Money in Middlemarch


Money in Middlemarch
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A Web of Monetary Matters

*Caution spoilers ahead*

Middlemarch takes place in an epoch of great economic change; as such various characters in the novel are preoccupied with questions concerning money, whether they actively profit from others’ misfortunes, or inadvertently find themselves in financial jeopardy.

Money is a ubiquitous point of connection between the inhabitants of Middlemarch.

The town financier Bulstrode, who funds the hospital and loans money to various characters, is extorted by Raffles, a gambler who threatens to reveal the dishonest origins of his prosperity. Said wealth, (ill-begotten from a disreputable pawnshop), rightfully belongs to Will Ladislaw who, in turn, refuses Bulstrode’s bribe of £500 a year, in part, because he is anxious to not disappoint Dorothea. Dorothea, heiress to her uncle’s estate and wife to the wealthy Mr Causabon finds out that Causabon, in an attempt to exert posthumous power over her, has made an amendment to his will to disinherit Dorothea in the event she weds his cousin, Will Ladislaw.

At the novel’s close, Dorothea weds Ladislaw anyway, takes over Lydgate’s loan from Bulstrode at the behest of Rosamond and appoints Farebrother rector of Lowick, putting an end to the financial worries that he had previously kept on top of by winning games of chance. Said games took place in the billiard room at the Green Dragon, the same place where Lydgate gambled away substantial money and Fred Vincy lost a bet after bragging about his inheritance. In Middlemarch’s latter half, Fred is passed over by the miserly Featherstone (from whom he expects to inherit Stone Court) in favour of his uncle’s secret illegitimate son, Joshua Rigg an aspiring moneylender who — like Bulstrode (to whom he sells the estate) — is financially preyed upon by the parasitic Raffles.



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A stealthy convergence of human lots…
Explore a sample of the novel’s core characters & their relationship with money…

ARTHUR BROOKE | Idle landlord & aspiring MP
Mr Brooke is a wealthy bachelor and landowner of Tipton Grange. Despite the fact Brooke makes strides to run for a seat in the House of Commons and frequently — if ineptly — espouses his liberal beliefs and desire for reform, he treats his own tenants poorly and is slow when it comes to making improvements on the properties they rent. Moreover, in his capacity as a magistrate, he expresses little sympathy for struggling families who turn to poaching for food.
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In the course of the nineteenth century, the manufacturing industry gradually became a dominant force within the British economy. This had a considerable impact on class relations. The manufacturing class emerged, particularly in the Midlands and the North, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Growing international trade in the capital, a prosperous national economy, and rapidly advancing technological innovation resulted in a surfeit of new investment opportunities. Speculative business ventures involving overseas commodities, and advancements in railway locomotives, steamships, and factory equipment, were a constant topic of conversation. Eliot herself had a growing and diverse portfolio of low-risk investments including shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway.

In 1844, provincial banking shifted from a series of disparate country businesses into a more sophisticated, commercial enterprise dominated by the Bank of England. The Bank Charter Act of 1844, gave the Bank of England exclusive rights to issue notes, backed ‘pound-for-pound’ with gold reserves. Prior to this act, in the years Middlemarch is set, provincial banks could issue their own notes unrestricted.


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Exhibit 26 – Unissued banknote, Nuneaton Bank, (c. 1815-61), © The Trustees of the British Museum.


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The Morality of Debtors & Creditors

Wealth, in this era, could come and go at the swing of the latest speculative venture. What’s more, debt, irrespective of class or station, affected all walks of life.

Broadly speaking there were two contending schools of thought on the subject of debt in the public imagination. One intimated that debt was an inevitable and necessary part of commercial life and could thus not be considered immoral in and of itself. The pious country banker Mr Bulstrode has an intimate knowledge of ‘the financial secrets of most traders in the town’ and is the purveyor of numerous private loans. As the narrator explains to us, any ‘spiritual conflict’ that Bulstrode bears from tempting his neighbours into debt is mitigated by an ‘inward argument’ that imagined any power he might gain from such enterprises would be devoted to ‘the glory of God’.

Charles Dickens’ Household Words and All the Year Round published a series of articles dedicated to the topic of debt that implied quite the opposite. One article, printed in All the Year Round in 1864, supposed that debt, not drink was the ‘greatest curse of the land’. ‘So completely does insolvency pervade society’, it speculated, ‘that those who are not in debt are almost as much victims to the consequences as those who are.’ With misguided young men like Fred Vincy, ‘a trouble to themselves, and to their friends, through owing money’, making ‘their debts and their troubles’ those of their neighbours – leaving the likes of Caleb or Mary Garth to face the consequences.


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Exhibit 27 – The Banker’s Private Room, Negotiating a Loan, by John Callcott Horsley, (1870), oil on canvas, Royal Holloway, University of London. Purchased for Thomas Holloway, 1883. Find out more about visiting Royal Holloway’s stunning Grade 1 listed Picture Gallery or book a research visit to view the private collection here.

In an effort to charm the banker opposite her, a young woman clothed in a sumptuous fur-trimmed coat leans across a table offering up her proposed terms. Her demeanour and body language are at once seductive and self-possessed. Notwithstanding her coyly proffered fan and flirtatious posture, she meets his eyes with confidence.

Women, in this era, played an active if hidden role in financial affairs, particularly those associated with one’s household. Like Rosamond Vincy, a seemingly ‘mild creature’, with a ‘terrible tenacity’ for getting her own way the young woman in Horsley’s painting displays a confidence that belies the performative coyness of her disposition. Indeed, Rosamond’s awareness ‘that she was a much more exquisite ornament to the drawing-room’ than her female peers, directly predicates her desire to find herself ‘a husband whose wealth corresponded [with] her habits’.

Dorothea, who with idealistic sincerity proclaims midway through the novel, that ‘money buys [her] nothing but an uneasy conscience’, functions, in this respect, as a foil to Rosamond. Though in the earlier half of the novel, she rather performatively shuns the costly jewels of her late mother (after failing to justify ‘her delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy’), this somewhat haughty disdain for materiality gives way, to a decidedly more rational perspective. By the novel’s end, Dorothea gives up Causabon’s estate to marry Will and declares, with considerably more humility, that she will take care to ‘learn what everything costs’.


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Note her ornate gold earrings, pearl bracelet, and emerald ring – a purposefully lavish display of wealth likely worn to demonstrate that she comes from an affluent background.



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‘Profits made out of Lost Souls…’

By design, the concept of money — as a fungible token of exchange — is effectively intended to erase its lineage. Throughout Middlemarch however, various characters approach money as though it carries traces of its moral history.
  When Bulstrode attempts to atone for having deliberately concealed Will Ladislaw’s existence from his grandmother, Ladislaw fervently rejects his offer of recompense on the grounds the money originates from a ‘thoroughly dishonourable’ business, a pawnbrokers that profited from stolen goods and the distress of ‘lost souls’.
  Intel on this ill-gotten money provides Raffles with the leverage to blackmail Bulstrode — for such information would contaminate both Bulstrode’s religious reputation and his integrity as the town’s banker.
  The idealistic impulse that motivates Ladislaw to fling back the offer with such vehemence, the narrator tells us, stems from a complicated mix of ‘passionate rebellion against this inherited blot’ on his ancestry and an inkling that ‘it would have been impossible for him ever to tell Dorothea that he had accepted it’.
  Even Bulstrode himself puts his ill-gotten wealth through an elaborate purification ritual by financing the new hospital and other ‘clean’ business investments.





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‘With one powerful snatch at the Devil’s Bait…’

The destructive practice of gambling is a recurrent motif in Middlemarch, from Rev. Farebrother who partakes to supplement his paltry income to the young men understood to be “addicted to pleasure” prayed upon by Mr Bambridge, a persistent ‘figure in the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon’.

Though Lydgate is initially sickened by the sight of ‘agitated features clutching a heap of coin’ and has a ‘contemptuous pity’ for ‘the half-idiotic triumph in the eyes of a man’ who jubilantly beggars his neighbours, his ‘repugnance’ soon dissipates when he faces financial difficulties himself. Just as he had ‘tried opium’ his thoughts turned ‘upon gambling — not with an appetite for its excitement, but with a sort of wistful inward gaze after that easy way of getting money, which implied no asking and brought no responsibility.’

What Lydgate had, with taught dispassion, earlier regarded as an immoral vice imbued with a ‘meanness’ that he viewed as beneath him, becomes, under financial pressure, a compulsive need that narrows his mind ‘into that precipitous crevice of play’.



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Exhibit 28 – Johann Anton Sarg and three friends playing whist by candlelight by Mary Ellen Best (c. 1842-45), watercolour, York Museums Trust.



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Provincial public houses, and the games that took place in them, instilled a sense of local camaraderie and helped to break the monotony of everyday life.

Gambling, like so many aspects of Victorian culture, was implicitly divided along class lines. Where upper-class gambling was often hidden in private-members clubs where the landed gentry partook in a compulsive form of conspicuous consumption, middle and working-class gamblers, desperate to improve their circumstances, frequented public houses like Middlemarch’s Green Dragon.

In the years before the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 working-class men and women had very little leisure hours to spare so drinking and gambling in the local public house served as the main form of entertainment.

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Exhibit 29 – The Golden Cross Inn on the corner of Pepper Street, Coventry, c. 1819, by William Henry Brooke, (the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum) and c. 2022 by Aaron Law.

Can you take a picture of modern Coventry that corresponds with a painting from the past? You can visit our Google Map to find an approximate location of the artist’s vantage point and post your photo on Twitter under the hashtag #FindingMiddlemarch. Photographs posted may feature in later parts of the exhibition.



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Exhibit 30 – A drink plan of Coventry which includes the Chapelfields area, (1884), Coventry Archives.


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Exhibit 31 – The Salon d’Or, Homburg by William Powell Frith, (1871), oil on canvas, Courtesy of the RISD Museum.

At the time Eliot was writing Middlemarch the gambling industry was flourishing.

William Powell Frith’s panoramic painting The Salon d’Or, Homburg was exhibited to great acclaim at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1871. Frith had visited the popular casino near Frankfurt in 1869 where he made observational sketches to inform his composition. Each vignette tells its own story within the wider narrative of the painting, from the desolate woman turning away from the gaming table at the heart of the painting to the older couple behind her looking on in dismay at her very public misfortune.

Two years later, in 1872, Eliot visited the Salon d’Or with her partner George Henry Lewes, shortly before its closure the following year. It is probable that she would have been familiar with Frith’s work, having likely seen one of its many reproductions. Indeed, in a letter documenting her time in Homburg she describes witnessing a near identical scene; the sight of Lord Byron’s great-niece, at only twenty-six ‘completely in the grasp of this mean, money-making demon’ amid ‘the hags and brutally stupid men around her’ brought tears to her eyes.

Eliot continued to contemplate the rationale and psychology behind gambling in Daniel Deronda (1876), a novel which opens with the titular character observing a young woman avidly playing at the roulette table.


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All the men in the audience only have eyes for the first bride. In the face of her beauty, the man in the foreground is not even looking at the riches he intends to part with.



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Courting Lady luck in the late Victorian Era

As we learn from old Featherstone, who counsels Fred against relying upon his ‘speckilating’ [sic] Uncle Bulstrode, in the 1830s the line that separated gambling from other forms of ‘lawful’ financial investment, like market speculation, was relatively indistinct. By the time Eliot was writing Middlemarch, in 1871, England had become a ‘nation of shareholders’ (George Robb White-Collar Crime 3). In calling attention to this worrying affinity, Eliot was therefore posing an uncomfortable ethical concern to a readership that likely would have been reluctant to recognise that which cast a shadow on their own activities.



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