Recountings: On Dickens’s Financial Memory

Abstract

great house is, therefore, a huge circulating library. Charles Dickens on Bank of England (1850) Without memory, there is no debt Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) In a 2006 TLS review article on architectural history of Bank of England, Gillian Darley thus describes vast expansion of Bank's operations in early-nineteenth century: By 1815, more than a thousand were working on Bank site, a factory floor in which time-keeping, discipline and mechanization ordered what may have been largest white-collar work force in world (13). This consummate display of order, precision, and systemization contributed to Bank's increasing figuration as an imposing symbol of nation and authority--an edifice responsible for good governance of, as Darley says, with language of exemplarity that so frequently accompanies its description, the largest white-collar work force in world. The Bank, and larger system it inhabited, was evidently an increasing force to be reckoned with. In recent years, a growing body of critical work has carried out a good deal of this reckoning process, encouraging us to consider degree to which institutionalization of banking system informed cultural experience--and cultural production--of nineteenth-century Britain. (1) Such thinking of course extends well beyond bounds of both that period and those of academic enquiry. I point, for instance, to a recent marketing campaign by direct, which compels us to think in similar terms about bank's construction in our own age. In ING'S 2012 Old Ways television commercial, a central feature of its new Forward Banking campaign, viewer enters a looming, grey cavernous space, a bank, which is emptied of employees and customers and, it seems, of its cultural significance as well. (2) In this fascinating piece of revisionism, bank's conventional iconography--the deposit slip; pen with chain attached; limited banking hours, marked on an archaic sign; water cooler, stale coffee, and free donuts; velvet ropes; and, above all, banker's green lamp--are, literally, obliterated, exploding one by one before our eyes. Endless reams of paper reminiscent of Dickens's Circumlocution Office rain down across this financial sepulchre and are replaced, as we move to next shot and comfortable, easy-chair bank of today, by relaxed coffee-sipping individual, happily reviewing his financials on his smooth functioning iPad at his local ING direct Cafe. In rendering such images and objects of banking realm so viscerally obsolescent, taps into a critical aspect of shared cultural memory: this commercial urgently reminds us of degree to which banking, as a physical experience, had once been bound up with individual and daily life, and perhaps, more importantly, it reminds us of just how much of it we have forgotten. And as if bank's connection to our collective memory were not plain enough from images on screen, nostalgic tones of Edith Piaff are called in to overstate case: It's all paid for, wiped out, and forgotten, she sings in her mournfully defiant Je Ne Regrette Rien. What is doing here is attempting to revise, but not altogether alter, our conception of banking as intensely personal, tactile, and experiential. Such a construction of bank can likewise be found, I would contend, in nineteenth-century British culture. Throughout century, period's fiction charts an increasing--if tentative--acceptance of bank's role as both a financial and interpersonal mediator, one often responsible for authentication of individual identity and a guarantor of social legitimacy. In George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874), for example, narrator identifies relocation of saved money from Old stocking at home to the savings-bank in town as one of a range of changes coming to Old provincial society (88). …