Dickens' Ghosts: Invisible Economies and Christmas

Abstract

In her The Finan?al System in Nineteenth-Century Britain Mary Poovey notes that from the late eighteenth century onwards there was, due to the emergence of a predominately industrial economy, a shift in the perception of wealth. Crucially, whilst wealth had once been associated with land-ownership, it had now become less tangible, less visible, in part due to new forms of economic activity (such as, for example, the emergence of the Stock Exchange) and pardy because of the prevalence of paper money. According to Poovey: