It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English
novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the
wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance
his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded
woman whom he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this common
marriage plot reveals about changing reactions to money in British
culture.
It was in the novel that writers found space to articulate the
anxieties surrounding money that developed along with the rise of
capitalism in nineteenth-century England. Michie focuses in
particular on the character of the wealthy heiress and how she,
unlike her male counterpart, represents the tensions in British
society between the desire for wealth and advancement and the fear
that economic development would blur the traditional boundaries of
social classes.
Michie explores how novelists of the period captured with
particular vividness England's ambivalent emotional responses to
its own financial successes and engaged questions identical to
those raised by political economists and moral philosophers. Each
chapter reads a novelist alongside a contemporary thinker, tracing
the development of capitalism in Britain: Jane Austen and Adam
Smith and the rise of commercial society, Frances Trollope and
Thomas Robert Malthus and industrialism, Anthony Trollope and
Walter Bagehot and the political influence of money, Margaret
Oliphant and John Stuart Mill and professionalism and managerial
capitalism, and Henry James and Georg Simmel and the shift of
economic dominance from England to America.
Even the great romantic novels of the nineteenth century cannot
disentangle themselves from the vulgar question of money. Michie's
fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice between two
women at its heart, shows it to be as much about politics and
economics as it is about personal choice.
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