Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture [Paperback]

Victorian Investmentsexplores the relationship between the financial system in Great Britain and other aspects of Victorian society and culture. Building on the special journal issue ofVictorian Studiesdevoted to Victorian investments, this volume is the first to define an interdisciplinary field of study emerging in the space between Marxist critiques of capitalism and traditional histories of business and economics. The contributors demonstrate how phenomena such as the expansion of colonial and foreign markets, the broadening of the investor base through the advent of limited liability, and the rise of financial journalism gave rise to a culture of investment that affected Victorian Britons at every level of society and influenced every kind of cultural production. Drawing together work by prominent historians as well as literary and cultural critics,Victorian Investmentsboth defines the methodologies and perspectives that characterize an existing body of scholarship and pushes that scholarship in new directions, demonstrating the signal role of economic developments in Victorian culture and society.

An interdisciplinary look at Victorian culture and finance

Nancy Henry is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is author ofGeorge Eliot and the British EmpireandThe Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot,and is co-editor of a 2002 special issue ofVictorian Studies.

Cannon Schmitt is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is author ofAlien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality.

This is a generous collection in every sense of the term, commendable for the breadth of its voices and for the wealth of information it offers both newcomers to and veterans of the study of Victorian finance. . . . Assembling contributions from top scholars in history and literature, Henry and Schmitt offer us a diverse and highly readable vols-