George Eliot and the Precious Mettle of Trust

Abstract

people, however, to acknowledge that something as precious as one's money depends on something as untrustworthy as other people is unthinkable. Far safer to trust in God, as American currency proclaims. Safer still to trust, in addition to God, gold. The Victorians found the international gold standard trustworthy because it was, at least in theory, an expression of the free market rather than the meddlings of government. At the same time, however, Victorian trust in gold remained troubled by gold's age-old rival-paper money-itself increasingly backed not by gold but by a paper Indeed, as the convenience of paper money caused it to proliferate, it called into question the very sanctity of trust in gold. Should one trust only the natural form of money (gold and, arguably, paper receipts for gold known as bank notes), or should one also trust paper instruments of credit such as checks and bills of exchange? As J. G. A. Pocock and others have documented, Victorians were not the first to worry about the relationship between gold and paper. Two factors, however, made the Victorian anxiety exceptional. First, Victorian England helped pioneer the modern regulatory state, whatJeremy Bentham termed bureaucracy. Not surprisingly, one of the chief functions of Victorian bureaucrats was to manage and regulate Victorian money. As described in Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873), it was during the Victorian period that the Bank of England, although nominally a private institution, became a de facto arm of government whose bureaucrats were charged with regulating the supply and general soundness of English