which Melmotte's reputation and the prestige of the other guests add to the ticket. The traders of the party ticket cannot be separated from the exchange because they are trafficking in their social identities as much as in Melmotte's and his guests’ reputations.Footnote 18

Clearly, then, any change in Melmotte's status will impact the value of the party tickets, as will the non-appearance of the most prestigious guests. Melmotte's starring role as the “merchant-citizen” in a narrative that will unfold before the Emperor and the other guests and justifies the event. When rumors begin to circulate that he has forged Dolly Longestaffe's signature in order to transfer the title-deeds to Pickering Park to himself, Melmotte's possible disgrace (557) not only makes the party less desirable but also damaging to the other guests’ social capital.Footnote 19 When many of the dinner guests fail to show, the reader knows that the collapse in the market in the railway shares is imminent, for it is Melmotte's reputation, rather than the economic viability of the railway, that has kept the share price bubble aloft. Melmotte's standing is damaged by the poor turnout and any other textual commodity that depends on his social capital, such as the party tickets and the shares, cannot sustain their previous values.Footnote 20 Indeed, the fall in the value of the party tickets in the wake of the rumors and the failure of the dinner suggest that the price in the railway shares must fall since Melmotte's reputation is the only rationale justifying the market in them. Melmotte's reputation can only justify investment in a railway that does not exist as long as investors believe that Melmotte can sustain the price bubble – and thus the opportunity to benefit at the cost of less savvy or informed investors.

It is significant that it is not the revelation that the railway company is a fraud that brings Melmotte down, but his violation of a code of personal and commercial conduct that a man does not forge another man's signature. In forging the letter that transfers the title-deeds from Dolly to himself, Melmotte violates the intimate relationship between the representative function of a name and the asset that is at stake – in this case, property. His crime highlights the fundamental maxim of trade: that the commodity at stake in an exchange exists and belongs to the party offering to sell it. Because the joint-stock corporation is in minimally regulated market, neither guests nor investors have any way of verifying whether Melmotte's shares are based on anything other than airy promises. When Trollope's narrator alludes to the “British freedom” that allows Melmotte “to enjoy, without persecution, the fruits of his industry” (31), he suggests that in this unregulated market, “freedom” facilitates fraud. By linking Melmotte's downfall to the exchange of an asset – property – to a man's signature, Trollope suggests that commercial honesty depends on the transparent relationship between an individual and the commodity at stake. The “British freedom” that would allow a capital market to function without fraud would be one, the novel suggests, in which investors understand the financial relationship of the companies’ directors to the business they manage.

The collapse in Melmotte's reputation and in the railway shares teaches readers that markets cannot function in the absence of the participants’ fundamental agreement on the nature and purpose of the underlying rationale of exchange, such as, in the case of the capital market, to channel capital to beneficial projects. The economic payoff of any particular market – the opportunity to profit – cannot alone justify trading since exchanging subjects will not participate without also sharing the belief that others will participate, and such a belief depends on the parties’ confidence that shared norms of behavior will be enforced. The novel shows that because the rationale that justifies the existence of a market is rooted in social norms such as notions of commercial honesty, markets are fundamentally social creations, not the product of the natural expressions of individual self-interest. Melmotte's failure to conform to the standards of English honesty by forging another man's name, and his subsequent bankruptcy as a result of that violation of a widely accepted social norm, reassures readers that exchange cannot be reduced to pure economic self-interest. Proponents of reform of limited liability legislation made this point. For example, Leone Levi argued with respect to the regulation of joint stock companies,

The practice of advertising a large nominal capital, often out of all proportion to the amount bonâ fide subscribed or required, which obtains in small as well as large companies, is wrong in the extreme, and is tantamount to making unauthorized use of names of great responsibility or wealth. No capital should be allowed to be advertised but what is required and received. . . . The moral effect also of parading extraordinary investments entirely of a fictitious character in this or that kind of enterprise at home and abroad, often greatly intensifies distrust and fear in times of troubles and panics. (11)

Levi insists that the rules that govern the regulation of the capital market are grounded in both morality – what is “wrong” – and in practical considerations – the psychology of investors “in times of troubles and panics.” Reformers such as Levi realized that a functioning capital market requires a regulatory system that ensures that the participants can share an understanding of the rules of exchange and of the nature of the commodity: a “fictitious” commodity is one whose value is not rooted in collectively shared norms. Trollope's novel advances the cause of reform in that it both delineates how such a fraud transpires and demonstrates that fraud is not an inherent feature of a functioning capital market. Similarly to the market in the party tickets, which functions only as long as the participants share the belief that the social value of attending is worth leveraging their own social capital, the market in shares can function only as a long as investors collectively believe that they have a fair chance of earning an economic payoff – and this belief depends on each individual's perception of the market as one in which others will participate.

Conclusion

Together, these two markets in IOUs and party tickets suggest that capitalist markets are organized through a collective process that is based on shared social values; simple self-interest can only sustain the representative function and economic value of any form of credit as long as the social foundation on which the participants rely is intact. Just as courtship and marriage are carried out according to particular norms – such as gender norms that dictate that a woman may not negotiate her own economic interests in courtship – the trade of economic assets such as shares can only function when participants adhere to social norms such as commonly held notions of creditworthiness or generally accepted standards of accounting. Such notions can accommodate change: as trading in the Beargarden IOUs and Lady Julia Start's marriage respectively show, English institutions such as gentlemen's clubs and traditions governing courtship and marriage can accommodate change in the form of capitalist forces and remain English. By showing that markets are social entities, created and structured through collective acts such as custom, legislation, and regulatory agencies (e.g., in the case of joint stock companies, the Registrar), the novel also makes the argument that the structure and functioning of markets are not imposed but are the product of collective choices that can be carried out through legislation, law, or other forms of consensus such as ethical norms enforced through peer pressure or conventions that govern business practices.

In illustrating that it is the social rationale that motivates exchange, which in turn sustains and dictates the structure of a market, even when economic self-interest is at stake, The Way We Live Now suggests that all exchange is fundamentally driven by the desire to build social relations. The historical conditions in which Trollope wrote the novel are particularly conducive to the novel's work of examining the nature of exchange and of markets, for at his time the idea of the self-regulating market was coming under increasing attack in the wake of malfeasance in the financial markets. The novel's representation of exchange as a complex, socially-constituted act rooted in the relations of the participants and the collective purpose of the market suggests that even ostensibly “pure” economic exchanges and even markets themselves are social constructions, not the product of an autonomous self-regulating economy. This representation of exchange and markets, far from being simply pessimistic in The Way We Live Now, invites readers to imagine capitalist markets as subject to institutional, legal, and social constraints. Trollope's representation of exchange shows the reader that such regulations are not modifications of a naturally autonomous market but rather that markets are not autonomous at all. In undermining its own satirical description of mechanistic exchange, the novel invites readers to view the emergence of a modern British capitalist society as one whose parameters have yet to be defined. Those parameters, therefore, are potentially consistent with commercial honesty – if reform of limited liability legislation can be enacted to institute such standards. The gap between the institutional framework that facilitates Melmotte's railway share scam and English values arises, the novel suggests, not from the nature of capitalism or the imposition of an autonomous market mechanism, but from a poorly structured regulatory framework, one in which the “freedom” to exchange is anomalous with respect to more established markets, such as those in land.Footnote 21

Although The Way We Live Now is often read as an attack on rampant capitalism, Trollope's novel appears instead to have anticipated a more general acceptance that markets, especially complex financial markets, do not function autonomously, for, by the end of the Victorian period, the very point that Trollope's novel illustrates became common currency. As one late Victorian commentator argued,

It is absurd to tell the investor that he must take care of himself and talk to him about caveat emptor. The government might just as well leave off stamping coins, and tell us that if we do not know a piece of fine gold when we see it, we ought to, and that in the future we must accept change at our own risk.”Footnote 22

The Way We Live Now makes a similar argument by representing exchange as a complex, social activity that is invariably structured by the legislative and legal context in which it operates. The novel suggests that “the way we live now” requires the conscious and collective structuring of modern capitalist markets to ensure their consistency with English social values and standards of honest commerce.

Footnotes

1. For example, for Weiss, the novel depicts “a total corruption of the traditional social values” and “the loss of commercial honor and respectability” (168, 163). Similarly, Russell argues that the novel is a product of Trollope's concern that “credit and credit financing, coupled with the feverish company promotion following the establishment of limited liability, have become acceptable to the higher ranks of society, and that the class from which Britain had for centuries derived its moral and social values was affected and corrupted by the new order of things” (152). In Delany's reading, Trollope “extolled the disappearing gemeinschaft based on agricultural production, barter, and paternalism, while denouncing its replacement, the heartless and insubstantial financial capitalism of ‘the way we live now’” (“Land, Money” 770). Alborn argues that the novel's villain Melmotte “symptomized social failings that no dose of moralism could cure” and that Trollope makes no effort to “pair [Melmotte's] demise with signs of moral rebirth” (221).

2. I use the term “self-regulating” to mean exchange directed solely by market prices. As many economists and historians have pointed out, the notion of the self-regulating market is an oxymoron. Heilbroner points out that markets do not emerge spontaneously from a predisposition to trade; rather, market behavior is the product of socialization that takes place after the establishment of a market system (chapter one): “market systems required conventionalized responses,” which are inculcated through socialization to prevent the breakdown of exchange (21). In contrast to the classical political economists who believed that markets emerged from what Adam Smith called the “propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another” (11), markets do not emerge from the practice of barter, which is historically, in many societies, embedded in custom, religion, and long-term social relations and does not evolve into a price-driven market in the absence of outside influence, such as colonization (Polanyi 64–65). In particular, in Western Europe, organized markets are the product of state intervention (Polanyi 66–70).

3. For example, my reading contrasts with McGann's argument that through Melmotte's bankruptcy Trollope “attempts to account for the business cycle theory during the late 1860s and 1870s, which looked to impersonal factors such as fluctuating credit, liquidity crises, and time to understand what produced sharp downturns in the money market, of the sort that crush Melmotte” (136). This argument rests on the premise that “Melmotte simply experiences a cash flow problem, and just when his credit dries up” (McGann 136). Trollope clearly illustrates, however, that Melmotte's cash flow problem is directly tied to his fraudulent mortgaging of Pickering Park (see note 19); Melmotte confirms that this is the source of his difficulties when he attempts to pay for the property with commercial paper (see note 21). McGann provides this “un-moralized” or impersonal answer to the question of how to interpret Melmotte's reversal in response to “readings of the novel as a conservative response to finance” (134). It is not necessary to counter such readings by characterizing the novel's depiction of markets as subject to “impersonal factors.” The speculative bubble in the railway stock must burst because there are no economic assets – i.e., a railway – to justify the investment. Melmotte's fraud must eventually collapse because it exists to fleece investors, as Trollope's narrator makes clear when the company is launched: “Even [Paul] Montague did not beguile himself into an idea that he was really a director in a company to be employed in the making and working of a railway. People out of doors were to be advertised into buying shares, and they who were so to say indoors were to have the privilege of manufacturing the shares thus to be sold. That was to be their work, and they all knew it” (78). I argue that Trollope depicts financial markets as structured by and embedded in the social and legal relations of the exchanging subjects, suggesting that the novel does not depict market cycles as “impersonal,” but as products of the institutional framework of those markets.

4. However, the idea of the self-regulating market still dominated much mid- and late-Victorian thinking on the economic domain. For example, in The Study of Sociology (1873), “Herbert Spencer treated hostility to political economy as a form of primitive superstition and likened contemporary attacks on its practitioners to the earlier attempts by theologians to refute astronomers’ accounts of the solar system” (Searle 253). Nevertheless, by the 1860s and 1870s, opposition to the notion that markets function according to natural or mechanistic laws had spread significantly (Searle 254).

5. Limited liability legislation provided minimal protections for investors. The 1856 Companies Act eased the requirements of the original 1844 Joint Stock Company Registration and Regulation Act, making registration available simply by submitting a “Memorandum of Association to the Registrar containing the name and object of the company, the type of liability – whether limited or unlimited, the amount of nominal capital and the total number of shares” (Robb 26). Subsequent consolidating Acts did not strengthen regulatory muscle: between 1856 and 1900, “there were no legal specifications as to the keeping of proper books and accounts, nor was there a mandatory audit for most joint-stock companies. The guidelines for prospectuses and advertisements were equally vague so that the public had little information on which to base its investment decisions” (Robb 148). See Searle, chapter 5, and Robb (11, 17, 26, 84–85, 95) on the endemic problem of fraud and embezzlement in the mid-Victorian period. Leone Levi estimated that in the period 1856–1868 nearly 50% of limited liability companies formed were wound up or made no return and that less than 10% of the nominal capital of the total of joint stock companies had been actually paid up (22). Shannon estimates that 17% of company promotions in the period 1856–83 were unambiguously fraudulent (295).

6. Melmotte's railway scam recalls the Railway Mania of 1845–46 in which advertisements “made the most extravagant claims for companies, frequently overstating capital funds and quoting shares at higher values than they had ever achieved on the Stock Exchange” (Robb 38–39). Unscrupulous railway promotions continued into the 1870s and one possible model for Augustus Melmotte is Albert Grant, whose flotation schemes of “foreign railways, mines and public utilities” spanned the 1860s and 70s (Robb 99).

7. This point has become apparent during the financial crises, asset bubbles, and recession of 1998 and of 2008–2010. Many economists and other commentators who have staked their theoretical allegiance to neo-classical views of the market as self-regulating have reexamined this faith. For example, Posner argues that lax regulation, the theoretical rationale for which is rooted in the efficient-markets hypothesis and rational-expectations theory, contributed to the recession. Trollope's illustration of how unregulated financial markets can facilitate speculative bubbles and fraud is also relevant to an understanding of the extreme levels of leverage and risk that led to the financial crisis of 1998 (instigated by the collapse of Long Term Capital Management) and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008–10: the novel suggests that individual investors and company promoters will assume levels of risk that can threaten the entire financial system and that a regulatory regime that reflects and enforces the social benefits of trade are crucial to the integrity of capital markets and the economy as a whole.

8. The idea that exchange manifests the parties’ self-interested desires dates from the social contractarian idea that the state's function is limited to “the maintenance and due enforcement of rights of property and the rules of a private market economy” (Atiyah 70). The notion of the self-interested subject is foundational in Adam Smith's theory of political economy in which unhindered exchange manifests the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations 399). However, Smith conceptualized this subject within a larger, institutional context that would promote justice. This larger framework was marginalized in nineteenth-century political economy, especially under the influence of David Ricardo's simplified, deductive, and ahistorical approach, which “jettisoned [eighteenth-century political economy's] moral and historical dimensions” (McNally 266). The mid-Victorian notions of the naturally self-regulating market and of the self-interested exchanging subject, then, grew out of a tradition of political economy that attempted to simplify and universalize economic behavior.

9. Poovey makes a related but different argument with respect to Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (384–416). Poovey argues that Trollope uses a bank check as a formal feature rather than as an extra-textual reference: “To Trollope and his readers, it did not matter that the most characteristic features of a Victorian check do not feature in the novel; what mattered was that he could use the check in an aesthetic pattern” (416). Similarly, here, I argue that the regulatory framework of shares in limited liability companies is subordinated to the narrative's thematic concerns. However, I also argue that the pattern of contrasting representations of exchange also functions referentially to indicate a theory of how capital markets should function in England.

10. This notion of the social-embeddedness of markets was first formulated by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. Polanyi rejects “the concept of the economy as an interlocking system of markets that automatically adjusts supply and demand through the price mechanism” (Block xxiii). “The term ‘embeddedness’ expresses the idea that the economy is not autonomous, as it must be in economic theory, but subordinated to politics, religion, and social relations. . . . [Polanyi] uses the concept to highlight how radical a break the classical economists, especially Malthus and Ricardo, made with previous thinkers [who subordinated] the economy to society” (Block xxiii-xxiv).

11. At an outrageous rate of interest: Miles “undertook to pay Herr Vossner £450 at the end of three months, and . . . in return for this the German produced £322 10s in notes and gold” (82).

12. Miles is indebted to Fisker because Felix settles his losses to Fisker with Miles's IOUs. During the game with Fisker “Sir Felix lost continually, and was almost the only loser” (80), but to pay for his losses, “out of his pocket-book, he extracted . . . documents bearing that M.G.” (80).

13. Melmotte's board consists of Lords Alfred Grendall and Nidderdale, Sir Felix Carbury, Paul Montague, who has a stake in the American railway company, and the “member of Parliament for Stains,” Samuel Cohenlupe, a confederate of Melmotte's. Melmotte's use of such directors recalls a prevalent practice during the Railway Mania of 1845–46: “decoy directors were also known as ‘guinea pigs’ since they supposedly received money (guineas) for merely attending board meetings” (Robb 37). This practice carried over into the limited liability era: “Investors often applied for shares in a new company on the faith that certain distinguished persons advertised as directors had a real stake in the company, when in fact they had been paid for patronizing the firm. There was never a shortage of impecunious peers willing to lend their name to a prospectus in exchange for cash payment” (Robb 98). Investors believed that directors of a company must have an ownership stake in it because before limited liability, business partners each assumed unlimited liability for the firm's obligations (“Limited Liability” 26).

14. For example, Lady Carbury fantasizes that infinite wealth might be generated if newspaperman Mr. Alf touts Melmotte's railway shares: “If Melmotte and Alf could be brought together what might they not do? Alf could write up Melmotte, and Melmotte could shower shares upon Alf. . . . Who would not buy [such] shares?” (230–31). Lady Carbury has the confused notion that investors are infinitely susceptible to deceit simply because they can be tricked in the short term.

15. An example of a conflicting reading is Delany's, in which he links the Beargarden Club gamblers to share investors: “The lack of inherent discipline in the financial sector of the economy is fatally attractive to the young aristocrats who consume rents and do nothing but amuse themselves” (Literature 24). This argument overlooks the novel's clear indictment of fraud and its approval of the capital market as a source of funding for worthwhile projects: as the narrator remarks of Fisker's and Melmotte's railway company, “[their] words had no reference at all to the future profits of the railway, or to the benefit which such means of communication would confer upon the world at large; but applied solely to the appetite for such stock as theirs, which might certainly be produced in the speculating world by a proper manipulation of affairs” (72). The narrator implies that a company that proposed to build a railway that conferred benefits upon travelers and investors would not require manipulative machinations.

16. The Beargarden Club scenes cannot make this point because the players manifest their self-interest in their desire to win and not, as in the market for party tickets, through their desire to participate in the market. The rules of the game, including the placing of bets, are formal and, consequently, there is no self-interested negotiation of terms, only a financial outcome on the basis of these rules. Trollope makes this point clear when, upon hearing from Felix Carbury that Miles Grendall has been cheating, Dolly Longstaffe replies, “If he won anything very heavy, I should begin to think about it, I suppose” (221). Dolly is willing to lose some money to Miles and avoid making a fuss because winning is less important to him than the pleasure he derives from gambling at the club.

17. Leone Levi's agenda for the reform of the Registrar's powers to regulate limited liability joint-stock companies focused on such issues; he pointed out that a stricter regulatory regime did not represent undue interference in the market: quoting John Stuart Mill, Levi writes, “‘When the law has thus afforded to individuals all practicable means of knowing the circumstances which ought to enter into their prudential calculations in dealing with the [joint-stock] company, there seems no more need for interfering with individual judgment in this sort of transaction, than in any other part of the private business of life.’ So long as the interference of the State in such matters is more judicial than administrative, and so long as it is restricted to providing of means for the due publication of the conditions on which any company may seek public co-operation, and to the putting of proper checks to the publication of false statements, the objection to Government interference cannot be really maintained” (19).

18. Miles Grendall's ticket exchange is the only one that is explicitly economic: he receives for his pair of tickets “an IOU of considerable nominal value from Lord Grasslough” (465). By trading his tickets for an IOU, Miles acknowledges that apart from his connection with Melmotte, his social capital is all but depleted.

19. Melmotte buys Pickering Park from Dolly and his father and mortgages the property without having yet paid for it (412–13, 445), When he is pressured for payment, he forges Dolly's signature and posts it to Mr. Longestaffe's lawyers (557). The rumors of the forgery begin to spread on the day of the dinner (447–48).

20. While the party tickets and the shares in the railway company are both to some extent based on Melmotte's reputation, they differ in that the railway shares ultimately derive their value from their potential economic payoff and the party tickets derive their value in part from other people's social capital. For this reason, some of the guests’ wives “did not care whether Melmotte was arrested at the dinner or after the dinner, so long as they, with others, could show their diamonds in the presence of Eastern and Western royalty” (450). As long as the event retains some of its prestige, the benefit of attending (for some people) outweighs the embarrassment of having one's host arrested for forgery. However, these are the exception; for the men whose aspirations or reputations in political or professional circles might be tainted by their association with a man accused of forgery, attending the party would be costly indeed.

21. An example of established customary practices occurs when Melmotte attempts to forestall payment for Pickering Park, the property he has bought from Adolphus Longestaffe and his son Dolly. Melmotte offers “bills at three and six months’ date”; in response, Longestaffe's lawyer Bideawhile objects, “the sale of a property is not like an ordinary mercantile transaction in which bills are customarily given and taken. The understanding was that the money should be paid in the usual way” (576). The practices governing payments in the land and “mercantile transactions” are commonly shared, even if they are not inscribed in law but are “customary.”

22. Hartley Withers, “The Investor's Last Hope,” National Review 26 (September 1895): 137. Qtd. in Robb 153.

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