All That Glittered: Britain’s Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush, by Timothy Alborn

Abstract

Reviewed by: All That Glittered: Britain's Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush by Timothy Alborn Paul Lucier (bio) All That Glittered: Britain's Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush, by Timothy Alborn; pp. ix + 260. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, $35.00, $23.99 ebook. A quick search for the phrase "all that glitters" returns over twenty-seven million results; most everyone, it seems, from Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare and J. R. R. Tolkien to Led Zeppelin, is looking for a shiny aphorism about mistaken riches. Timothy Alborn, by contrast, is seeking a more accurate account of the cultural values that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons placed on gold, and in this bright new book he has largely found it. All That Glittered: Britain's Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush is a praiseworthy feat, as much for Alborn's methods as for his results. Over ten thousand sources were surveyed, scanned, and searched (with the assistance of ten Ph.D. students duly praised in the acknowledgments) to discover the multiple meanings of gold. The extensive inventory of digitized sources—from gothic romances, travelogues, poems, and plays to currency pamphlets, encyclopedias, newspapers, and political polemics—is remarkable and may facilitate a new way of seeing the past. Alternatively, it conjures up a word cloud representing the frequency of references to gold, a visual comparative guide to the data. By design, then, Alborn's book reflects the interests of those Britons who wrote, read, and were written about when it came to gold. What did these Britons talk about when they talked about gold? Adornment, most often, and Alborn accordingly devotes a lot of attention to how Britons viewed decorative gold. At home, Britons seemed most concerned about who could legitimately flaunt gold about their persons (servants, military officers, mayors, and, of course, members of the royal family) and why everyone else (gentlemen, tasteful women, nouveau riche) could not. Abroad, Britons regarded the wearing of gold earrings, bracelets, bells, and rings as the [End Page 596] very definition of foreign; at once exotic, picturesque, and barbaric, the gold worn abroad signaled a radically different stage of civilization, one in which such unproductive gaudiness may be tolerated, perhaps, because investment opportunities in those other countries were rare. Such interpretive flexibility was similarly on display in what Britons thought about gold in religious ornamentation. While they could criticize the gold plate, vestments, and tapestries of Catholic churches as excesses of backward devotional practices, by the 1830s conflicted Anglicans could lament the lack of decoration in their own immoderately sparse cathedrals. Britons also needed nimble reckoning to appreciate ancient coins and newly-minted medals. As emblems of the past, the former could be preserved for their historical and aesthetic value. And if some dull-witted workers dug up a medieval gold noble, antiquarians were quick to condemn them for melting it down, although that was a rather smart economic thing to do. Medals, likewise, were worth more than their bullion, and so Britons could approve their proliferation as signs of sparkling achievement and social distinction for military officers, aristocratic sportsmen, and gentlemen of science. Alborn is skilled at navigating the cultural contradictions swirling about gold; he is also artful in choosing the term coinages, an expression relatively more popular than medals, as a way to connect culture to commerce without getting lost in the details of politics or finance. And even though Alborn's book is not a monetary history, coinages provide a sort of three-part structure to his story of cultural value. Britain introduced its first milled (that is, machine-struck rather than hammered) gold coin in 1663. Nicknamed the guinea, the gold for this coin came from West Africa. Early issues of the guinea featured an elephant or an elephant and castle, the symbol of the Royal African Company, a monopoly trading in enslaved Africans and importing much of Britain's gold. In theory, the value of a guinea, one-quarter ounce of twenty-two-carat gold, equaled twenty silver shillings, but in practice, the silver coinage was so old and worn that its...