BANKING IN THE AGE OF JANE AUSTEN

Chawton House Library, UK Saturday 20 September 2014

From 2017 the image of Jane Austen will grace the ten pound note, and this

decision by the Bank of England seems apt, not only because of her keen

observation of economic matters in the novels, but also because her favourite

brother, Henry, was a banker. His business, including a branch in Alton near

Chawton, was bankrupted in the financial crash of 1816. Austen’s lifetime

coincided with tumultuous years in the history of British finance, due to the long-

running war with France and the constant fears of economic isolation, hardship

and insurrection at home. Speakers will address the rise of paper money and

financial malpractice, the transformation of the social landscape by modern

capitalism, and Austen’s own insider knowledge of the changing world of finance.

Programme

9:15 -9:45: Registration

9:45 – 9.50 Emma Clery, Welcome.

9:50 - 10:15 Introduction and Overview of Exhibition (Paul Crosthwaite and Peter

Knight)

10:15 -11.00 Ian Haywood (University of Roehampton), ‘The Ghost of Gold:

Forgery, Finance and Satirical Prints’.

This talk will re-examine the Bank of England's controversial suspension of cash

payments in 1797 by looking at some of the vivid and witty responses to the

Restriction Act by the great political cartoonists James Gillray and George

Cruikshank. Where Gillray emphasised the inflationary explosion of paper money,

20 years later Cruikshank commented on the horrific rise in executions of lower-

class people found guilty of handling (or 'uttering') forged banknotes. The Bank of

England was directly responsible for this spike in capital punishment as it spent

large amounts of money pursuing every case. For Cruikshank, the new one-pound

note was quite literally blood money. These images exposed the contradictory

aspects of paper money: simultaneously abstract (even phoney) and lethal. It will

end with some comments on the relevance of this controversy for the present

electronic era where money is even more intangible.

Ian Haywood is Professor of English at the University of Roehampton. His latest book,

Romanticism and Caricature, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. He

also co-edited a collection of essays on the Gordon riots (also for Cambridge) in 2012.

Ian works on the links between radical politics, literature and popular visual culture in

the 18th and 19th centuries and his next major project will be a study of the transition

from Georgian to Victorian caricature.

11.00 - 11:30 Break

11:30 - 12:15 Matthew Rowlinson (University of Western Ontario), ‘John Bull and

the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street: Gender and Money in the Restriction Era’

With reference to the image of Britannia on the Bank of England’s seal, and to

graphic images of money produced in the Restriction era (1797-1821) and before,

this talk will trace the emergence of the pound sterling during the eighteenth

century, and will argue that this form of money provided the basis for new kinds

of national and gender identities.

Matthew Rowlinson teaches in the English Department and the Centre for Theory and

Criticism at Western University, in London, Canada. He is the author of Real Money and

Romanticism (Cambridge, 2010) among other titles, and is currently working on

representations of animal noises in poetry as part of a book on animals and taxonomy in

nineteenth century literature and natural history.

12:15 – 1.00 Helen Paul (University of Southampton), ‘Henry Austen’s Banking

Failure’

Jane Austen’s brother, Henry, acted on her behalf in several of her business negotiations with publishers. He was a man of business, most notably in banking and finance. He learnt his trade as an army agent and then went on to be involved in several banks. Sadly, they were not a success and Henry was bankrupted. He retrained as a clergyman. This paper discusses Henry’s financial activities against the backdrop of a changing economy. Helen Paul is a lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton and the author The South Sea Bubble: an Economic History of its Origins and Consequences (2011) and specialises in early modern economic history, especially related to the Atlantic trade and finance. She is chair of the Economic History Society’s Women’s Committee. 1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 - 2:45 Robert Clark (University of East Anglia), ‘The Hertfordshire of Pride

and Prejudice: the Space of Capital’.

This presentation began from an attempt to understand Austen’s reasons for locating Longbourn in Hertfordshire, a question to which — at least before this paper was written — there seemed to be no biographical or literary answer. What became apparent through researching this question is that the hints that Longbourn is near Ware situate the novel in an area already considered as part of “greater London” or “the space of the capital” and therefore also within the national and imperial “space of capital” in the monetary sense: since the

1650s large landed estates in this part of greater London had been progressively bought and sold by the new-monied, notably city bankers and East-India men, a fact readily demonstrated through research into estate history, and through the maps and road-books which would have constructed Austen’s understanding of this space. Having looked at the evidence, we are left with the realisation that the narrative concerns of Pride and Prejudice do not inhere in this space; rather the setting seems to have been adopted in the 1810s (perhaps because Austen visited the area with Henry’s banking partner Henry Tilson) for a narrative whose concerns with entail and estate succession belong in earlier and geographically more distant places -- Hampshire and Kent.

Robert Clark is Editor of The Literary Encyclopaedia and Senior Research Fellow at UEA where he taught until 2012. During the last thirty years he has lectured widely on Austen in Europe and North America and is currently writing books about Austen’s geographies and about her relationship to the development of market capitalism during the French Wars.

2:45 - 3:30 Emma Clery (University of Southampton), ‘Speculation in Austen’s

World’

Speculation was a feature of the Regency era towards the end of the Napoleonic

wars, with the modern system of international finance emerging under the

direction of the Rothschilds and their like. The term was new in the 1770s when

Adam Smith used it in Wealth of Nations. Jane Austen’s unfinished novel of 1804,

‘The Watsons’, is the earliest mention of the card game ‘Speculation’ given in the

Oxford English Dictionary. I will suggest that her interest in the game arises from

the way it modelled and taught the modern speculative mind-set. The talk will

move from discussion of the scene in which ‘Speculation’ is played in Mansfield

Park (1814), to other references in the fragment ‘Sanditon’ (1817) and the letters

to build a picture of Austen’s unexpectedly ambivalent attitude to financial risk.

In Austen’s biography too, financial speculation is a notable though often

overlooked factor, whether in the ultimately disastrous banking career of her

favourite brother Henry or her own risk-tolerant publishing decisions.

Emma Clery is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at University of Southampton.

Her publications include The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century Literature:

Literature, Commerce and Luxury (2004) and she is currently working on a project

funded by the Leverhulme Trust on the involvement of Romantic-era women writers in

economic controversy.

3:30 – 5.00 Tea and Exhibition Visit

This is a Lifelong Learning Study Day supported by the University of Southampton and

the Leverhulme Trust. It is part of two days of events, and can be booked separately or

in conjunction with a Workshop on Friday 19 September.

Tickets, including a buffet lunch, refreshments and entry to the exhibition ‘Show Me the

Money: The Image of Finance from 1700 to the Present’:

Delegates rate: £40

Students and Unwaged Delegates: £30

To book, please visit the ‘Events’ section at the Chawton House Library website at

http://www.chawtonhouse.org/ or phone Chawton House Library: 01420 541010.