The Financial Imp: Ethics and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract

Economic issues have never been far from British fiction. Indeed, as literary historians have often pointed out, the rise of the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century itself closely paralleled the emergence of the new science of political economy in the period.' Similarly, during the Victorian era, while the novel reached new heights of popularity in England, political economy was the main source of philosophical debate. In British philosophy at the time the standing of political economy was quite clear: it marked the sharp separation of moral philosophy into utilitarian and anti-utilitarian schools. The critical point here was the validity of applying the methods of political economy to moral questions, and this point effectively divided moral philosophy into two schools. There were, on the one hand, those advocating the exercise of economic or financial reason in ethical deliberation-the calculation of the moral profitability of an action-and, on the other, those who held that ethics was a matter beyond calculation, the result, not of calculation, but of a human endowment or gift (an intuition, as they said). The main currents of this debate over political economy in Victorian philosophy can also be discerned in British fiction at the time. Harriet Martineau's decision in her Illustrations of Political Economy to use fiction to bring political economy into the British mainstream (xi-xii) and Dickens's efforts two decades later in Hard Times to stem the tide of political economism are only two of the most obvious, if ultimately unsatisfying, attempts to produce narratives that would argue for one side or the other in the conflict. Some works of fiction at the time, however, rather than choosing a side in the debate, perceptively confused its entrenched positions and managed to avoid becoming bogged down in the stagnant arguments for and against political economy. Especially telling in this context, I would argue, was the reflection on the key question of finance, which can be found at the center of certain works of British fiction during the period. What follows here is an attempt to sketch an approach to this reflection on finance in Victorian fiction, first by outlining the importance of finance in the debates dominating moral philosophy at the time and then by considering this question in the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose contribution to the debate over ethics and economics in the period has yet to be appreciated.