Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 by Timothy Ablorn

Abstract

The cultural representation of misers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be a niche interest, but Alborn’s Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 offers a valuable contribution to general historiography in the age of digital research. Alborn traces how the perception of misers shifted across his selected period: Sermons and poems decried misers’ moral failings; ethicists and economists gave ambivalent acceptance; plays, operas, and novels made them social pariahs and punchlines; and nineteenth-century biographies and novels considered their pecuniary acumen. This exploration marks an important case study in the intersection between capitalism and popular literature and culture. Alborn accurately notes, however, that it does not “address either the formation or distribution of capital” in an economic sense (11). Instead, the book explores how British culture represented misers to themselves. Although this intervention adds important layers to the already thick description of capitalism’s cultural influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Alborn’s book deserves both accolades and scrutiny for a methodology based on both a distant reading of genres and a close reading of individual texts to prove its claims.The scope of Alborn’s archive is staggering. The first four chapters are organized around genre. Although the organization of the latter three is more scattershot, all the chapters range across genres with the same alacrity. The variance comes from Alborn’s interest in “boundary-drawing: when did someone qualify as a miser …?” (11). Part of the cleverness of Alborn’s approach is that he allows the texts to create this boundary for him, rather than imposing a definition. But allowing a culture to unveil its structure is always a historiographically complex task. In a critique of her own book, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1994), Poovey challenges textual analysis as a proper basis for cultural history: “No amount of evidence of the kind [textual criticism] supplies … would be sufficient to prove” broad historical claims.1 In other words, if four sermons are inadequate to prove that British people thought misers morally corrupt in the early eighteenth century, would five suffice? Would fifty? What about 5,000?In a refreshingly honest metacritical move, Alborn describes his work in the digital archive. When he claims that sermons across Christian denominations followed a formulaic script that portrayed misers as “caricatures” rather than “sympathetic portraits of human beings,” Alborn includes a footnote that outlines his analysis of 335 religious publications (18, 36, fn 13). The notion of objective proof of cultural movements may be a self-defeating endeavor, but Alborn’s dense work in the archive demands that we confront what the digital record makes possible.Most interestingly, Alborn deliberately eschews quantitative analysis to analyze his library. Instead, he uses these texts “to add no end of nuance to the stories” that he discovers (9). He creates this nuance with rapid flight across texts and genres—both a strength and a potential area for critique. The depth of his research creates powerful integrity for his narrative. Yet his readings hurry through these texts, often quoting at length with little to no explication or providing a lengthy plot summary of a play or novel, as though they speak for themselves (115–118, 84). But this critical observation leads to a methodological challenge: If texts need interpretation to fit a narrative, the narrative might have more to say about contemporary methods than about a historical moment.Misers presents an ambitious historiography that straddles the scientific aspirations of distant reading and the hermeneutic dreams of close reading. As is often the case with innovation, Alborn’s work demonstrates the strengths and exposes the shortcomings of both methodologies. The result is a vast, rich archive that builds a foundation for both deeper investigation into particular texts or genres, as well as for a broader discussion of capitalism and culture.