Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing

by Simon J. James

Overview

Simon J. James examines how Gissing's work reveals an unhappy accommodation with money's underwriting of human existence and culture, and how daily life in all its forms – moral, intellectual, familial and erotic – is transcended or made irrelevant by its commodification.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843311089
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	12/08/2003
Series:	Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series
Edition description:	First Edition, 1
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Simon J. James is Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. His research interests include Victorian fiction, masculinity in literature and contemporary writing.

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Unsettled Accounts

Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing

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By Simon J James

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2003 Simon J James
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-751-9

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: TELLING MONEY

One would have asserted without scruple that if Mr Pecksniffs conscience were his bank, and he kept a running account there, he must have overdrawn it beyond all mortal means of computation.

Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter 20

Hundred pence are eight and fourpence,
  Never learn to cheat or swear.
Hundred and ten pence are nine and two pence,
  With bad companions take no share.
Hundred and twenty pence are ten shillings
  Learn to be both meek and mild.
Hundred and thirty pence are ten and tenpence,
  God never loves a wicked child.

From The Archer Alphabet (n.d.)

Unsettled Accounts: Money and Representation

Unsettled Accounts is a book about the novels of George Gissing, but it is also about the representation of money in Victorian fiction. The subject of money preoccupies Gissing more than it does any other novelist in English literature. Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens and many other writers have their claims; money inescapably underlies the fiction of Gissing's contemporaries such as Henry James and Thomas Hardy. However, in no other writer is the presence of money and the universalizing hold of commodity relations on modern social life so continually present, so insisted on both by the language of the narration and by the shape of the plot.

Gissing wrote to Edward Clodd in 1898, 'I am so preoccupied by the accursed struggle for money that nothing metaphysical seems to me of primary importance.' No matter how the different voices of Gissing's fiction may protest against it, the power of money over the material world is so great that for Gissing the realist mode of fiction seems virtually the only possibility for a serious literary artist. He confessed to Clara Collet, CI am never quite at ease save in dealing with forms of life where there enters pecuniary struggle. I think it will always be so. I find it a great effort to understand the daily life of people free from money cares. Never for one hour since I was out of boyhood have I been free from that harassing thought, & of course it affects my imagination.' Gissing complained that Ruskin's imagination was adversely affected by his possession of independent wealth; Gissing's imagination was in turn conditioned by his own poverty. He shared the post-Romantic artist's tendency to valorize high culture and to express distaste for commercial values, but contested literary culture's claim to autonomy from the profit-motive, insisting that the enjoyment of Art, and that indeed anything else that is worth having, such as a comfortable home, moral independence or even love, is dependent on the income necessary to fund it. Tut money in thy purse,' warns the narrator of A Life's Morning, 'and again, put money in thy purse; for, as the world is ordered, to lack current coin is to lack the privileges of humanity, and indigence is the death of the soul.'

As a result of conflicting loyalties both to cultural value and to realistic representation, Gissing's novels often appear contradictory and confusing. For him, late Victorian society's separate attitudes to money and to culture are contradictory; in Gissing's work, the internal contradictions of his form mimetically stand in for the incoherences and ideological censorings of the social world. In order to characterize Gissing's technique as a novelist, therefore, I will examine in turn the novels' images of money and of art. I will also consider subjects that, for Gissing, intersect with that of money: class, education, gender, politics, literature; and specific manifestations of late-Victorian economic life, such as the city, advertising, prostitution and imperialism.

Resisting Capital

Of the enormous corpus of Victorian fiction, there is barely a single novel whose contents remain untouched by money: John Vernon has suggested that money is 'the most common theme in nineteenth-century fiction.' While Victorian literature tries to resist the idea of money as a moral telos for its characters, it is rarely able to establish an imaginative world that is capable of functioning entirely without money. Money may be, like the first pound notes that Pip receives from Magwitch, greasy from circulation in the public world, but it is still needed by realist fiction to oil the wheels of its plot mechanics. George Orwell, realist novelist and an emphatic admirer of Gissing, adapted I Corinthians 13 for the epigraph to his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, itself a twentieth-century reimagining of Gissing's New Grub Street:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffered! long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things ... And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

The presence of money in a narrative almost functions as a kind of index of fidelity to real life, filthy lucre a guarantee of grimy realism. Realistically portrayed Active worlds have to possess economies of some kind, whether more or less visible, and modern economies require money. Even in one of Vladimir Propp's examples of pre-capitalist narrative in The Morphology of the Folktale, a bag of money occupies the function of 'reward'. Victorian fiction frequently substitutes a legacy for the treasure or half a kingdom traditionally awarded to the hero of a fairy tale: Pip in Great Expectations (1860–1) mistakenly believes himself to be the hero of this kind of narrative, as if money were the means of bringing about his desired fairy-tale ending. While the representation of money has tended to be associated more with mimetic realism than with wish-fulfilling romance, money remains the site where realism and romance frequently compete. Money is simultaneously attractive and repulsive; money's illimitable translate ability into power or commodities make it a powerful force for good or for evil. Shirley Keeldar claims cheerfully of the fortune that she inherited:

I can do a good deed with my cash. My thousand a year is not merely a matter of dirty bank-notes and jaundiced guineas (let me speak respectfully of both though, for I adore them); but, it may be, health to the drooping, strength to the weak, consolation to the sad. I was determined to make something of it better than a fine old house to live in, than satin gowns to wear; better than deference from acquaintance, and homage from the poor.

Little that is good can be achieved without money; money also lies at the heart of much that is evil, whether as poverty or excessive pursuit of riches. Money can appear as the just restoration of the Dickensian ending, or equally as the origin of social ills; in the Victorian age money is a potent source of cultural anxiety. While this is undoubtedly the case for eras before and since, Grahame Smith suggests that:

What is new in the nineteenth century is the notion that greed for money lies at the very heart of almost all personal and social evil, that other forms of wrongdoing are superstructures erected upon this one essential foundation, and that it is diffused throughout the whole of society.

In Victorian texts from Our Mutual Friend to Capital, such is the power of money that it even seems to possess a will of its own, accomplishing changes in the social world without human agency.

Novels therefore rarely feel entirely comfortable when handling money. In everyday life one needs money to exist, but would not wish one's whole existence to be consumed by thoughts, worries, desires or fantasies about money. Similarly, novels must deal with money, but struggle against being overpowered by an economic logic which would obliterate the meanings of their narrative. An unmediated mimetic representation of the market might preclude narrative entirely; if the dictates of the market are obeyed exclusively, moral narrative is elided, as characters obey economic logic alone, to the exclusion of individual conscience.

Thomas Carlyle's hugely influential comparative history Past and Present (1833) voiced resistance to the increasing dominance of the financial motive on the nation's moral life: 'We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.' Carlyle's attempts to demonstrate the moral fissure between the increase of the nation's wealth and the inequity of its distribution is echoed throughout Victorian discourse, from the debate over whether ethics had any place in economic theory (a case made by John Stuart Mill, for example, but opposed by WS Jevons) to fiction's protests against the naked pursuit of capital. Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin and other Victorian writers were aware that theirs was a protest that swam against the tide within 4a moral and religious ethos that stressed such virtues as hard work, thrift, and accumulation of wealth as intrinsic goods to be sought for their own sake.' Uriah Heep, perhaps with some justice, complains that he was taught at school 'from nine o'clock to eleven, that labor was a curse; and from eleven o'clock to one, that it was a blessing and a cheerfulness, and a dignity, and I don't know what all'. The life of a gentleman, to which David Copperfield virtuously and Heep transgressively aspire, requires a minimum level of income, but at the same time the ideals of gentlemanliness affect to repudiate the possessive individualism that ideologically powered Victorian economic growth.

The novels of such Victorian writers as Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Gissing and HG Wells contest the ideology that the general pursuit of enlightened monetary self-interest would lead to an increase in individual moral happiness. Even Malthus criticized such a belief, arguing in 1798 that 'the wealth of a society may increase [...] without having any tendency to increase the comforts of the labouring part of it.' For socially concerned novelists, the visible presence in real life of the poor who populate their fiction is proof that the distribution of wealth in Victorian society could not be viewed as morally legitimate; liberal sympathies do not necessarily harmonize with classically liberal economics. Such novelists were aware that theirs was an age of genuinely increasing and unprecedented prosperity, but were concerned that existing structures of social relations were failing to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of their economic base, that economic value and social or moral value could not coincide.

Money and the Shape of Belief

As Walter Benjamin, among many others, has argued, narrative has its origins in social use, in the desire to instruct. If stories do indeed teach, they accomplish this function by implying a shape of belief, by constructing an analogical relationship between the Active universe in which they take place, and an ideal moral universe in which correct actions are rewarded and sinful conduct punished. The following brief and slightly oversimplified account of Dickens (an author I have chosen as an example here partly because of his special significance for Gissing, and partly because of the conspicuity of money in his work) is intended as a kind of case study for the relationship between money, morality and ending in Victorian fiction. Peter Brooks suggests that 'narrative must tend towards its end, seek illumination in its own death. Yet this must be the right death, the correct end.' Narratives that include money, therefore, construct a shape of belief towards money and its correct use: in Victorian fiction, for instance, it is a repeated topos that while the pursuit of money for its own sake is morally reprehensible, the self should also learn how to use money correctly. Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy (1834), for instance, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett's Tales of Political Economy (1874) attempt to use narrative responsibly to instruct their readers.

Attempting to locate the place of the love of money in human happiness, John Stuart Mill warns that '[w]hat was once desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness, has come to be desired for its own sake.' Money, Victorian fiction repeatedly states, should be the means to an end, and not an end in itself; frequently, however, if money cannot be an end it is still an ending, in the form of the protagonists' reward for the virtue that they have displayed in the course of the narrative. Money's underwriting of the material reality in which the plot occurs makes money, or things purchasable with money, almost the only possible reward for a protagonist after love, and perhaps not even then. One of the most frequently employed endings in Victorian fiction is thus the unexpected inheritance. This convention can be seen as a Active strategy to restore the desired link between moral action and economic existence, between deserts and possession. Such a relationship is also embodied in the extremely popular Victorian anthology of true-life 'success stories', Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859), in which the protagonists' display of the correct moral value of hard work is rewarded by deserved success in their chosen sphere of action. In the chapter on 'Money – Its Use and Abuse', Smiles claims:

How a man uses money – makes it, saves it, and spends it – is perhaps one of the best tests of practical wisdom. Although money ought by no means to be regarded as a chief end of man's life, neither is it a trifling matter, to be held in philosophic contempt, representing as it does to so large an extent, the means of physical comfort and social well-being.

In the classic novel, moral value and money are both weighed and calculated in the final reckoning of the ending, its ultimate judgement on the characters providing an image, perhaps, of the Last Judgement that will ultimately apportion punishment and reward. The moral accounting of the classic novel's ending calls upon the reader's own faculty of ethical judgement to infer a relationship between the fates of the characters and a system of moral judgement, and implies thereby a kind of 'moral grammar' for interpretation of their actions.

The financial preconditions of life as represented in the Victorian novel thus translate the mechanics of narrative, and of narrative closure in particular, into a pseudo-economic form. 'Yes, reader, we must settle accounts now', writes Charlotte Bronte's narrator, beginning Shirley's final chapter, 'The Winding-Up'. John R Reed suggests that for Dickens, 'the language of money and commercial exchange easily comes to signify the accumulation of moral debt and the need to have that debt repaid or forgiven.' Moral values are incorporated within, even reified by, the internal economy of the novel; the moral universe created by the novel's plot settles scores with the characters, finally balancing the book. Roland Barthes has read the classic text as a relay of economies which are resolved by narrative closure, the internal exchanges of capitalist economics thus mimicked in the art form which is most closely associated with the rise of capitalist economics, the novel. (The metaphor 'economy' has indeed recently become very popular in critical terminology to characterize such textual circulations, as in 'economies of the body', 'economies of taste', and so on.)

Debts, both literal and metaphorical, are therefore an obstacle to traditional narrative closure. For the narrative to end, nothing must still be owing or remain unaccounted for; money that has circulated through the plot must come to rest in the right place. After they have received their legacy in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), 'Mr. and Mrs. Harmon's first delightful occupation was, to set all matters right that had strayed in any way wrong'. Although the virtue that the ending rewards has often been demonstrated by resistance to the profit impulse, the very weighing-up of deserving qualities at the ending of the classic text, satirically described by Henryjames as 'a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks', makes closure a form of financial calculation. If, as Vernon suggests, to write a realist novel in the nineteenth century is virtually to be obliged to write about money, money itself becomes a part of narrative technique, arguably with greater force later in the century. Monetary metaphors blur the boundary between the metaphorical and the literal: if monetary relations ultimately underlie the forms of social life in the nineteenth century, generic terms such as 'debt', 'payment', 'fortune' and 'account' half-acknowledge the existence of an economic superstructure beneath the narrative's apparent freedom. Fredric Jameson has suggested that, ideologically, texts uniformly possess a 'political unconscious'; one might add that indeed all texts possess an 'economic unconscious' as well, and in nineteenth-century realist fiction this unconscious can never be successfully repressed. Money circulates through novels; it underwrites their represented truths; it funds their assertions of moral value; it is the text beneath the text. Gissing may be more specific than most about his characters' financial situation, but protagonists from Moll Flanders to Leopold Bloom are capable of producing a balance sheet of their income and expenditure when their stories end.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: Telling Money; 2. Dickens in Memory: Gissing's Critical Writing; 3. Poverty and Imagination: The Early Novels; 4. The Price of Culture: Gissing's Major Phase; 5. Gissing's City of Women: The Later Novels; Notes; Bibliography; Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'"Unsettled Accounts" is a splendidly documented study of Gissing's fiction...it constantly impresses by its new insights and the freshness of its approach to a major Victorian theme. "Unsettled Accounts" is a book of stimulating suggestiveness which greatly enhances the status of Gissing's art. It will become one of the most frequently quoted critical studies devoted to his impressive achievements.' —Pierre Coustillas, Emeritus Professor, Department of English, University of Lille

'"Unsettled Accounts" offers new and fresh insights into Gissing's contradictory social vision...and provides a rare critical understanding of the complexity of Gissing's prose. Simon J. James' book constitutes an invaluable contribution to the growing body of criticism on this most singular of Victorians.' —Scott McCracken, Principle Lecturer, Department of English Studies, Sheffield Hallam University

Editorial Reviews

'James's study begins with an excellent survey of the role of money in Victorian plots, and works down to careful readings on the specifics of Gissin's art.' —'Victorian Studies'

From the Publisher