‘Business! Solidity! Publicity!’: Speculation, Commodification, and Affect in Martin Chuzzlewit

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) can be read as a retrospective narrative which seeks to understand how the Panic of 1837 and the global economic crisis that followed in its wake happened, though it does not offer reassurance. Rather than any broad-ranging narrative of comforting teleology that explains how the panic fits into acceptable economic orthodoxy, Martin Chuzzlewit zooms in on the deeply personal, fundamentally subjective and unconscious processes which precede a panic. This article shows how Martin Chuzzlewit denaturalizes the acquired sociocultural self-evidence of confidence through an examination of its exploitability and studies the ways in which Martin Chuzzlewit represents confidence as asserting itself through affective heuristic processes.