Writing and the Rise of Finance
Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century

An original study of the early eighteenth century's financial revolution in the literature of the period.

Colin Nicholson (Author)

9780521604482, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 August 2004

240 pages
22.9 x 15 x 1.7 cm, 0.362 kg

"...this most original study centers on the effects that the financial revolution in English society...had on some of the major writers of the period...The author's approach to these works from this specialized, political-economical point of view is consistent, resourceful, elucidating, and convincing; Nicolson...has presented a very valuable argument for viewing these 18th-century writers 'in terms of a developing political economy that was permanently changing their world as they wrote'...Highly recommended to those interested in 18th-century history and literature." R. G. Brown

The early eighteenth century saw a far-reaching financial revolution in England, whose impact on the literature of the period has hitherto been relatively unexplored. In this original study, Colin Nicholson reads familiar texts such as Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera and The Dunciad as 'capital satires', responding to the social and political effects of the installation of capitalist financial institutions in London. The founding of the Bank of England and the inauguration of the National Debt permanently altered the political economy of England: the South Sea Bubble disaster of 1721 educated a political generation into the money markets. While they invested in stocks and shares, Swift, Pope and Gay conducted a campaign against the civic effects of these new financial institutions. Conflict between these writers' inherited discourse of civic humanism and the transformations being undergone by their own society, is shown to have had a profound effect on a number of key literary texts.

Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. A culture of commodities: 'Trivial Things' in The Rape of the Lock
2. Cultivating the bubble: some investing contemporaries
3. 'Some Very Bad Effects': The strange case of Gulliver's Travels
4. 'Bilk'd of Virtue': The Beggar's Opera
5. 'Abusing the City's Best Good Men': Pope's poetry of the 1730s
6. 'Illusion on the town': Figuring out credit in The Dunciad
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]