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Reviewing Austen’s
Mr. Woodhouse’s objections to the marriage of his daughter are overpowered by the fears of housebreakers, and the comfort which he hopes to derive from having a stout son-in-law resident in the family; and the facile affections of Harriet Smith are transferred, like a bank bill by indorsation, to her former suitor, the honest farmer, who had obtained a favourable opportunity of renewing his addresses.Scott’s financial metaphor is deeply apt. In Emma’s speculative imagination, Harriet Smith is the illegitimate offspring of aristocratic, Whig capital, of “nobility or wealth,”Walter Scott, Review of Emma , in Southam, 70.
The term “social imaginary” derives from Charles Taylor’s
The broad transition Taylor has in mind, is from “Platonic-modeled orders of hierarchical complementarity” to a contingent model whose “two main ends, security and prosperity, are now the principal goals of organized society (12, 13-14). In contradistinction to the former, “the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy or any particular structure of differentiation” (12). Taylor refers to modern liberalism rising from the natural law theories of Grotius and Locke, to the imagining of societies composed of equal free agents who pool sovereignty in order to advance individual goals, en masse. We tend to think of such individualism as inherently atomistic, but as Taylor notes, in its original conception private ends and public goods found themselves in a balanced, productive tension, as it is only through the latter (including, notably, security) that the former may be realized.
If one were thinking of the modern, Western, moral order as a system, it would be “structuralist” in that no element would have an a priori meaning, but gains significance as it furthers or hinders the ultimate goals of prosperity and security. Originally the preserve of a few philosophers, the ideas underlying the modern Western order migrate “from one niche to many, and from moral theory to social imaginary” (6). However, remarkably, a third axis is at work. Summing up his distinctions, Taylor notes “that an idea of moral or political order can either be ultimate”, as in eschatology, “or for the here and now, and if the latter, it can either be hermeneutic or prescriptive” (7). The modern idea of order begins as a hermeneutic inquiry into the origin and nature of the “unquestioned legitimacy” underlying governments. But over time the “hermeneutic of legitimation” found in natural law theory travels along its axis towards prescription, so that notions of fundamental equality between social agents and the consensual nature of legitimacy become ethical constraints, taking on revolutionary force in the process.
Taylor employs the term “social imaginary” because he wants to avoid the idealist
pitfalls of “culture” and “ideology”, both of which he sees as covertly teleological.
His definition is worth attending to: By social imaginary, I mean something
much broader and deeper than intellectual schemes people may entertain when they
think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the
ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how
things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that normally met,
and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.
(23)
Taylor’s project is emphatically not a history of ideas (although it
may be mistaken for such at first glance). He does not believe that natural law
theory accounts for, or explains, the Western modern order. The task of explanation,
rather, would fall on why the theory moved along its “three axes” into the Western
social imaginary, from few to many, abstraction to practice, hermeneutic to
prescription. While Taylor argues that the materialist substrate is an essential part
of the story, arguments predicated on materialism as the primum mobile inevitably
traduce the complexity of the process. By the same token “culture” is an unhelpful
metaphor, suggesting, as it does, something contained, with a singular axis of
causality, of a medium in which agents act on objects (think petri dish). Taylor’s
preferred term is “background”, a philosophical concept meaning “that largely
unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which
particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have. It can never
be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines because of its unlimited
and indefinite nature”. Hence the need to speak of an “imaginary” rather than a
“theory” (30).
The Romantic era looms large in all of Taylor’s many accounts of the history of the
instantiation of what is now a salient aspect of our social imaginary, something we
familiarly know as the “economy“.
The point can be illustrated through an argument Lynn Hunt makes about how, for the population at large, the French Revolution was mediated through the family romance (Hunt). Prior to the Revolution the king was commonly regarded as the father of the nation; by the same token his subjects were his children. The point Hunt stresses is that within the social imaginary the relationship pulsed with literal, rather than figurative, force.
Within the Pre-Revolutionary mentality, legitimacy was a concrete affair, insofar as it could be materialized as blood. The shift to thinking of citizenship and state legitimacy in abstract terms, as matters of universal principles and rights, or, indeed, as the expression of Rousseau’s “general will”, was, indeed, revolutionary. In support of her argument Hunt provides evidence of the profound disorientation of the common citizenry, who felt bereft, indeed “orphaned”, by the king’s execution; they had severed connections with a visible “father”, and were now at sea with a host of abstractions. In Taylor’s terms the transition was from a previous model of “hierarchical complementarity”, concretely instantiated in the king’s body, haloed by an ontological investment, to a new order predicated on the universal human rights of equality, security and prosperity, so that we may concur with Saree Makdisi who argues, along with Burke, that Jacobins were the advanced guard of economic liberalism (Makdisi). The point of introducing Hunt’s perspective, is that it cues us into what this crisis in the social imaginary meant at the level of narrative: an explosion of stories of families and fathers, rebellions and repressions, unities and disunities, in which the paternal figure was divested of its ontological aura through the father’s endlessly repeated symbolic decapitation in the Gothic plots of the Minerva school; plots turning on sons and daughters somehow prevailing in their quest to marry in accordance with their emotional needs, rather than the family’s dynastic ambitions (Miles 2002). In Freudian terms, it’s as if contemporary readers administered their own talking cure, vicariously experienced through endless symbolic repetitions of the new order’s primal scene where abstract right was conceived (in the daughter’s stubborn adherence to her love), and the king’s body dispatched (in the father’s failure to impose his will), the whole psychomachia mediated through the cultural debris of an exploded feudal system.
I want to argue that the change in the social imaginary attendant upon the suspension
of cash payments was equally far reaching, as value lost its concrete embodiments in
favour of abstract promises: where there used to be stamped portions of precious
metal, there were now paper bank notes unsecured by specie. This was hardly a
phenomenon anyone could have missed, who lived through it. Prior to the suspension
country banks were prohibited from issuing notes smaller than five pounds, while the
Bank of England had none smaller than ten. According to John Clapham’s history of the
Bank of England, up until 1797 “Englishmen of the rank and file—wage-earners and
small traders—knew little of paper money” (Clapham 2-3). Over a period of twenty
years paper or its substitutes replaced traditional coins: “Gradually the age became
one of bank notes and tradesmen’s tokens and Spanish dollars stamped with the head of
King George III and put into circulation by the Bank in England” (Clapham, 4). There
was an explosion of country banks, made possible by the relaxation in the rules
governing the supply of money (an explosion involving Austen’s brother, Henry). The
surge in the supply of money was in turn linked to a rapid cycle of boom and bust, of
speculative fevers momentarily cured by bone-numbing recessions. The journals were
filled with the “bullion controversy”—with the first finest hour of the dismal
science, as it came to grips, conceptually, with the underlying causes of boom and
bust, “inflation” and “deflation” (as yet, not the common currency of economic
discussion). Meanwhile, the suspension was a forger’s charter. When bank notes were
of large denomination, counterfeiting was difficult, as palming-off a dodgy note was
an act you did up close and personal: only with the emergence of small notes in
common and daily use could you anonymously slip them into circulation, and then
disappear; hence, as Ian Haywood explains, the draconian practice of stringing up any
unfortunate wretch insufficiently eagle-eyed to catch the minute signs of the
counterfeiter’s art.
Romanticism—at any rate, Romantic ideology—may be understood as the dream of achieving permanent or transcendent value against a background of value rendered radically unstable and contested (McGann). In this respect forgery signifies the possibility of the endemic instability that fed the transcendental desires that peculiarly distinguish Romanticism. Although this is a version of the familiar story told about Romanticism—a story about the rise of secularization, with temporal theories of value replacing atemporal ones—the constitutive role of the bullion controversy (with its concomitant ills, such as the forgery epidemic) as a necessary condition for the historical rise of Romanticism has only recently been directly addressed, for example in Mary Poovey’s
My aim is not to change prevailing notions of Romanticism so much as it is to change prevailing notions of forgery in relation to it, from forgery as Romanticism’s dark other (an expression of the critical imaginary understandably present in, for instance, Nick Groom’s ground-breaking 1994 issue of
The hinge, linking the two systems, is forgery. In recent years there has been a great deal of critical interest in the history of literary forgery, an interest K.K. Ruthven links to “two intellectual developments in the final decades of the twentieth century”: “post-structuralist critical theory” and the “continuing anatomy of . . . 'the postmodern condition'“. The first forced a rethinking of traditional assumptions about “authorship, originality, authenticity and value” while the second fundamentally undermined commonsense apprehensions of the real and the simulated (Ruthven, 63). The eighteenth-century habit of positing the ideal of “original genius” axiomatically produced the allied condition of anxiety about its failure, which is to say, fakery, or, where it was with malice prepense, forgery. Post-structuralist critical theory certainly pounced on this hare, once set running; my aim, rather, is to take us back to a moment where a linkage was made, that now seems self-evident, but was hardly so at the time: the linkage, that is, between forgery in its dominant figurative sense (the unauthorized replication of bank notes), and a secondary one: the unauthorized replication of literary property. Originally a forger was simply a metal-basher, and forgery “the action or craft of forging metal”. So what connects the innocent act of making something (a poem, say, attributed to a long-dead poet), with the criminal act of counterfeiting bank bills? Blackstone in his
instantly the base wretches, from every quarter, poured in upon him; instead of admiring his ingenuity, and apologising, as well as they could, for their own folly, in having been Shakespeare-mad, they pitched upon him, like tigers, called him a forger, called him an impostor, and almost hunted him from the face of the earth.Cobbett continues:
With regard to Mr. Ireland, let these facts be borne in mind; that he was no forger, no impostor, according to the usual meaning of those words; that he had a perfect right to put forth the publications he put forth; that there was nothing illegal and nothing immoral in any of his proceedings as to this matter; that Doctors Wharton and Parr were deemed the two most learned men in the Kingdom; that they declared and certified that it was their conviction that no human being could write those manuscripts but Shakespeare; that when Mr Ireland was discovered to be the real author, the whole band of literary ruffians fell upon him, and would have destroyed him, if they had been able, with as little remorse as men destroy a mad dog...Cobbett is correct. “According to the usual meaning” of the word, Ireland was no forger. But in the minds of those hunting him down, like a mad dog, he was, because the concept of forgery had been stretched to link together the aesthetic with the monetary value the aesthetic generates (where the aesthetic is arbitrarily confined to a single, “original” source). From Cobbett’s perspective, these are heterogeneous notions yoked together by force. The “con” was not Ireland pretending to be Shakespeare, but the pretence of a rare and precious literary value only the cognoscenti could discern. Ireland’s true crime, Cobbett suggests, was his laying bare the pretence.The article is W.H. Ireland’s obituary from Cobbett’s Register , but is pasted in, without date or page numbers, in British Library Manuscript BL 37, 831.
One could say that mine is a secularization argument; that the late Enlightenment throws us into a state of irony, contingency, and subjectivity; and the hinged relationship between numismatic and literary forgery is just another indication that we are in the free-floating realm of shifting values. But I prefer to put it like this: the suspension of cash payments ushered in a period in which the modern economic cycle first began to intensify, a period, that is, of rapid capital growth, speculation, and savage retrenchments; it was one where paper replaced metal as common, circulating tokens of value; and where the economic discourse of value (on why, for instance, gold and silver have value in the first place: the common answer looping back to the scarcity-value attendant upon the limits of South American mines and the labour that worked them) infiltrates other discursive systems of value. All three developments altered the social imaginary, not least through the pervasive example of economic agents rising and falling, as the economy booms and busts, along with the allied lesson that the modern moral order presupposes deep interconnection and dependence. And I put it like that, because it is the best way of understanding something really peculiar about Jane Austen’s
And that is, that
Perhaps it was not fair to expect him to feel how very much he was her inferior in talent, and all the elegancies of mind. The very want of such equality might prevent his perception of it; but he must know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his superior. He must know that the Woodhouses had been settled for several generations at Hartfield, the younger branch of a very ancient family—and that the Eltons were nobody. The landed property of Hartfield certainly was inconsiderable, being but a sort of notch in the Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged; but their fortune, from other sources, was such as to make them scarcely secondary to Donwell Abbey itself, in every other kind of consequence... (153)We never learn about these mysterious “other sources”—Emma is doubtless vague herself—but almost certainly the Woodhouses have their money in the funds: and like many others living the good life among England’s ancient gentry, they are but one or two generations removed from the trade in which they earned their pile, before “cashing out”. As Shinobu Minma observes, “we may assume that the progenitor of the Hartfield Woodhouses was a younger brother in a landed family, who entered trade, made his fortune, purchased the Hartfield estate (from the Knightleys no doubt) and settled in Highbury.”
Of course stock-jobbers and kindred scoundrels are always trying to cash-out: as the
current joke has it, they made off, like Madoff. The eighteenth-century had their own
word for the phenomenon: “realise”. Here is the OED defining the word: To
convert (securities, paper money, etc.) into cash, or (property of any kind) into
money. After F.
In Highbury, everyone
is trying to realize themselves (apart from George Knightley, who has the opposite
problem to contend with, of turning land to cash). Thus we learn that Mr Weston had
“realized an easy competence—enough to secure the purchase of a little estate
adjoining Highbury, which he had always longed for” (16). Buoyed by the unexpected
profits of their London “House”, meaning business, the Coles are looking to realize
their fortune, by buying property in Highbury and insinuating themselves into the
best circles, to Emma’s chagrin. The obvious point, for a contemporary reader, is
that Emma is drawing distinctions without a difference; or rather, the slight
difference of the Woodhouses being superior to the Coles, by dint of cashing out a
generation or two earlier.“Well, and that is as early as most men can
afford to marry, who are not born to an independence. Mr. Martin, I imagine, has
his fortune entirely to make--cannot be at all beforehand with the world. Whatever
money he might come into when his father died, whatever his share of the family
property, it is, I dare say, all afloat, all employed in his stock, and so forth;
and though, with diligence and good luck, he may be rich in time, it is next to
impossible that he should have
This is the second instance of “realize”, used in its modern,
financial sense, found in the novel. Emma is speculating about Robert Martin’s
speculation, his attempt at the “high farming” as it was called, that was then
transforming British agriculture, as the speculative boom involved capital investment
in land, in new farming methods that were reaping strong returns owing to the
unprecedented high prices in corn.
How broad is the irony? “. . .his share of the family property . . . is . . . all afloat, all employed in his stock”. Note the pun on stock (obviously livestock, but also the financial variety). The pun develops the double meaning of Robert Martin as a high farmer (a passion he incidentally shares with Mr. Knightley), but it also brings out this latent irony: Emma is talking as the very thing she is: a speculator, who is, herself, the daughter of speculators (that is, business people), who have realised themselves, having cashed out.
The novel has a word for this conjunction of the two senses of speculation: Emma, we are told, is an “imaginist...on fire with speculation and foresight!” (295). The conjunction is also evident in the novel’s core plot device, where Emma speculates on Harriet Smith’s origin. Emma prefers romance (Harriet is the natural daughter of a Merchant Prince, or Whig Grandee, someone, ideally, combining both nobility and wealth, so “bleaching” the stain of her dodgy origin [404]), but has to learn novelistic realism (Harriet’s father is a tradesman decent enough to remain anonymous). In its sly way,
One could argue that Harriet is a counterfeit banknote, in that she is, from Emma’s perspective, a “fake”, but that is taking the allegory too far. The point, rather, is that two competing discourses inhabit the same space in the novel, and through the punning capacity of language, often the same words. You can try the experiment. Get an e-text of the novel and plug in “resources”, “speculate”, “improve”, “stock”, “credit”, “realize”: the terms recur, pointedly. The competing discourses are drawn from aesthetics and economics, where the correction of one kind of speculation (the economic) is linked to the improvement of another (novel-writing).
Austen’s fascination with the dismal science arguably pervades her work, but most notably
I want to conclude by considering the aspect of the novel that most severely tries my interpretation: the idealization of Knightley and Donwell Abbey. The marriage between Emma and Knightley repairs the “notch” in the latter’s property, making it whole again, while her thirty thousand pounds is safely placed in the service of an ancient estate, the pinnacle of a “well-connected” community presumably stretching back to the English Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. In his brisk pedestrianism, frugal habits, and active concern for all the “citizens of Highbury”, Knightley appears to be the embodiment of the responsible, enlivening spirit that draws the community together, transforming it (through self-regulation) into a living example of the Tory ideal. Emma’s epiphany, when she strolls around Knightley’s grounds, as she escapes the wretched Mrs. Elton and her inane mercantile chatter, appears Austen’s own, ventriloquized by Edmund Burke: “It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive” (315). At the heart of this glorious, organic, vital media is a crucial representation of social relation: “The considerable slope, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood; and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it” (315). Knightley, and Robert Martin, the Abbey and the Abbey-Mill farm, seem chthonically present, as if spontaneously grown from the sinuous earth, as close as one can get, in a realist novel, to an instantiation of the ontic force of “hierarchical complementarity”. On this reading, the mysterious power that makes the English home counties the home counties of England, and nowhere else—continuous across space and time, a unique identity enduring through the aeons—is made manifest in the novel as the healing force that repairs notches in ancient estates, excludes frightful sorts like the Eltons, while lodging dangerous females (wild imaginists and ambulatory banknotes alike) snugly within the confines of appropriate marriages.
This “heritage” fantasy is indisputably at work in the novel, but it works as one pole in irresolvable tension with another reality, of independent, and equal, economic actors, engaged in a mutual-aid society, as they seek to prosper in giddy financial times. For if
J.G.A. Pocock influentially argued that the rise of a polite and commercial society
in the eighteenth century eclipsed the mentality in which land was automatically
assumed to be the proper source of wealth and the true foundation of political
legitimacy.