Buying Brains: Trollope, Oliphant, and Vulgar Victorian Commerce

Abstract

Grant Allen's 1894 description of the shift from "the old asceticism [which] said, 'Be virtuous, and you will be happy' [to] the new hedonism [which] says, 'Be happy and you will be virtuous'" (377) applies to large-scale economic movements of the nineteenth century. During the era preceding the expansion of the credit economy, capital was hard to come by; in order to expand businesses, entrepreneurs had to save, borrow from relatives and friends who had also saved, or both save and borrow. "In these circumstances abstinence became a buttress of industrial expansion because what was not spent on personal account stayed in the business. Personal abstinence is one of the qualities most universally attributed to the entrepreneurs" (Mathias 143). With the expansion and centralization of the banking industry in the 1860s and 70s, commerce was no longer based on saving but on the ability to borrow capital and amass credit, which led to the development of a "plutocracy of big business men and great landowners [. . .] in which the old virile, ascetic and radical ideal of active capital was submerged to the [. . .] supine, hedonistic and conservative ideal of passive property" (Perkin, Origins 436). These changes were associated with the emergence, in the early 1870s, of marginalist economics, which negotiated what Regenia Gagnier calls a "paradigm shift" (137), when it turned critical attention from production, and the habits of saving associated with it, to consumption, and the habits of expenditure associated with it. I examine here a pair of interconnected novels by Anthony Trollope and Margaret Oliphant, authors noted for their explicitness in dealing with money and money-making. Published in 1867 and 1876 respectively, The Last Chronicle of Barset and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford bracket the moment when the [End Page 77] philosophy of consumption and pleasure was articulated publicly in W. Stanley Jevons's The Theory of Political Economy (1871). Both novels function in a quasi-anthropological sense, evoking, through the drama of individual characters' financial problems, an entire culture's response to dramatic changes in economic practice and theory taking place in the last third of the nineteenth century.