The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James

by Elsie B. Michie

It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English 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 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.

Genres: Jane Austen

320 pages, Hardcover

First published August 21, 2011

Reviews

[Ale K.]

A good book to have as a companion when delving into the marriage plot and the novel of manners. Clear arguments and insightful examples from four different authors' repertoires. I think I'll come back to this again and again while writing.

[Alethea]

This book was miserable to read. It was like trying to digest someone's overly thought-out masters' thesis, where the point is belabored and beaten like a dead horse. However, the underlying them WAS appropriate - money was considered vulgar to speak of but necessary for life in the novels (and times) of Regency, Georgian, and Victorian novelists. In Austen's time, marriage was the only social move women could make to better themselves and their stations. They could not work, nor could they manage their own money; everything was patrilineal, man-based, and a woman had only luck in a spouse to carry her from genteel poverty to stability. So money was the underlying purpose of love, marriage, children... Its maintenance, creation, and passage. And it remained so for generations, perhaps it still is a reason for being to some. But it was vulgar to SPEAK of such things. One knew the place of money without discussing it. Money was the dark side, the blasphemous conversation, the dirty book hidden in the bedclothes. Very interesting point. But, as I said, it was rendered almost unimportant by the hideous repetition of this book.