Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay examines the rhetoric of romance in Thomas De Quincey’s skeptical periodical essay about the California Gold Rush. It contextualizes this rhetoric within a long history of California and meditates on the intersection between finance and romance in an effort to shed light on the American state’s enduring susceptibility to speculative bubbles. De Quincey’s interest in California’s global media attention, which galvanized international investors and laborers fascinated by the discovery of gold, mirrors his own investment in opium as a global commodity that helped him generate lucrative visions of romance. By drawing on criticism that has illuminated the importance of political economy on De Quincey’s opium writings, I propose that his essay about the California Gold Rush allows us to more fully understand the economic underpinnings of his long periodical career, as well as the financial romance that continues to draw capital to California.
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