Nevertheless, the chronicle of suffering inflicted by industry, as we have it in the nineteenth-century novel, takes us through sweated labour, class conflict, cut-throat capitalism, bankruptcies and suicides. It is often a grim story of callous individualism where dog eats dog and the devil takes the foremost. And so it continues, but the degree of artistic conviction can sometimes be in inverse proportion to the vehemence of social condemnation. Mrs. Gaskell got into trouble with Manchester manufacturers for what they considered to be her bias towards the workers in Mary Barton, but in her fair-mindedness she sought to redress the balance in North and South.
Perhaps not surprisingly, with their ready sympathy for those who are obviously suffering, creative writers can tend to be too simplistic. Thus Disraeli in Sybil has his heroine, the previously unrecognised aristocrat (note class again), resolve matters in what one can only call a fairy-tale solution at the end. In a comparable reversion of what has gone before, Gissing in Demos has his hero physically eradicate the new town and factory development and restore the landscape to its pristine pastoral condition! That sort of transformation is difficult to credit, but no more difficult than the relentless catalogue of oppression of the workmen which Robert Tressell describes in his turgid and prolix novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914). Mrs. Gaskell and Dickens, by their fair-minded portrayal of such sympathetic characters as the enlightened John Thornton and in Nicholas Nickleby the Cheeryble brothers, based on the Grants of Ramsbottom (Lancashire), manifest a credibility that is so obviously absent from both the idealised and the excessively condemnatory examples of the industrial novel.
Attitude shows by way of tone. Earnestness was a Victorian characteristic; wit was not. We have to wait until the later years of the nineteenth century to find this latter faculty deployed upon our subject, though, one has to say, without that deft scalpel-like refinement which Jane Austen always had at her command. Nevertheless, we cannot but admire the effectiveness of Shaw as he makes the glorious impudence of the munitions manufacturer Sir Andrew Undershaft annihilate the ultra-seriousness of his earnest Salvationist daughter, Major Barbara, in the play of that name. Likewise, we appreciate Wells’s exposure of Uncle Ponderevo on the one hand and his generous fun at the expense of Mr. Polly on the other, whilst Galsworthy’s persistent low-key criticism of the materialism of the Forsytes in the saga of that name provides yet another variation in satiric tone: “Nothing for nothing and remarkably little for sixpence” may be a truism, but it is also a devastating comment on the attitude of mind behind it. Satire is often in one respect at least a confession on the part of the satirist that, though he may condemn, he cannot convert. By the end of the nineteenth century modern capitalist society had become so firmly established and so complex that criticism, though it might secure the approval of readers, could never be so radical as to threaten the foundations as Manchester manufacturers had once thought it threatened them. That may be one reason why Tressell’s vehemence is so much off-key and why the wit of the writers I have mentioned seems more to the point. It speaks better to the mood of the time.
Twentieth-century writers have a different kind of contempt for business from that of their predecessors. Generally speaking, theirs is a development of attitudes first enunciated in the Victorian period and typically expressed by Matthew Arnold, what one might call, to quote his own phrase from Culture and Anarchy, the “we in Oxford” syndrome, the dislike that intellectual superiority displays for what it regards as uncultured materialism, the denigration of the “Philistines.” It is there in Forster’s contrast of the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, music against money, in Howards End. It is there again in Lawrence’s hostile portraits of the manufacturers Gerald Crich (Women in Love) and Clifford Chatterley (Lady Chatterley’s Lover); and once more in T. S. Eliot’s “double whammy” in The Waste Land when he condemns the small-house agents’ clerk “on whom assurance sits / As a silk-hat on a Bradford millionaire.” Those who succeed in business are seen as ruthless go-getters, even sinister characters as in some of Conrad’s creations, destroyed spiritually by their enslavement to money; whilst of those who are entrapped in the system it is Eliot again who notices the “death-in-life” of the city workers:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Nihilistic materialism becomes even more evident as the century progresses, descending, as John Morris concludes his essay by noting, into “an unprecedented moral quagmire.” This, however, is not just a criticism of business; it is an indictment of the age. In earlier periods criticism had taken the form of protest, outraged by the failure of business to measure up to a set of basic human values. With these values gone, protest has given way to cynicism and despair. Business, like all else, is now seen as operating in the post-modern spiritual vacuum. Literature has lost its bearings and defining moments are no more.
Eighteenth-Century Attitudes Towards Business
W. A. SPECK University of Leeds
In the early eighteenth century, literary reactions to business activity were largely conditioned by the impact of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 upon society. Above all they were influenced by the rise of the fiscal-military state and by its creation of a special relationship between the government and the City generated by the so-called Financial Revolution.1 Later, in the middle decades of the century, literary responses to commerce addressed the effects of economic growth and a rising standard of living, which some welcomed as “progress” but others deplored as “luxury.”2 Towards the end of the century incipient industrialisation and class struggle were emerging as themes informing some writings, anticipating the debate between the pessimists and the optimists over the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. But the most vociferous literary responses to business activity in the closing decades of the century were responding to the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire, a campaign which triumphed in 1807.
The term Financial Revolution sums up those measures introduced to underwrite the wars against Louis XIV which occupied the years 1689 to 1697 and 1702 to 1713. These required revenues on a quite unprecedented scale. Moreover, the taxes voted by Parliament, although initially adequate for war finance, took time to reach the Treasury. Meanwhile, allies and the armed forces had to be paid and equipped, necessitating the anticipation of revenues. The government therefore resorted to loans secured on the various taxes, at first short term but increasingly long term, until a national debt came into being which depended on faith in the regime’s ability to pay the interest. This system of public credit was enshrined in the Bank of England, established in 1694. In return for its privileged financial status the Bank lent £1,200,000 to the Treasury. In 1709 an Act of Parliament increased its capital to £4,402,343 and allowed it to lend another £2,900,000. Other corporations were also involved in the new financial machinery. The East India Company was frequently tapped for loans in return for the confirmation of its privileges. During the 1690s, when there were two companies vying for the government’s favours, the state received substantial sums from this source. Thus in 1698, when the “new” East India Company was incorporated, it lent £2,000,000 to the government while in 1708, just before the rival concerns joined to form the United East India Company, a further sum of £1,200,000 was advanced. In 1711 the financial mechanism was completed with the launching of the South Sea Company, which incorporated the state’s short-term creditors and transformed some £9,000,000 of debt into the new corporation’s stock. These links between the state and the City created a fiscal-military complex which underpinned Britain’s newly acquired Great Power status.
REACTIONS TO THE NEW FISCAL-MILITARY STATE
Reactions to this new financial machinery