------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (June 2010)

Ranald C. Michie, _Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and
Edwardian Culture, 1815-1914_. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. x +
278 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-85196-892-3.

Reviewed by Leslie Hannah, Department of Economic History, London
School of Economics.


Ranald Michie, Professor of History at the University of Durham,
England, probably knows more about the history of stock exchanges than
anyone. His 1987 study, _The London and New York Stock Exchanges,
1850-1914_, remains the classic source for those wishing to understand
their different institutional characteristics. In this new book,
however, he explores new and unfamiliar ground, admirably summarized
in his preface: “Though its theme is the City of London as a financial
and commercial centre, it is not a factual account. Though it relies
heavily on novels it is not an exercise in literary criticism. Though
it attempts to identify ideas and images it is not a cultural history.
The fact that it does not fit into any obvious category may explain
why referees for journals and publishers found it easy to be critical
rather than to understand what I was trying to achieve. This book sets
out to test one simple theory and that is whether it is possible to
establish, with any degree of precision, the place occupied by a
financial centre in the culture of a nation, and the degree to which
that changed over time.”

We may already know that financiers played a large part in the
nineteenth century novel from our reading of _Mansfield Park_, _Little
Dorrit_ or _Howard’s End_ (or at least remember the television
adaptations on the BBC or public television). We may even have
encountered the playwright Israel Zangwill in melting pot contexts, if
not through his less well known _Cheating the Gallows_, but Michie has
intrepidly delved deeper into the century’s literary output to uncover
novelists that few of us will have even heard of. He appears to have
read every bad novel and mediocre play and viewed every painting that
touches on the life of the City. Of course, many of these were more
popular at the time than the surviving classics and arguably give us a
clearer window on the everyday dialogues and immediate discontents of
a lost world of contemporary public opinion. Fear not, however: you
are guided gently by the author though the relevant plots and
dialogues, as he expertly and relentlessly assesses their
significance, so you will not have to read them yourself.

His thesis is that, in a period of rapid change for both the economy
and cultural attitudes, we can chart their interactions with some
chronological precision by using such sources. There is no hint here
of the pervasive and unchanging simplicities of Martin Wiener’s
British business culture, but rather an insistence that attitudes were
contingent on events and their construction, with considerable leeway
for prejudices and presentations to shift and evolve. For example, the
negative view of finance and speculation in some early representations
tended by 1895 to be reserved for some of the darker company
promoters. City folk were then generally being portrayed as
hard-working, effective and honorable contributors to Britain’s
economic success. However, the two decades before 1914 saw a more
negative portrayal again coming to the fore. Driven first by the
“Kaffir circus” gold speculation of the late 1890s, there was an
unpleasant emphasis on Jews and foreigners as a source not of the
City’s international success but of dubious and underhanded practices.
The rise of socialism also added a new element of negativity in the
portrayal of the capitalist. Manufacturing was increasingly portrayed
in positive terms while finance evoked deep-seated prejudices against
money and speculation, as the unacceptable face of capitalism.

The book can be recommended to anyone seeking to understand shifts in
popular attitudes toward finance and the strengths and limits of using
literary evidence for this purpose. It makes no large claims to
broader significance, for example, as an explanation of the financial
repression which was such a marked feature of the post-1914 UK economy
until the 1980s. The author can be pronounced successful in the
unusual, challenging, and carefully limited, task that he set himself.


Leslie Hannah is Visiting Professor, Economic History Department,
London School of Economics and is currently working on an
international comparison of stock exchanges before 1914.
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