No one knows who they are, or where they came from, or what they'll turn to.
—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875), the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they bear the marks of risky speculation, accompanies the rise of the commercial Melmotte Empire from its beginnings. Close inquiry is not so much guarded against as shirked by those who wish to believe in it. When aristocratic would-be investors scramble for a seat on the boards of this “New Man,” they are therefore guilty not simply of nourishing a fraudulent financier whose history as a swindler they are well aware of, for Melmotte's connections to continental scams are notorious. Rather, they are building on ambivalent attitudes to the seemingly successful speculator. Just as the instability associated with speculation is conveniently embodied by an international man of mystery in the worst sense, it can also be exorcised just as easily by his self-destruction.
But what happens when the threat comes from within, when the stock-market villain really is a born English gentleman instead of simply posing as one? Before Melmotte in The Way We Live Now and Lopez in The Prime Minister (1876) imprinted their inscrutability and indeterminate foreignness on promising narratives of financial speculation, the mid-Victorian novel had brought forth much better camouflaged and all the more dangerous stock-market villains. Embedded in the high society they set out to cheat, they were shown to acquire sets of attributes that were to stereotype fictional financiers for the following decades. In this, they significantly redirected the relationship between financial and cultural change and in particular its role in the financial plots of novels.
If Victorian novelists were investing heavily in changing cultural fictions of finance, it was not only because they were reacting to prevailing preoccupations but because these new fictions provided new plots and new plotting villains, and in the 1860s, they made their sensationalization a successful venture. The divergent ways they shaped the novel genre at the mid-century compels us to rethink the fascinatingly productive functions of money and the hypocrisy with which desire for it was regarded. To tell good from bad paper – or the well-intentioned from the villainous among those who circulated it – became a popular plot structure. When apparent gentlemen entered the pool of stock-market villains, their ambiguous position collapsed the favored vilification of the upstart New Man to create instead much more powerful investigations of the boundaries between duplicity, hypocrisy, and self-deception.
George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? (1865), the first of Trollope's political novels, may be marred by an eerily communicative cicatrice, yet he is regarded as “safe” in business simply because he is the squire's grandson and probable heir. Once he runs into financial problems, the extent of his roguery becomes subject to an intriguingly self-conscious questioning. As the narrator declares, Vavasor “should have been more of a rascal or less. Seeing how very much of a rascal he was already, I think it would have been better that he should have been more” (59; ch. 46). In a similar vein, handsome George Godolphin, descendant of an ancient family and partner in “an old-established and most respected firm, sound and wealthy” (21; pt. 1, ch. 2), fails in his speculations and resorts to fraud, “plung[ing] into shoals and quicksands” (226; pt. 2, ch. 2) of dubious financial gambles in Ellen Wood's 1863 sensation novel The Shadow of Ashlydyat. His double life complicates the rapidly stereotyped characteristics of the fictional speculator. As these unexpected exposures of the stock-market villain within open up new vistas (and abysses) of the credit economy's instability, they show attitudes to speculation to be much more complex than they seem when personified by intruders like Melmotte.
The Shadow of Ashlydyat and Can You Forgive Her?, novels published within a few years of each other, are rarely compared in the context of newly evolving plots of financial speculation. I hope to show that they at once necessitate and assist in a new revaluation of Victorian stock-market narratives. Instead of merely making a list of their villains – what George Robb has called the “economic demonology” of nineteenth-century “white-collar” crime (4) – I shall briefly assemble a much needed audit of the ways the Victorians regarded monetary values. A brief overview of mid-century plots of speculation more generally will then situate the changing representation of finance capitalism in the literary developments of the time. The financial villain who appeared in fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century had an interesting literary genealogy. By looking at the 1860s for clues, we find ways financial tropes were later played out, testifying to the growing attraction of financial speculation. This decade was a multiply transitional phase for the Victorian novel, as scholars of sensation fiction have argued. But despite the seeming prevalence of sensationalized white-collar criminals, emerging stock-market plots also cut across subgenres, as the juxtaposition of novels by Trollope and Wood will illustrate. After discussing mid-century experiments with the figure of the speculator, I shall give the stock-market plots of these two novels the detailed reading they deserve. In many ways, their speculating protagonists are revealing transitional figures in the making of financial fictions.
Speculation's Charm: The Magicality of Paper Currencies
So why have analyses of the Victorian stock-market for so long rarely ranged beyond the most obvious swindles and swindlers? That Dickens's Merdle and Trollope's Melmotte are partly based on railway and company speculators of the time, and that the insurance companies featured in Thackeray's The Great Hoggarty Diamond and Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit share the same origins, have often been discussed. However they have been used primarily to illustrate the historical processes of nineteenth-century economic ideologies and practices through their incorporation into fiction – an appropriate circulation of the names of real-life speculators in commercialized paper fictions, certainly. Not analyzing their transformation in (and through) literatureFootnote 1 hardly does justice to the fascination with which the Victorians viewed this source of plots. As John Butt stressed in 1959 in “The Topicality of Little Dorrit,” Dickens did not need specific financial scandals to create his fictional speculators: “it is rather that he had already taken imaginative stock of the situation when some fresh event occurred to confirm his diagnosis and to supply him with an illustrative example” (8). Surely there is much more to literature's use of economic or political discourses than a reflection or even a diagnosis of contemporary problems alone. An enlarged spectrum of crime engendered new plots, new opportunities for heroism and failure: a new cultural imaginary.Footnote 2
As Gillian Beer has emphasized in her reassessment of the proliferating studies that read scientific and literary discourses side by side, the function of science in literature is not “a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation.” Instead, the relationship is one of interchange and transformation (173). The significance of financial speculation, or of economic discourses more generally, has begun to be explored as a source of cultural myths in the nineteenth century, much as the intersections between science and literature have long been. John Vernon has already shown that banks and realist novels are both fictions with their “roots in the actual – but a fiction nonetheless” (7). Works by Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux have likewise paved the way for studies of what has been called the oxymoronic relationship of money and art (see Digaetani xv–xix).Footnote 3 More recent research on the representation of money in Victorian fiction, however, has capitalized much more centrally on the “magicality of paper fictions,” as J. Jeffrey Franklin has so aptly described it (“Gambling” 911). Patrick Brantlinger entitles his chapter on Victorian fiction “Banking on Novels” (ch. 4), and Paul Delany has added that novelists, like bankers, hoped “to convince everyone that their tokens can be cashed out on demand – in other words, that they have endowed the conventional with all the functional attributes of the essential” (23). Conversely, the majority of Victorians viewed paper currencies, especially their fictitious value, with both suspicion and fascination as something akin to magic (Franklin, Play 62). As a representational system relying on credit, it was moreover regarded as interchangeable with that of fiction, as Brantlinger has shown (144). In a recent article on Victorian concepts of “filthy lucre,” Christopher Herbert refers to “the nineteenth-century divinisation of money” (189); George Robb similarly speaks of its “enigmatic allure” in his study of “[b]ig business and business crime” (191, 11).
Victorian fiction's creative engagement with finance capitalism has indeed been highlighted to such an extent that, in a recent review essay, Jonathan Rose has raised the provocative question whether capitalism was good for nineteenth-century literature, despite the fact that “every important Victorian author deeply distrusted speculative capitalism” (491). Reading Delany's Literature, Money and the Market from Trollope to Amis side by side with publishing history, Rose places this reassessment outside what he considers expected critical frameworks. Delany's approach is neither Marxist in presupposing economic exploitation nor Foucauldian in implying domination through power. Instead, it is “Smithian” in “presuming the free and mutually beneficial exchange of goods” (Rose 491). Delany prefers to term it “economism” (1). As such, it forms part of the “emerging body of literary and cultural criticism founded upon economic paradigms, models and tropes” (3) that Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee have pinpointed in their introduction to The New Economic Criticism. Osteen and Woodmansee remark that “productionist” or “contextualist” approaches abound, and while they caution against a potential promiscuity in metatheoretical accounts, they indicate the importance of a move away from the purely extratextual as from the purely formalist (35–39). While literary representations showing the effect of supply and demand on the production, circulation, and consumption of literature and art have recently received more attention, a reappraisal of the Victorians’ fascination with paper fictions also calls for a close reading of the versatile ways the novel genre was remodelled and, in turn, redefined attitudes to cultural myths of finance.Footnote 4
Mary Poovey has powerfully argued that journalists and novelists alike “turned the national fixation [with money] into some of the most engaging fictions of the century,” and that in exploring capital's “mysterious circulation,” they imbued it with imaginative substance (Financial 1, 3).Footnote 5 Most importantly, however, as it became more and more common to measure worth by disembodied capital instead of landed wealth, novels also abandoned providential inheritance-plots in favor of financial plots that allowed them to “explore matters involving personal agency and individual will, like financial temptation and fiscal responsibility” (Financial 2; “Writing” 33). In other words, as the invention of stock-market villains participated in discourses on evolving financial systems, it also singled out rich sources of a new moral, fiscal responsibility. Victorian novelists, Russell argued in 1986, “were quick to condemn the New Men of commerce as unscrupulous, coarse, bloated, probably dishonest” (150), producing Robb's “economic demonology.” They helped to drive an ongoing vilification of commercial acquisition, as the nouveau riche's vulgarity was rejected in favor of, to use Pierre Bourdieu's terms, the symbolic and cultural capital of the shabby genteel. When Poovey accentuates the central focus on fiscal responsibility in their representation, she does so to suggest that novelists in the 1840s and 1850s especially were interested in establishing the financial system as reliable in the popular imagination. Whenever fictional financiers turned out to be criminals, they could be expunged from the system and, more and more frequently, exposed as intruders, as “exceptions to a general rule of reliable transactions” (Poovey, Financial 3). By carefully distinguishing between trustworthy investors and speculating swindlers, fiction absorbed the changing revaluations of financial speculation to provide manuals for responsible behavior in a rapidly evolving economy. Without doubt this formed an eminently comforting narrative, but it ran parallel to a much more disconcerting – yet also more exciting – plotline that pivoted on the questionable indeterminacy of the speculator's insider status itself.
Social Speculation: Finding Gentlemen at the Stock Exchange
The exposure of the most celebrated fictional swindlers in Victorian fiction symptomatically hinges on their indeterminacy and, inevitably bound up with the fictitiousness of fiction, on the magicality of the mostly dubious financial transactions. The cunning speculator who places bets on the victims’ greed or gullibility has consequently received more attention than perhaps more exculpable, less glamorous, moral vacillators. Unlike would-be entrepreneurs (they include, we shall see, George Godolphin in The Shadow of Ashlydyat), scheming swindlers are the makers of fiction(s). They create and flaunt fictitious commodities as well as identities. While they might end up embroiled in their own plots or lose control over conflicting narratives, there is nonetheless something admirable, or awesome, in their large-scale scams that appeals to the imagination. Melmotte's presence famously grows more in demand on shares of a railway that does not exist. Similarly, Ferdinand Lopez, the commodity trader of The Prime Minister, is an appropriate outgrowth of the dangerous exoticism ingrained in the guano, coffee, and bios in which he speculates but which he is careful to possess only in paper. In exhibiting the concealed linkage of the luxurious and the excremental in speculative economies, these elusive commodities represent a cunningly constructed fiction, very much like the rumours circulating about Lopez's falsely flaunted values. As it is put in a chapter ominously titled “He Wants To Get Rich Too Quick,” “the deceit had come from the fact that his manners gave no indication of his character” (52; ch. 46). Dressed in the clothes of a gentleman, Lopez is yet marked by a “foreign” physiognomy (indeterminate like Melmotte's). He cannot fool his solid father-in-law, who has “amassed a large fortune, mainly from his profession, but partly also by the careful use of his own small patrimony and by his wife's money” (21–22; ch. 3, emphasis added). Hence this secure investor feels entitled to dismiss Lopez's speculative business as “a sort of gambling” and to be wary of entrusting either his money or his daughter “to a friendless Portuguese, – a probable Jew, – about whom nobody knew anything” (29, 31; ch. 3). As in Melmotte's case, anti-Semitic stereotyping brings out, and merges into, fear of social and financial indeterminacy. But in that they externalize a volatile bubble-economy's self-destructiveness, both these speculators go on to exorcize its worst effects by committing suicide. It is thanks to their memorable exploits that both foreignness and suicide have come to be regarded as the speculator's defining characteristics.Footnote 6
Social indeterminacy as a symptom of financial flux is often understood as a given. The most memorable stock-market villains are additionally implicated in a widespread corruption or infiltration of society that is linked to foreign infections. As they deal in fictitious commodities, they share their suspicious allure with other promiscuous and often ominous exotica in the fiction of the time, from swamped enterprises in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) to the looted diamond in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). A misappropriated religious icon and a failed investment in land (misappropriated too, and marked by the very absence of native Americans and, more visibly, by an economy built on slavery), these forays into colonized sources of sudden riches are bound up with fiscal and familial speculation at home and exhibit the same interest in wealth gained suddenly through a single act, a single daring speculation, that drives growing interest in new narratives of attractively risky ventures. Speculative enterprises are invested with a new allure, generating plot developments: a commercial project for the Victorian novel. Its preoccupation with the foreignness of swindlers as a projection of anxieties about new economic practices parallels the better explored connections between home and colony that Raymond Williams has diagnosed at the narrative linkage of work abroad in tropical or arid places to the acquisition of embowered estates at home (281). The real villain of The Moonstone, is the hypocritical philanthropist Godfrey Ablewhite, and Martin Chuzzlewit juggles fraudulent financial fictions, including an insurance scam on both sides of the Atlantic instigated by the homegrown upstart Montague Tigg.
Whether outlandish imports or self-made men arising from the equally suspect dark continent of urban slums, Montague, Melmotte, Merdle, and Lopez are nevertheless all foreign bodies penetrating the City and often Parliament as well. As a peculiarly awkward financier, Merdle demonstrates most glaringly how the New Man is out of place in fashionable society in Little Dorrit (1857) with his hands “in everything good, from banking to building,” he conceals them with a “somewhat uneasy expression about his coat-cuffs, as if they were in his confidence, and had reasons for being anxious to hide his hands” (241; ch. 21). Bounderby, the inflated banker of Hard Times (1854), is similarly exploded as a fabricator of fraudulent fictions, although the bubble concerns only his status as a self-made man. Boasting Brough in The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841) brings hypocrisy to bear more specifically on stock-market speculations: Brough is “a great man on ‘Change” (13–14; ch. 2), a religious hypocrite (67; ch. 7), a predictable upstart who courts genteel society and charges two of his four horses on his fraudulent company. Unlike later self-tortured antiheroes, he combines the hypocrite and the fraud, while his victims really are deceived innocents.
If these mid-century financial villains are all homemade upstarts, they are not only regularly identified with, but increasingly replaced by, more or less indeterminate foreigners. The two plots of Martin Chuzzlewit map out this juxtaposition of imported and exported speculators, as has been argued.Footnote 7 By the 1860s, however, both the foreign fraud's incursions and the punitive exile of runaway speculators had become such a common plot device that in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1863 sensation novel, Aurora Floyd, a detective speaks of criminals’ fixed idea of flight: “these fellows always go one way. It seems as if the minute a man has taken another man's life, or forged his name, or embezzled his money, his ideas get fixed in one groove, and never can go beyond Liverpool and the American packet” (442; ch. 38). When A Dark Night's Work, Gaskell's most sensational story, published in the same year, plays with new paper fictions that include the sensation genre, such flight is a fraudulent fabrication that covers up murder:
If Mr Wilkins had gone into Hamley market-place and proclaimed himself guilty of the manslaughter of Mr Dunster – nay, if he had detailed all the circumstances – the people would have exclaimed, “Poor man, he is crazed by this discovery of the unworthiness of the man he trusted so; and no wonder – it was such a thing to have done – to have defrauded his partner to such an extent, and then have made off to America!” (67; ch. 7)
As the stock-market novel of the “sensational sixties” capitalized on villainous speculators, it undoubtedly continued to create typecast crooks but also stimulated spins on them. Braddon's Birds of Prey of 1867 features a deadly dentist-cum-stockbroker; in Charles Reade's 1864 Hard Cash, a banker speculates with his son's money and on the believability of the latter's presumed insanity only to fall victim to a monomania that turns the ruthless speculator into a pathetic miser. If he remains a symptomatically indeterminate capitalist – country-banker, stockbroker, miser, swindler – the novel amply makes up for this typecasting by telling the story of the eponymous Cash's travels, in a captain's pocket, from an Indian bank through the South Seas, to be, with consummate irony, nearly lost in a provincial bank.Footnote 8 Most importantly, in measuring the eruptions caused by speculative capitalism on the traditional literary landscape of inherited landed wealth, novels of the 1860s often pair commercial New Men with speculators that emerge from fashionable society as well as from solid middle-class respectability. Braddon's The Lady's Mile (1866) sees a successful capitalist's son ruined by “A Commercial Earthquake” (ch. 33); her Birds of Prey sets an upstart who trades on “that appearance of respectability which, in a world where appearance stands for so much, is in itself a kind of capital” (17; bk. 1, ch. 2) against a “ruined fop of the Regency” (54; bk. 2, ch. 2). The latter “join[s] the ranks of the vultures” instead of the victims of mid-century financial practices (65; bk. 2, ch. 2). Anticipated by the insertion of “gentlefolk” into business in Wood's The Shadow of Ashlydyat, Braddon's novel shows how “[h]enceforth Horatio Cromie Nugent Pagent flourished and fattened upon the folly of his fellow-men [as] promoter of joint-stock companies that never saw the light; as treasurer of loan-offices where money was never lent” (65; bk. 2, ch. 2). Nevertheless, the murky ways of “your ultra-respectable men” (142; bk. 3, ch. 7) remain the central issue in this as in most subsequent stock-market plots. Dickens's last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, published at the height of the sensation genre in 1865, suggestively declares the indeterminacy of shares an apt reflection of society:
As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. . . . Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! (118; bk. 1, ch. 10)
By the mid-sixties, shares had clearly acquired specific, easily recognizable, functions in fiction.Footnote 9 The socially indeterminate and morally suspect merge with vaguely foreign, mysterious business that involves capitalized “Shares.” They engender a social speculator whose whole reputation is based on the fact that “[h]e goes, in a condescending amateurish way, into the City [and] has to do with traffic in Shares” (118; bk. 1, ch. 10). But just as the metaphorical connection between such trafficking and human birds of prey is spelled out more insistently in Braddon's tellingly titled Birds of Prey, a Dust Contractor's legacy, “a hilly country entirely composed of Dust” (24; bk. 1, ch. 3) in Dickens's novel brilliantly plays with “filthy lucre” to be comically evoked in Trollope's. In a subplot of Can You Forgive Her?, a merry widow can afford to please herself when choosing a spendthrift lover over a solid suitor who boasts of his dunghills, but she nevertheless urges her niece not to be financially squeamish: “Kate shouldn't give herself airs. Money's never dirty, you know” (390; ch. 78). Of course it often is in Victorian novels, but if the guano in The Prime Minister or the memorable dust mounds of Our Mutual Friend are both once again explicitly linked to excrement, their reduction to mere paper fictions (untrustworthy shares and disputed wills) only makes them more suspect, not cleaner to handle. By contrast, after satirizing Dickens's pivotal dust mounds, the main plot of Can You Forgive Her? moves away even from the substantiality of marginalized dunghills to concentrate instead on circulating paper.Footnote 10
An important model for the progressively typecast stock-market villain, Trollope's George Vavasor exploits, yet ultimately becomes the victim of, this very indeterminacy. But while his villainy is attributed to desire “for money till the Devil has hardened his heart” (244; ch. 64), and this connection with devilry literally suits him, “making the hole in his face gape” (41; ch. 4), it is obscured by his insider status in fashionable society.Footnote 11 In fact, the pattern that emerges from this brief overview of fictional speculators marks out the 1860s as a watershed in the making of the Victorian stock-market villain; both The Shadow of Ashlydyat and Can You Forgive Her? are representative of early redirections precisely because they make the figure of the insider speculator problematic. They demonstrate growing fascination with the magicality of finance capitalism rather than interest in mere moral exposure and, still more strikingly, propel intriguing twists that break through typecast plots. Paper's “magic” drives financial plots in a number of novels of the time, but in Wood's fiction the specter of speculation engenders an even more apparent spookiness to bring out fear of its instability. The Shadow of Ashlydyat is particularly relevant because instead of focusing, as many of Wood's novels do, on social upstarts who speculate on a sudden inheritance, the aristocracy craves a piece of the City-man's cake. This reversal is, as we shall see, part of a creative breakdown of genres as well as a remaking of types.
Speculation's Curse: The Fall of the House of Ashlydyat
THE SHADOW OF ASHLYDYAT LIKE MOST of Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood's sensation novels, reworks the genre's defining characteristics by redeploying aristocratic settings while superimposing bourgeois moral frameworks on self-consciously adapted upper-class terrain. As a result, they are at once more conservative in holding on to middle-class moral strictures that other sensation novelists dismantle and also less critical of the aristocracy's exotic allure. The sensation genre's “domestic Gothic” is eerily relocated in those Gothic castles from which it has originally been taken. As Lillian Nayder has shown in her study of Wilkie Collins, sensation novels specialize in disclosing “the private sphere as a place of Gothic strife and suffering rather than a healthy and harmonious refuge from the conflicts of public life” (72). Tamar Heller has similarly traced their transformation of eighteenth-century Gothic into “a feminised discursive category, associated with what is ‘other,’ subversive, and marginal” (9), and Nicholas Rance has suggested that the genre's best exponents derive their effects “from subverting a diversity of early and mid-Victorian ideologies” (1). When Wood's novels move the collapses of familial and fiscal conflict that structure this exposure back into aristocratic sites, they cunningly capitalize on a persistent interest in an exotic fashionable world – something they share with the novels that George Eliot famously derided in her suggestively titled article, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in the Westminster Review in 1856. The sensational potential of new financial fictions restructures stories of aristocratic inheritance, including their reuse in Victorian novels of fashionable society, which have recently been termed, with reference to Eliot, “millinery novels.”Footnote 12
Like fiction of high life, Wood's novels regularly sport heroines “whose nose [and] morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity” (Eliot 301–02), but like other sensation novels, they explore sudden discoveries of “a skeleton in the closet [that] is unsuspected by others, hidden from others’ eyes” (96–97; ch. 14), as Lady Jane phrases it in Lord Oakburn's Daughters (1864). These skeletons dramatize middle-class fears, even when they inhabit castles. Wood's best known novel, East Lynne (1861), for example, revolves on the heavily moralized punishment of Lady Isabel, who forfeits domestic motherhood in a typecast aristocratic fracas. The aristocratic family's fall in The Shadow of Ashlydyat, however, illuminates the fusion of millinery novels with the sensation genre. As it concentrates on a Great House family turned bankers and actualizes the family curse through stock-market speculation, the novel's navigation through middle-class business is marred by a double irony that runs counter to the narrative shift away from inheritance plots that Poovey has outlined (“Writing” 33). This shift is indeed not so much a matter of displacement as of incorporation or adaptation. Persisting interest in aristocratic high life does not remain free from the fictional opportunities created by new financial crimes. Leaving such redeployment out of the equation would surely generate an unbalanced account of Victorian fiction. Wood's novel not only sees the family curse worked out in banking business, but this unusual arrangement is capped by the antihero's twofold social camouflage. With his gentlemanly figure and aristocratic bearing, this “most attractive banker” projects buoyant cheerfulness into the fashionable world. It is curiously combined with hard work at the bank and misread as financial stability:
Look at him as he rides through the town, Charlotte by his side, and the two grooms behind them! Look at his fine bay horse, his gentlemanly figure! – look at his laughing blue eyes, his wavy golden hair, at the gay smiles on his lips as he turns to Charlotte! Can you fancy care an inmate of that man's breast? Prior's Ash did not. They were only content to admire and to envy their handsome and most attractive banker, George Godolphin. (316; pt. 2, ch. 11)
George is doubly sheltered by reverence for the resident aristocracy and respect for the local bank: “In the heart of the town was situated the banking-house of Godolphin, Crosse, and Godolphin. It was an old-established and most respected firm, sound and wealthy” (21; pt. 1, ch. 2). Feudal allegiance matches bourgeois enterprise: “The Godolphins could trace back to the ages of the monks. . . . [T]o be lords of Ashlydyat was an honour they would not have bartered for a dukedom. They held by Ashlydyat. It was their pride, their stronghold, their boast” (22; pt. 1, ch. 2). But while Thomas Godolphin is a dull, “ultra-filial” (71; pt. 1, ch. 7), middle-aged, man whom “a casual observer might have pronounced. . . ‘insignificant,’ and never have cast on him a second glance” (13; pt. 1, ch. 13), his attractive younger brother George is a charming man of pleasure. Still, before speculation tempts him, even he is “buried five fathoms deep in business; though he would have preferred to be five fathoms deep in pleasure” (60; pt. 1, ch. 5). At first sight this balance of the hard-working aristocrat and the charming banker seems to reconcile old and new ideals of gentlemanliness, but the mismatched sides ultimately work the family's downfall. Once Crosse, the middle-class partner, retires, George becomes the resident banker: newly married, with a growing family, ready to settle down to bourgeois domesticity. But if he thereby dutifully follows a recommendation that “business men be at their place of business” (93; pt. 1, ch. 10), easy accessibility to the bank's safe tempts him to remove deeds at night: to play “pranks with the Bank's money” (406; pt. 2, ch. 20).
It is this social camouflage of the perpetrator of dark deeds that the novel shares specifically with Can You Forgive Her? Both novels engage with the brittleness of circulated paper, whether title deeds or notes, although in markedly different ways. Vavasor's villainy may be very visible on his scarred face, but to the (business) world, these glaring signs are revealingly obscured by his, at least at first, seemingly respectable undertakings and his connections to landed wealth, on which he likewise speculates too confidently. Godolphin's honest face adds another spin to the speculator's increasingly typecast progression. By no means a straightforward development, it is premised on moral vacillation and a correspondingly fluctuating appearance of worth. As Audrey Jaffe argues, when the “terms of romance and those of finance [become] interchangeable,” protagonists “display not the unwavering certainty of the clear moral line but rather the jittery peaks and valleys of the stock-market graph” (49, 58). This is not to say that literature only started depicting moral doubt or emotional uncertainties after stock-market plots entered the novel, and of course Jaffe does not suggest that. But there is a profound shift in the fascination with which such “jittering” is depicted, a shift which “the idea of the stock-market as an emotional projection” bears out (45).Footnote 13 Godolphin's good qualities, like his hopes and fears, alternately surface and are submerged by the irregularity of stock-market graphs. Like Vavasor, he is aware of his fluctuating share of roguery, but while Trollope's villain traces the flows of his increasingly murderous calculations, Godolphin freely trades on a charm that is never vilified in the novel. Neither is easily distinguishable as an “unsafe” speculator, and yet this is significantly more than simply a variation on the perennial theme that appearances are deceiving. When the new financial villains become aware of their self-deceit, their moral dilemma plays out larger problems of the magicality of paper fictions.
With Verrall alias Rustin, the shady stockbroker from London, The Shadow of Ashlydyat admittedly introduces a more stereotyped speculator, but he is only the supplier of the ways and means that allow George to give in to the charms of risky speculation. An “old tradition in our family – a superstition I suppose you will call it – ” foretells that when the Godolphins “leave Ashlydyat, their ruin is at hand” (29; pt. 1, ch. 2). It becomes true when financial difficulties force them to rent out the inherited estate to a (seemingly) rising businessman. The “tenancy of Mr Verrall [is simply] the link in the chain” (483; pt. 2, ch. 25). It is, however, a decisive link that brings speculation into a still feudal world. Eventually, aristocratic inheritance itself circulates as a commodity: George “had sent that fair and proud inheritance of the Godolphins, Ashlydyat, into the market; and had hastened the passage of his brother to the grave. Ay! dash your bright hair from your brow as you will, George Godolphin!” (536; pt. 3, ch. 3). New financial plots enter, indeed absorb, the aristocratic estate and even its family curse. Verrall, it is true, exploits a weakness traditionally associated with the aristocracy when he calculates on George's financial dependence in casinos abroad and strategically deploys Charlotte Pain, Mrs. Verrall's sister, as the chief charm of his own company. But both aristocratic fracas and gambling for pleasure work as a Trojan horse to introduce George to the games of finance capitalism. What is more, like a number of speculating villains, Verrall tempts him specifically with the misleading tangibility of paper money before he initiates him into less graspable fictions. He holds out a heavy roll of notes to George:
The latter's eager fingers clutched them:. . . Mr Verrall could not have taken a more efficient way of inducing him to play again, than to affect this easy indifference, and to leave the money under his eyes, touching his fingers, fevering his brain. George took up the notes (213; pt. 1, ch. 22).
It is important to keep in mind that Victorian moral discourses on speculation regularly denounced it as a form of gambling, often to distinguish it from investment as presumably less risky. This spurious differentiation between speculation and gambling, as between investment and speculation, served as a purging process thought necessary for the legitimization of a capitalist economy. As Franklin has shown, gambling functioned as “the necessary evil other” that facilitated the stock exchange's “establishment as a pillar of society and an unquestioned source of real value” (“Gambling” 918).Footnote 14 If the financial plots of earlier fiction bear out this investment/speculation split, in the majority of fully-fledged stock-market novels, to believe in it is an essential step towards the self-deception that begins to restructure perceptions of, in Walter Houghton's words, “sincere insincerity” (411). Ultimately this issues in the self-blinded aristocratic would-be speculators that sit on Melmotte's boards.Footnote 15 Thus, in a short episode at the end of Gaskell's 1855 North and South, for example, the New Man, Mr. Thornton is “so prudent with all his daring” (499; ch. 50) that he refuses to embark on a risky venture offered to him by his brother-in-law, tellingly termed “the speculator” (508; ch. 50). “[A]s the news swept through the Exchange of the enormous fortune which his brother-in-law had made by his daring speculation” (509; ch. 50), Thornton emerges financially impoverished but morally enriched. In sharp contrast, Melmotte arrives with “a reputation throughout Europe as a gigantic swindler” (61; ch. 8) and looks his role: “He looked as though he were purse-proud and a bully” (31; ch. 4). It is then not at all surprising that his finances turn out to be as fictitious as his claims to the ranks of English gentlemen. The interest rests instead on the hypocrisy practised by aristocrats who receive him with greedy arms, effectively sweeping away their self-deceiving complaints of victimization.
Published nearly a decade after North and South and one earlier than The Way We Live Now, The Shadow of Ashlydyat erases the earlier novel's careful discriminations between investment and speculation and prefigures the interest in financial hypocrisy that propels Trollope's.Footnote 16 Tricked into the game of stock-market speculation, George leads a hypocrite's double life: “Never a man more free from care (if appearances might be trusted)” (296; pt. 2, ch. 9). At the domestic breakfast table, he splits into two men: “George laughed in echo: as merrily as his wife. There must have been two George Godolphins surely at this moment! The outer, presented to the world, gay, smiling, and careless; the inner, kept for his own private and especial delectation, grim, dark, and ghastly” (329; pt. 2, ch. 12). Part of him still believes that he has “a good deal of paper in the market” (374; pt. 2, ch. 16) in more senses than one. At once villain and victim, he scuttles along shady demarcations that separate speculation from investment, fraud from mere negligence, swindles from prevarication. This convincingly distinguishes him from callous swindlers, yet increasingly he has more than a share of Verrall. Called Rustin in town, Verrall in the country, and at the centre of “the great bill-discounting firm, Trueworthy and Co” (167; pt. 2, ch. 9) to which he goes “incog.” (64; pt. 1, ch. 6), this fraudulent speculator does indeed share his indeterminacy of origins with later stock-market villains: “Who is he? Where did he come from? Did he drop from the moon?” (102; pt. 1, ch. 11). It is an essential feature of the firm's “internal economy” that “no client ever got to see Mr Trueworthy” (268; pt. 2, ch. 6), and in a similar projection, Verrall regularly invokes Rustin as an elusive, tight-fisted partner against whom he pretends to defend George: “To hear that this Rustin was Verrall himself opened out a whole field of suggestive speculation to George. Not pleasant speculation, you may be sure” (308–09; pt. 2, ch. 9). For Verrall, it has been a successful one. Charlotte even emerges triumphant. Whereas George shamefacedly sets out to “bury [him]self alive in Calcutta” (612; pt. 3, ch. 9), she enters London high society: “there was an unmistakable look of weary sadness, never before seen on the features of gay George Godolphin. . . . And Mr and Mrs Pain's dinner-parties in Belgravia are a great success” (614; pt. 3, ch. 9). Their elaborate network of deception has certainly paid off better than George's self-tortured split.
While success in financial speculation is exposed as the result of chance and ruthlessness, as both indeterminable and morally suspect, the London stockbroker as a villainous double underscores George's victimization in order to retain the reader's sympathy for this troubled hypocrite. In contrast to the absconding Verrall, George is unable to pay his debts because of his generosity: “The money in George's pockets amounted – I am telling you truth – to three and sixpence. With all his faults, he was open-hearted, open-handed” (398; pt. 2, ch. 19). When he commits fraud, he does it out of desperation, and his financial hypocrisy is preferable to the deliberate deception practiced by Verrall. This is not to say that being hypocritical rather than conniving is a redeeming quality. On the contrary, George's hypocrisy is a form of social fraud that leads to forgery. His questionable escape cannot even act as an exorcism, as exile or suicide does in subsequent stock-market novels. His wife and brother die of the anxiety he has caused; his child is practically orphaned; both the estate and the bank are ruined: “It was even so. The Bank had stopped. The good old firm of Godolphin, Crosse, and Godolphin had – GONE!” (384; pt. 2, ch. 17). Instead, his chosen exile to India suggests that the speculating gentleman's appropriate punishment is loss of status. The appointment is “only mercantile. The situation is at an indigo merchant's, or planter's” (536; pt. 3, ch. 3). He has lost his reputation and estate, his cultural capital, including the cherished tradition of the family curse. In reversing the speculator's favored fiction that money can buy an entry into aristocratic estate, Wood's novels of sensationalized “high life” posit speculation not only as the destructive force of upstarts but also as the aristocracy's self-destructive interest in bourgeois openings. When Trollope works middle-class morality into aristocratic plots, financial hypocrisy similarly offers new enterprises to stock-market villains. However, whereas charming Godolphin is among the most self-tortured of sensational swindlers, Vavasor is Trollope's most brilliant calculating villain.
The Cost of Hypocrisy: The Insider's Export
Ironically, if George Vavasor had been more of a hypocrite, he would not have been disinherited, and his speculation on his grandfather's estate would have paid off. He would not have felt pressed to rely on his cousin's money and her jittering (rising and falling) love-interest in him, and the full extent of his villainy would never have been exposed. Like many presumptive heirs to estates, from the Blifils in Tom Jones to Mr. Elliot in Persuasion, Vavasor starts out by speculating on the money his inheritance might bring in. But while these earlier hypocrites are ultimately deposed in triumph by truthful, open characters – Mr. Elliot's main flaw is, we remember, that he is “rational, discreet, polished” but “not open” (161; ch. 5) – indicating an important move away from early eighteenth-century concepts of politeness,Footnote 17 the Victorian stock-market villain finds in new commercial enterprises and their increasing accessibility a new venture for hypocrisy as well as for speculations. Vavasor's attempts to play the lover in order to have a rightful hold over his cousin's resources, his dabbling in politics as a financial scheme, and in addition, his involvement in Alice's self-deceit complicates a peculiarly financial hypocrisy: a mixture of sincere insincerity and deliberate misrepresentations in his financial engagements, including his view of all contracts as financial. It obscures visible marks of villainy but ultimately unleashes it. At the end of his career, the disinherited speculator attempts murder because he resents money transactions made behind his back, but what sets his involvement in the stock-market in motion is a quarrel with Old Vavasor about raising money on the estate to invest it in
trade [that] might be extended indefinitely by the use of a few thousand pounds at moderate interest. Old Mr Vavasor was furious. No documents and no assurances could make him lay aside a belief that the wine merchants, and the business, and his grandson were all ruined and ruinous together. No one but a ruined man would attempt to raise money on the family estate! (36–37; ch. 4)
His position as presumptive heir roots Vavasor firmly in traditional inheritance plots yet only in order to underscore his insider status. Like Wood's Godolphin, he belongs to the elites among whom he wreaks havoc. An internalized mirror-image of swindlers from nowhere, they neither infiltrate so far untrammelled happy homes, nor can their eventual exportation annul the exposure of duplicity at the heart of the system. Simply put, they are a threat from within that fails to stand out clearly. Yet Vavasor also looks the villain, and this complicates the representation of society's acceptance of this insider. The seeming indeterminacy of the danger he poses is spelt out with ironic emphasis rather than exposed with a sensational flourish. His excitement about indefinitely extending businesses moreover finds its match in old-fashioned prejudice against turning landed wealth into circulating paper. It is in this quarrel with Old Vavasor that he looks “like the devil himself” with his cicatrice gaping at his grandfather (41; ch. 4). Young Vavasor's scar shouting out his villainy, his beguiling attraction to his sister Kate and his cousin Alice is a mystery to the old squire: “It's astounding to me, – with that ugly mug of his!” (336; ch. 32). But his dark, scarred visage also aligns him with the dashing villains of romance, although it is in the very face of his own dismissal of romance as “all very well” for bedtime reading, “but when it comes to be mixed up with one's business it plays the devil” (398; ch. 38). Chapter four, “George Vavasor, the Wild Man,” introduces him as a new “wild man”: “It will no doubt be understood that George Vavasor did not roam about in the woods unshorn, or wear leathern trappings and sandals, like Robinson Crusoe, instead of coats and trousers. His wildness was of another kind” (34; ch. 3). Equally alluring and dangerous, wildness and a reputation on ‘Change reinforce each other: “In fact, he stood well on ‘Change. . . . He was a stockbroker, a thorough-going Radical, and yet he was the heir to a fine estate, which had come down from father to son for four hundred years! There was something captivating about his history and adventures” (37–38; ch. 4).
However, in the “established firm” of wine merchants, he “scared his partners by the boldness and extent of his views,” and when the quarrel with the squire puts a stop to his projected investments, he turns to more amenable ventures that require no capital: “After that George Vavasor had become a stockbroker, and a stockbroker he was now” (36–37; ch. 4). This is a suitable occupation, yet it is captivating that he is at the same time heir to a “fine estate.” His speculation on Alice is likewise part and parcel of his profession, and at first the financial hypocrisy he practices when capitalizing on jittering love-interest has the full share of the vilification. Increasingly, however, it is not only that his failing investments in this peculiarly financial engagement lead to violent crime, but the exposure of his calculations is complemented by the more traditional condemnation of a gambler and womanizer, as if to emphasize that it is really no great loss when Alice chooses Mr. Grey after all. With the quick introduction of an abandoned woman as the undesirable output of a failed venture or gamble, the wild man is additionally painted black: “You and I, Jane, have not played our cards very well” (325; ch. 71). Still, the worst is his callous business approach: his cold calculations rather than his violent outbursts.
This is precisely what puts him in contrast to the unlucky gambler Burgo Fitzgerald, Plantagenet Palliser's rival for Lady Glencora's affections in the second main plot. While Vavasor's parliamentary career poses him against Palliser, “a steady, practical man of business,. . . with a deal of work in him, belonging to the race from which English ministers ought, in [the Duke's] opinion, to be taken” (194–95; ch. 18), and with no interest in risky speculation, Burgo's function as a traditional “wild man” highlights the extent and kind of Vavasor's villainy. Parliament means an expensive gamble for this “type of commercial politician” without private means, a “would-be political type most abhorrent to Trollope,” as John Halperin has pointed out (48, 46). It is a wild speculation, but the disappointments it entails also drive Vavasor wild. For him, it is an “immoralising process” that is helped by that part of his greed that is “indigenous” to his aspirations but which sets him onto a career path to become, what Halperin has termed “a real criminal” (48) when he attempts murder. If this underscores Plantagent Palliser's old-fashioned code of honor, it also detracts from the Pallisers’ centrality. Despite its origins in Trollope's 1850 play The Noble Jilt and the focus on Alice's repeated jilting of both Grey and Vavasor, Can You Forgive Her? has, in fact, primarily been read for its introduction of the Pallisers. Juliet McMaster cautions that “it is tempting to concentrate on the Glencora subplot. . . at the expense of the main plot, that which concerns Alice Vavasor” (20), and that the novel's three plots are constructed as a set of parallels: it “shows a girl, a wife and a widow each hesitating between two suitors – ‘the worthy man and the wild man’” (23). Introduced as “the speculating lover” interested in Glencora's fortune as much as in her love (2; ch. 1), Burgo fails to calculate the odds accurately. Yet, his very failure sets him apart from the novel's stock-broking villain.
In the third plot, Mr. Cheesacre of Oileymead attempts to outdo impecunious Captain Bellfield with his “solid attractions” that include “the fat cattle which he sends to market” and the “heaps of manure raised like the streets of a little city” – “all paid for. I don't call anything a man's own till it's paid for” (139–40; ch. 14). In a chapter titled “Alice Vavasor's Name gets into the Money Market,” Vavasor circulates Alice's name on bills the City takes up “first horizontally, and then, with a twist of its hand, perpendicularly. . ., as though it were not esteemed a good name on Change” (209; ch. 60). Eminently respectable Cheesacre, by contrast, boasts of earthy substantiality: “There ain't any of my paper flying about, Mrs Greenow. I'm Samuel Cheesacre of Oileymead, and it's all my own” (96; ch. 9). Yet, he shares this preference for money talk with Vavasor, not Grey, and ultimately spoils his proposal because he really should talk “a little more about [his] passion and a little less about [his] purse” (423; ch. 40). This fusion of marriage and business propositions underlines the novel's critique of domestic politics as the mirror image of political corruption. Cheesacre may accuse Bellfield of forgery, but the latter is “simply an idle scamp” (254, 260; ch. 65) and hence a relatively safe undertaking, a luxury the widow Greenow can afford, while she recommends Cheesacre to her penniless niece. Bellfield is a void investment, but not a risky venture:
Indeed, for a woman wanting a husband of that sort, Captain Bellfield was a safer venture than would be a man of higher standing among his creditors. It is true Bellfield might have been a forger, or a thief, or a returned convict, – but then his debts could not be large. Let him have done his best, he could not have obtained credit for a thousand pounds; whereas, no one could tell the liabilities of a gentleman of high standing. Burgo Fitzgerald was a gentleman of high standing, and his creditors would have swallowed up every shilling that Mrs Greenow possessed; but with Captain Bellfield she was comparatively safe. (259–60; ch. 65)
Low credit makes Bellfield a safer version of “poor Burgo,” a luxury commodity that can be kept within bounds. Both are to an extent mercenary as well as spendthrift, yet there is sympathy for both. The fraudulent captain sees a secure livelihood in the widow; Burgo perceives Glencora's love as “a great chance,” but “[w]ho can say, too, that his only regret was for the money?” (187–88; ch. 18). Just as a reckless plunge gruesomely puts his horse's “career. . . at an end, and he had broken his heart” (186; ch. 18), Burgo rides over his supporters without intending to inflict pain: “George Vavasor would have ground his victims up to powder if he knew how; but Burgo Fitzgerald desired to hurt no one” (264; ch. 66). A spoilt beauty, Burgo ends up living on Palliser's financial assistance. Vavasor's wild allure is more ominous, manifest in the cowing cicatrice and eyes of “forbidding brilliance” (364; ch. 35). Grey's transactions to prevent Alice's exploitation nearly get him killed. The attraction of wildness clearly serves as a red herring when it comes to the juxtaposition of the novel's three different “wild men.”
Alice ironically vacillates between her suitors because she is, “if I may say, over-prudent in calculating the chances of her happiness and of his” (112; ch. 11). This further complicates the novel's discussion of prudence and prevarication. McMaster has dismissed interpretations of Vavasor as a libidinal figure and of Alice's predicament as “the familiar conflict of passion with duty” by reminding us that Grey is physically attractive, though not in a dashing way. Alice's love for him is a mixture of sexual attraction and esteem, while she regards Vavasor with political interest and physical revulsion (28). In “Passion versus Prudence,” Alice realizes with a sudden shock that her wish to support Vavasor's ambitions financially has committed her to a much more personal contract she finds repulsive: “Of what marriage had she thought when she was writing that letter back to George Vavasor?” (383; ch. 37). In pointed contrast, Glencora's decision is fairly clear: giving in to Burgo would mean adultery and financial ruin caused by “a man infinitely less worthy than her husband. . . a spendthrift, idle, given to bad courses” (182; ch. 58). Mrs. Greenow similarly knows what she is doing when she calculates the cost of maintaining and keeping under control her less extravagant spendthrift. But Alice's feelings follow the peaks and slumps of stock-market graphs. She starts by speaking up for financial prudence: “It seems to me, papa, that there is a great deal of false feeling about this matter of money in marriage, – or rather, perhaps, a great deal of pretended feeling” (354; ch. 34). However, if she thereby rejects pretended feeling (insincerity), she indulges a twofold self-deception (sincere insincerity) when she persuades herself that she chooses passion, or that a reengagement to Vavasor is prudent because she supports his political career financially. It is the converse of this rogue's losing struggle with his hypocrisy. He finds living on other people's money “a comfortless unsatisfying trade” and hence persuades himself that taking the money of a woman who loves him makes him less of a scoundrel instead of more:
We all of us know that swindlers and rogues do very dirty tricks, and we are apt to picture to ourselves a certain amount of gusto and delight on the part of the swindlers in the doing of them. In this, I think we are wrong. . . . To get his half-sovereign with scorn is painful. To get it with apparent confidence in his honour is almost more painful. “D– it,” he says to himself on such rare occasions, “I will pay that fellow;” and yet, as he says it, he knows that he never will pay even that fellow. It is a comfortless unsatisfying trade, that of living upon other people's money. (389; ch. 38)
The 1860s famously saw a new fascination with rascals relishing their own rascality. With his flashing eyes and gaping scar, Vavasor exhibits affinities with sensationalized villains but goes against their idealization. His descent into hypocrisy and finally into openly acknowledged roguery outlines the corruptive effects of financial speculation. Thus, his “career” takes him from a failed proposition that involves an assumed inheritance to wasting money in politics to resenting a rival's interference in his finances and ultimately to lapsing almost with a sense of relief into “Bold Speculations on Murder,” as chapter fifty-one is titled. Just as in many of the sensation novels of the time, he feels inspired by newspaper reports on murder (111; ch. 51). Most intriguingly, however, his calculations, like his stock-market speculations, expand proportionally as his financial hypocrisy escalates. From vague imaginings of “some accident” (111; ch. 51) and “some secret satisfaction in allowing his mind to dwell upon the subject, and in making those calculations. . . those little calculations of which I have spoken” (208; ch. 60), they swell into a whole river of poison: “George Vavasor cursed the City, and made his calculation about murdering it. Might not a river of strychnine be turned on round the Exchange about luncheon time?” (209; ch. 60). He makes similar calculations on suicide as the “necessary termination of his career” (8; ch. 41) but estimates that it would be better to shoot someone else first (320; ch. 71; 326–27; ch. 72).
His descent maps the stock-market villain's progression. At the end of the first volume, “[h]e was not, at any rate as yet, an altogether heartless swindler. He could not take his cousin's money without meaning, – without thinking that he meant, to repay her in full all that he took” (367; ch. 35). But the luxury of love shrinks into the other side of the coin of the “combined advantage” he seeks: “But though his prudence had been undoubted, he desired the luxury also. It was on a calculation of the combined advantage that he had made his second offer to his cousin” (363; ch. 35). He wants to have the woman as well as the money because possession of its owner would make it rightfully his. Of course, he tells himself repeatedly, he could simply obtain money on “a mere visit of business” by calling on his affianced bride “as he might call on his banker,” but this is precisely when he realizes that he can no longer deceive himself: “and he told himself that he was a rascal” (389–91; ch. 38). When Grey, his rival in love as in politics, messes in his financial affairs as well (by transferring his own money, instead of Alice's, to Vavasor), he finally gives up on the self-deception and tries to shoot Grey. This venture, as all others, having failed, the last papers he takes up are “the programmes of different companies” offering emigration, and with that he “vanishes from our pages, and will be heard of no more” (327, 335; ch. 72). If it does not immediately bring Alice's vacillations to a safe conclusion, it rids speculative society of one of its most villainous insiders more effectively than Godolphin's sentimentalized departure does. Among Trollope's later speculators, Melmotte takes poison and Lopez throws himself in front of a train, but as Halperin has suggested, exile to America and suicide are “punishments almost equivalent for a Trollope character” (45). In their questionable escape abroad, both Vavasor and Godolphin foreshadow the exorcism of bad speculators in later novels.
Embodying the self-destructiveness of “mighty Shares,” stereotyped suicidal speculators have indisputably shaped stock-market plots, but novels of the 1860s display a degree of experimentation with paper fictions that makes them vital to the invention of new villains and heroes. As homebred swindlers bear the cost not simply of social indeterminacy but of anxieties about hypocrisy as part of their genteel camouflage, they feature in a revaluation of larger moral and social issues. The oscillation between self-deceit and hypocrisy that plagues to a different degree Godolphin and Vavasor – who are, at first, unlikely candidates for the stock-market villain – shows that their balancing of moral and monetary accounts has become essential to changing perceptions of hypocrisy, its financial rewards, and its ultimate price.
Redefinitions of the domestic Gothic; aristocrats looking for openings; landed estates and lady's names circulating in the market – in translating cultural anxieties into narratives, stock-market novels moreover extricate marital and inheritance plots to tie them to a growing fascination with such self-deceived and deceiving speculators. This makes it particularly hard to understand why the narrative functions of financial speculation in the Victorian novel have so long remained marginalized in critical reassessments. Whatever might be argued with reference to the effect of supply and demand on literary quality, finance capitalism has provided new plots, redirecting the novel's very form as the villainous and the heroic jitter alike.
