William North’s The City of the Jugglers and the “Conventional Necessity” of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract

An almost unknown example of Victorian financial fiction, William North’s The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls: A Romance of the “Golden” Age (1850) interrogates at length Victorian conceptions of power, status, and authority, in particular the heavily-leveraged position reserved for those whom later social theorists would label the intelligentsia. Unlike its better-known contemporaries, including Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzelwit (1844) or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), City follows fraud for its own sake, and not as a figure for other characterological or social concerns.By making financial speculation its sign rather than its signifier, North’s unusual fiction internalizes at the level of form the notion of unfettered free trade that it repudiates. That is, its critique of the market comes to look like the market, monstrously inclusive, with none of the aesthetic protections normally afforded to either the text or the reader by generic convention.