England's Future in The Way We Live

Ambivalent Speculations: America as England's Future in "The Way We Live Now"

Author(s): Annette Van Reviewed work(s):

Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 39, No. 1, Victorian Structures of Feeling (Fall, 2005), pp. 75-96

Published by: Duke University Press

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Ambivalent Speculations: ^America

England's ^{Future in The} Way ^{We Live}

Now

ANNETTE VAN

In examining "the way we live now/' Trollope asks, how can we know what any- thing or anyone is worth? In a nation increasingly subject to the unpredictable ups and downs of economic speculation, is it any surprise that ethical and cul- tural values risk destabilization as well, that a bad book should receive a good review and that an honest, old-fashioned Englishman should be denied marriage to the nice, wholesome Englishwoman he desires? Written during 1874-75, The Way We Live Now preaches the link between economic and moral behaviors, sounding a familiar Victorian refrain about the dangers of speculation to both individual and national character.1 But the novel nevertheless distinguishes itself from other Victorian texts that demonize speculation, by its complex ambiva- lence towards the speculative and speculators. This ambivalence acknowledges the necessity of speculation to economy and nation while warning of its risks, risks that the novel ameliorates though its portrayal of America and Americans.

The Way We Live Now, I argue, posits America as an economic frontier space in which speculators can thrive and, hence, cedes the future to the Americans in a move imagined to preserve English values.

American Attractions

"A man should always have his money when he wins. "

"We don't think anything about such little matters at Frisco, my lord. "

"You're fine fellows at Frisco, 1 dare say. Here we pay up,- when we can.

Sometimes we can't, and then it is not pleasant." Fresh adieus were made between the two partners, and between the American and the lord;- and then Fisker was taken on his way towards Frisco. "He's not half a bad fellow, but he's not a bit like an Englishman," said Lord Nidderdale, as he walked out of the station. "

(1: 95) This exchange between Lord Nidderdale and Hamilton K. Fisker, an American railway speculator, occurs early on in The Way We Live Now. The two have just come from a night of gambling at the popular gentleman's club the Beargarden, where Fisker has won a fistful of I.O.U.s. As Fisker is immediately due to depart back home to America, Nidderdale and the other young aristocrats feel honor-

1 Dickens' s Little Dorrit (1855) and Our Mutual Friend (1864) are the most famous examples of texts depicting speculation as morally bankrupt but there are a number of others such as Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863) and Tom Taylor's Still Waters Run Deep (1855) and Payable on Demand (1859). For a survey on the representation of speculation in Victorian literature, see Reed.

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bound to exchange their I.O.U.s for cash, an operation that ultimately fails be- cause of their lack of ready money. Fisker is sanguine about the aristocrats' lack of cash funds, indicating that the situation is not anything with which he can really be bothered. The subsequent conversation between the Englishman and the American is illuminating for the way in which it relates specific economic behaviors and attitudes to national identity. Nidderdale characterizes Americans as somewhat less than scrupulous about repaying debts - "Here [in England] we pay up." Fisker revises Nidderdale's narrative by suggesting that Americans pre- fer to deal with the bigger picture - "We don't think anything about such little matters." As will become clear, Fisker always has his eye on the bigger picture, speculating that the contacts he makes will prove more valuable than the loss of a little gambling money.

In the novel, Americans, especially those from the West, play fast and loose with both money and scruples, and decent Englishmen always "pay up," paral- leling economic behavior with moral character. The most upright and exemplary character, Roger Carbury, is an abstemious Englishman who "had never owed a shilling that he could not pay, or his father before him. His orders to the trades- man at Beccles were not extensive, and care was used to see that the goods sup- plied were neither overcharged nor unnecessary" (1: 50).2 The two most promi- nent Americans, Fisker and Mrs. Hurtle are, in contrast, characters about whom one never quite knows the full and /or truthful story. Winifred Hurtle may or may not be still married; she may or may not have killed a man. Fisker is de- scribed as "indifferent whether the railway [the object of his speculative venture]

should ever be constructed or not" (1: 77-78). As shifty and shifting characters, the Americans are textually aligned with the infamous Melmotte, whose own

"various biographies" include one in which his "father has been a noted coiner in New York," making him, perhaps, almost American himself (2: 449).3 At the least, Melmotte has spent a good deal of time in America. Nevertheless, whereas the novel renders Melmotte, who suffers the additional taint of being married to a Jew, unredeemable, an inveterate and violent bully, "a surfeited sponge of speculation," the verifiably American Fisker and Hurtle escape absolute vilifica- tion (1: 222). These Americans may not be completely above board as far as their ethics are concerned, but they are also charming and intelligent, admired by even the most upright. Thus, after Fisker's departure, Nidderdale is able to deem him

"not half a bad fellow" even if "not a bit like an Englishman."

2 Roger has been accused of being overly upright and pious in his comportment, thus rendering him a rather unsympathetic character. Robert Tracy, however, offers a defense of Roger when he points out that Roger's temptation and moral indecision takes place within the realm of sen- timent rather than finance. He argues, [t]he struggle [between telling Hetta the truth about Paul and Hurtle and letting the matter lie] turns Roger from a conventional spokesman for vir- tue to a real man" (168).

3 Franklin cites this concern about origins as a particularly Victorian one, claiming that "[t]he anxiety over mixing monetary forms and exchanges is an expression of a broader anxiety at- tached to the familiar dilemma of origins and that threat that money poses of erasing all signs of origin with anonymity" (506). He links this anxiety over origins to "historical developments in capitalism ... especially the finalization in the 1830s of the long transition from gold to paper - from wealth as treasure to the exchange of capital" (501).

ANNETTE VAN | TROLLOPE'S SPECULATIVE AMERICA 77

Paul Montague, the young but flawed hero, reinforces the powerful charm of Americans. He dislikes Fisker intensely yet finds "himself unable to resist the man's good humour, audacity, and cleverness combined" (1: 77). He was like- wise able to fall in love briefly with Mrs. Hurtle despite her clear unsuitability and spotted past. And, in an intricate feat of logical reasoning, Paul's eventual wife, Hetta Carbury, is able to forgive her fiance's earlier dalliance because she, too, finds Mrs. Hurtle irresistibly attractive. Hetta observes of Mrs. Hurtle:

How full of beauty was the face of that American female,- how rich and glorious her voice in spite of the well-known nasal twang;- and above all how powerful and at the same time how easy and how gracious was her manner! That she would be an unfit wife for Paul Montague was certain to Hetta, but that he or any other man should have loved her and have been loved by her, and then have been willing to part from her, was wonderful. And yet Paul Montague had preferred herself, Hetta Carbury, to this woman! (2: 390-91)

In this passage, it is the American woman's attractiveness that becomes the key to enabling the successful resolution of the suitable match between Paul and Hetta rather than, more predictably, becoming the hindrance. Paul and Hetta feel able to excuse improprieties by Americans to a large degree because, the novel implies, these improprieties are committed with such charming audacity and because such behavior seems to be part of American nature and is thus not to be helped.

The Way We Live Now tempers Nidderdale's attitude towards America and Americans by adding a layer of complicating irony to his claim that Fisker is "not half a bad fellow, but he's not a bit like an Englishman." As the novel makes ob- vious, the majority of the Beargarden club members will not, in fact, ever "pay up." Felix Carbury and Miles Grendell, in particular, both young Englishmen from prominent families, are exposed as scoundrels and cheaters. Felix is forever borrowing from his mother's limited funds with no intention of returning the loans. Miles cheats at cards and never repays his I.O.U.s. The novel may repre- sent Fisker's financial speculations as suspect and too risky for proper English gentlemen to invest in, but Felix and Miles's gambling is obviously beyond the pale. That the Englishmen should know better is supported by the novel's ending in which the two young Englishmen have been banished from polite society. In comparison, Fisker returns to his native land with a clever, rich fiancée, and with every indication of future financial success.

The distinction drawn by the novel between gambling and speculation is an important one. The line separating the two activities has often been a fine one, one, at times, nonexistent. In Munera Pulveris, for instance, Ruskin deems finan- cial speculations "commercial lotteries" (277).4 For Trollope to distinguish so

4 Chancellor contrasts speculation with gambling and investing, suggesting definitions of these practices are often informed by hindsight:

Speculation is conventionally defined as an attempt to profit from changes in market price. Thus, forgoing current income for a prospective capital gain is deemed speculative. Speculation is active while investment is generally passive.... The line separating speculation from investment is so thin

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clearly between the two speaks to a more tolerant attitude toward both the American and his speculations. Indeed, it likely testifies to a gradual shift in English perspectives toward speculation in general. Itkowitz argues that, while the discourse of speculation during the Victorian Period was in constant negotia- tion, "[speculation ... was becoming 'domesticated' because people came to be- lieve that, like investment and unlike gambling, it was a legitimate way to risk money. The clearest indication of this can be seen in the way that, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, the growth of legal restrictions on gam- bling was accompanied by the removal of most legal restrictions on speculation"

(126). In this context, The Way We Live Now reads like a nostalgic response to a nation and culture into which speculation had already deeply penetrated, a long- ing for the old world of Roger Carbury and a removal of speculative activity from the domestic to the foreign.

Americans and America in The Way We Live Now are "not a bit like" the English and England but, that difference is finally strategic. America, the frontier, rather than England is the true home of speculation. Trollope imagines Americans as inherently speculative, as individuals uniquely amenable to finan- cially risky behavior. Commenting on the fact that Marie Melmotte (the savvy daughter of the speculator Melmotte) and Fisker are to accompany her back to San Francisco, Mrs. Hurtle revealingly observes "They are adventurers, - as I am, and I do not see why we should not suit each other" (2: 444). In deeming Fisker, the soon-to-be Mrs. Fisker, and Hurtle "adventurers," with its suggestion of romance rather than criminality, the novel continues to excuse, with some affection even, less-than-scrupulous American behavior as a matter of national disposition. It is Melmotte, instead, who goes too far when he resorts to forgery and who cannot survive his misdeeds. It is English society that is indicted when it stupidly continues to enable Melmotte's fraudulent activities while knowing he is universally detested. As Roger points out,

[m]en say openly that he is an adventurer and a swindler. No one pretends to think that he [Melmotte] is a gentleman. There is a consciousness among all who speak of him that he amasses his money not by honest trade, but by unknown tricks,- as does a card-sharper. He is one whom we would not admit into our kitchens, much less to our tables, on the score of his own merits. But because he has learned the art of making money, we not only put up with him, but settle upon his carcase as so many birds of prey. (1: 138)

Melmotte, like Fisker and Hurtle, is described as an "adventurer," but the pejora- tive "swindler" and "card-sharper" are attached in order to mark the difference between the way the novel regards him and the Americans. The passage also implies a closer similarity between Melmotte and the actual "card-sharper" of

that it has been said both that speculation is a name given to a failed investment and that investment is the name given to a successful investment.... Similar problems of definition are encountered in distinguishing speculation from gambling. While a bad investment may be a speculation, a poorly executed speculation is often described as a gamble, (xi)

ANNETTE VAN | TROLLOPE'S SPECULATIVE AMERICA 79

the novel, the dissolute Miles Grendell. Fisker's circumstances, in contrast to those of Melmotte's, remain promising throughout the novel - his speculations are likely to achieve excellent returns.

Transatlantic Trade

Writing in 1864, a decade prior to The Way We Live Now, D. Moirer Evans makes clear his belief that the early-Victorian economic relationship between Europe and America had been far from mutually beneficial.

During the time ... our 'cute Yankee cousins were constructing their public works, and principally their lines of railway, the banks were also organized. These schemes, by one special channel or another, aided to maintain the existing fashion, till the great crisis of 1835-36 arrived, when the true extent of transatlantic indebt- edness, and the worth of the paper which America had circulated throughout the world, became properly ascertained.... When the grand collapse occurred, its influ- ence permeating all banking circles, it was speedily discovered that the Britisher was not companionless in his misfortunes, for the Parisian, and the Hollander, were alike sacrificed- since they in their turn, not having allowed the golden op- portunity for participation to pass, experienced difficulty from the inability of States and companies to fulfil their engagements, even where they had sufficient honesty to recognize their liabilities. Then arose the doctrine of repudiation, which, forming a most convenient though discreditable mode of avoiding payment, did more than anything else to destroy the prestige of the States as borrowers, and the character of their merchants and citizens as trustworthy people. (124-25)

The '"cute" Americans borrowed English funds to establish an institutional and transportation infrastructure, funds, Evans claims, that were then "repudiated."

The lack of repayment had obviously led to considerable financial losses and embarrassment among the English and their "companion[s]."5 Evans, further- more, notes that the reneging of the loans had caused irreparable harm to the

"prestige," the reputation of Americans. The paradigm of transatlantic trade that Evans constructs is typical for the Victorian period and positions England in a strikingly different relation to America than to the rest of the world. It is the Americans who are exploiting the English; it is the Americans who are more acute and attuned to global markets. England is the victim of unscrupulous American speculation, dupes by virtue of its great sense of responsibility - see how we are rewarded for helping the Americans build their nation, Evans complains.

5 Evans goes on to point out that "British losses by American stocks and shares, may already be reckoned to have reached millions; and it is very desirable, much though it may be deplored by New York operators, and New York agents, whose aim is commission and brokerage, that this system of plundering the British should be forever arrested" (129). The implication here is that the only way to end the exploitation of the British by America is to effectively end transat- lantic speculation, an impossibility.

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That nineteenth-century England felt threatened by America's growing eco- nomic importance is manifest. Consequently, it is not surprising that the stereo- type of the greedy, amoral American gains in currency throughout the period.

Coupled with this character assassination on the economic front is the assertion of English and European cultural superiority. Americans may be good with money, but that talent functions also as the sign of their cultural deprivation and lack of civilization. As the century progresses, despite Evans's pessimism, the question for England becomes not how to quash American growth but how to harness that growth for English profit, how to put American money-making abilities to work for England and the English. One strategy that emerges is that of promoting America as a market and Americans as consumers for English ex- ports, a strategy nicely in step with narratives of English cultural superiority.

Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners (1832) and Dickens's American Notes (1842) function very much within this rubric of marketing America (in the con- ventional sense of marketing as well as in the sense of making America into a market). Within their travel narratives, American culture is market culture, a cul- ture of speculation. Mary Louise Pratt has suggested that a number of critical questions should be asked in relation to travel writing:

How has travel and exploration writing produced "the rest of the world" for European readerships at particular points in Europe's expansionist trajectory?

How has it produced Europe's differentiated conceptions of itself in relation to something it became possible to call "the rest of the world"? How do such signify- ing practices encode and legitimate the aspirations of economic expansion and em- pire? How do they betray them? (5)

In examining these Victorian travel narratives written by English men and women about America, it seems obvious that these texts do indeed produce a specific America and England in addition to a set of relations between the two nations that "encode and legitimate the aspirations of economic expansion and empire." The specific discursive construction of Victorian America in relation to England is especially complex, however, because of its post-revolutionary status, its self-government, and the difficulty of producing a fully cohesive racial narra- tive around Americans and America.6

Indeed, America is often treated within these texts as a wayward member of the English family (a child gone bad), to be chastised but still regarded as kin. For example, in North America (1862), Anthony Trollope makes a careful distinction between Americans and other foreign nationals with which England has had less-than-amicable relations by saying,

if fighting must needs be done, one need not feel special grief at fighting a Russian.

That the Indian mutiny should be put down is a matter of course. That those Chinese rascals should be forced into the harness of civilization was a good thing. ...

But a war with the States of America! (289-90)

6 By this I mean that Americans could not be the objects of an overtly radalized (and racist) dis- course in quite the same ways as could most of England's colonial subjects.

ANNETTE VAN | TROLLOPE'S SPECULATIVE AMERICA 81

To go to war with America is unthinkable; to fight Russians, Chinese, Indians, and even the French "is a matter of course." Interestingly, both Trollopes and Dickens spend a significant time discussing and critiquing race relations in America. All three point out what they see as the irony of a nation that privileges liberty and allows slavery and genocide (Dickens writes with some poignancy of the plight of Native Americans). In these narratives, England gets to be the en- lightened country in comparison to America, in this way, whitewashing England's problematic history of race relations and complicity in the slave trade.

The Way We Live Now is particularly interesting in regards to its racial and eth- nic politics. The decided preference for Fisker over Melmotte must be read as symptomatic of the novel's hierarchy of difference. That Fisker is "not half a bad fellow" tell us that he is, in point of fact, half a good fellow. And, as I pointed out earlier, his charm and attractiveness are attributed by the novel to his place of origin. Within the schema of the novel, Americans are closer in spirit to the English than either the Jews or Melmotte.7 "[A] war with the states of America"

would be intolerable to Trollope precisely because of the presumed ethnic affin- ity between the Americans and the English. Melmotte, whose ancestry is uncer- tain and who is married to the clearly Jewish Mme. Melmotte, is someone that the novel could conceive of going to war against. He has, after all, already allied himself with the wrong sides, sides whose interests run contrary to England's - "It was said that he had made a railway across Russia, that he had provisioned the Southern army in the American civil war, that he had supplied Austria with arms" (1: 31). His racial, ethnic, and national ambiguity, his lack of loyalty to anyone but himself, is too much in the end. Tellingly, Melmotte is not ultimately enabled by his talent to be everything and everywhere at once. Within the economy of the novel, his type of chameleon cannot prevail, even though, ironically, the exponential growth of international finance and trade in the nineteenth-century was making Melmottes more and more likely in real world England.8

The American Fisker, in contrast to Melmotte, remains at large and prosper- ous even if at the periphery of the landscape of The Way We Live Now. He takes on significance as a way for the novel to think about transatlantic economic rela- tions. Nineteenth-century America posed a special challenge for the English in terms of how it could be best exploited for economic purposes and, perhaps more importantly, how it could serve as a market for English goods without

7 A number of critics have discussed the anti-Semitism of The Way We Live Now. My own reading is somewhat generous on this point in that I believe the novel attempts some (if not totally ef- fective) critique of English anti-Semitism with both the representation of the excessive distaste of the English for the Jews and the way in which Brehgert comes off as the honorable party in all of his dealings with the Longestaffs. In Trollope's description of Georgiana's pre-marriage negotiations with Brehgert, it is Georgiana who is greedy, calculating, and unscrupulous.

Kermode makes this point in his introduction to the novel: "Brehgert is made to serve as a measure of the snobbery and corruption of the Longestaffes" (xvii).

8 It is somewhat of a mystery why Melmotte, in fact, does not simply flee England once his for- geries come to light, once he is caught out. Fisker even suggests that Melmotte need only have stayed put for all to be resolved eventually. His suicide rings false to a certain extent even though it had historical precedent in the suicide of John Sadleir.

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rendering England dependent (or Americanized, i.e., morally suspect and desta- bilized). The fear of economic dependence, especially upon a self-determining nation, was exacerbated by England's growing need for markets - in point of fact, Roy Bridges points out that "Britain's need for markets was especially acute;

the country could not feed itself from its own agriculture after about 1850" (60).

Given the historical situation, it seems only fitting that this novel should narrativize Americans within economic terms and that Victorians writing about America should construct Americans as a ready-made labor force and a people obsessed by money yet deficient in culture and cultural production. Americans became simultaneously consumers for English culture, labor for transatlantic projects, and savvy partners in speculative ventures.

Marketing America

Were I to relate one-tenth part of the dishonest transactions recounted to me by Americans, of their fellow-citizens and friends, I am confident that no English reader would give me credit for veracity; it would, therefore, be very unwise to re- peat them, but I cannot refrain from expressing the opinion that nearly four years of attentive observation impressed upon me, namely, that the moral sense is on every point blunter than with us. (Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners 198-99) Anthony Trollope was very familiar with his mother's Domestic Manners of the Americans and used it as a touchstone three decades later for his North America.9 Domestic Manners is the account of Frances Trollope's 1827 sojourn in America, which was precipitated by her family's money problems in England, and during which the author attempted and failed to establish a successful business in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was written during a time when the English were particu- larly hungry for travel narratives and, consequently, these narratives were flood- ing the market.10 Domestic Manners was met with controversy on both sides of the Atlantic, fueling debates about democracy, slavery, and the status of women, and became an international bestseller.11 The text itself ironically glosses over Trollope's failed speculative venture but its narrative nevertheless functions to promote America and Americans as a ready market for the English, a market not

9 Anthony Trollope, indeed, refers to his mother's text on the very first page of North America.

He distinguishes his own text by referring to Domestic Manners as "essentially a woman's book" (3). He goes on to describe his own intention of tackling "political arrangements" rather than "social absurdities/' thus invoking a gendered separation of public and private spheres (3). The bulk of North America, in fact, concerns itself with the American Civil War, which was taking place during Trollope's travels.

10 Linda Abess Ellis writes that "Almost half of the reviews in the Athenaeum for November 2, 1833, are for books that provide information about foreign lands; seven books on America are advertised the week of November 9" (21). Ellis also provides a cogent comparison of Trollope's Domestic Manners to her fictional novels set in America.

11 Heineman points out that the book was 'Vilified by the Americans, who saw it as slanderous revenge.... In England, the book fueled the then-current controversy over the extension of the suffrage ... and was cited by both liberals and conservatives, who saw in the newly created American republic the clear results of democratic principles" (Frances Trollope 25).

ANNETTE VAN | TROLLOPE'S SPECULATIVE AMERICA 83

primarily for commodities but for speculative investment and cultural produc- tion.12

The passage above prompts us to recall the exchange between Nidderdale and Fisker in The Way We Live Now and illustrates how Domestic Manners labels Americans as overly-fond of dishonest dealings (so fond that any narratives about them would challenge belief) and the English as not as morally "blunt" as their American counterparts.13 Not only are Americans unethical; they are also singularly devoted to, obsessed with, making money. Frances Trollope theorizes this preoccupation with accumulation as being exacerbated by American cultural deficiencies, particularly Americans' lack of leisurely, civilized pursuits. Of Cincinnati's rapid growth and prosperity, she observes,

Some of the native political economists assert that this rapid conversion of a bear- brake into a prosperous city, is the result of free political institutions; not being very deep in such matters, a more obvious cause suggested itself to me, in the un- ceasing goad which necessity applies to industry in this country, and in the absence of all resource for the idle. During the nearly two years that I resided in Cincinnati, or its neighbourhood, I neither saw a beggar, nor a man of sufficient fortune to permit his ceasing his efforts to increase it; thus every bee in the hive is actively employed in search of that honey ofHybla, vulgarly called money; neither art, sci- ence, learning, nor pleasure can seduce them from its pursuit. (38)

In this passage, a triumph of the backhanded compliment, Trollope replaces an American narrative of civil liberty and freedom with one of cultural vacuity.14 Her disingenuous claim of "not being very deep" belies her theory connecting the American "vulgar" pursuit of money with the absence of "art" or "science"

and even "pleasure." Indeed, the absence of cultural distractions suggests the suitability of Americans as economically productive workers and consumers and

12 Trollope mentions her business venture only briefly and in passing, writing "It was no agree- able conviction that greeted my recovery [from illness], that our Cincinnati speculation for my son would in no way answer our expectation" (135). For an account of Trollope's involvement with the Cincinnati Bazaar, see Heineman's Mrs. Trollope, especially chapter 4.

13 Of course, Trollope does tell a story or two about unsavory business dealings. One striking example is her transcription of a conversation with a young Jewish boy named Nick who buys produce and chickens directly from farmers and then sells them in town at a considerable mark-up. Trollope's way of criminalizing Nick, other than anti-Semitically emphasizing his ethnicity, is by exposing that none of his profits go to the support of his mother:

"And do you give the money to your mother?"

"I expect not. "

Was the answer, with another sharp glance of his ugly blue eyes. (97)

14 In one passage, she goes so far as to imply a natural relation between liberty and dissolution:

[The Kentucky flat-boat men] are a most disorderly set of persons, constantly gambling and wran- gling, very seldom sober, and never suffering a night to pass without giving a practical proof of the respect in which they hold the doctrines of equality, and community of property. (19)

This description makes a subtle equivalence between both "doctrines of equality" and "com- munity of property" and "gambling and wrangling," suggesting the illicitness and criminality of all four.

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America as a nation full of speculative opportunity. Both the "beggar" and the

"man of sufficient fortune" are worker bees, worker bees that, to extend the original metaphor, might be well suited to service the queen, even an English one.15 Trollope also here implies an ingenious explanation for her own failed en- trepreneurship - her Englishness, her cultivated taste prevents her from

"unceasing ... industry" and precipitates a need for her to revise her relation to the hive. Lacking returns from her failed financial speculation in America, she turns to the field of cultural production.

Charles Dickens's 1842 travel narrative, American Notes for General Circulation, echoes Frances Trollope in its description of Americans as people with a great fascination for money and commercial enterprise. His characterization, however, more explicitly details the potential risks of economic speculation in a nation thought to embrace and reward a kind of lawlessness. This more tempered nar- rative is most likely informed by increasing English wariness towards transatlan- tic speculative ventures, as well as towards speculation in general. Both Dickens and Anthony Trollope were also seriously concerned with American copyright issues, each advocating strongly for stricter laws in order to profit more fully from American sales of their work.16 Towards the end of American Notes, Dickens sums up his observations of the economic character of Americans as follows:

Another prominent feature [of Americans] is the love of 'smart' dealing, which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust; many a defalcation, public and private; and enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well de- serves a halter- though it has not been without its retributive operation, for this smartness has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a cen- tury. The merits of a broken speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoun- drel, are not gauged by its or his observance of the golden rule . . . but are consid- ered by reference to their smartness. (286)

15 With her Americans as bees analogy, Trollope evokes another made famous early in the eight- eenth century by Bernard Mandeville in his The Fable of the Bees (1714). Mandeville argued that humans were driven by self-interest and that this self-interestedness was to be regarded as beneficial to society (the hive) rather than detrimental. As Hundert explains, Mandeville' s

portrayal of the beehive ... cast a positive light on precisely those values of self-interest and the dominance of the passions which the De la Courts had condemned. The bee had long been a symbol of the orderliness of absolute monarchies, while in England economic writers commonly used the bee to represent Dutch frugality, discipline and commercial success. Mandeville refused these images and associations, concentrating instead on the beehive as a symbol of morally unbridled economic activ- ity, (xxii)

Trollope' s bees are Mandevillian in their single-minded pursuit of money but diverge from that model in that their pursuit is morally corrupt and inimical to culture.

16 It is interesting to consider that in the case of the Trollopes and Dickens, their travel narratives were directly related to explicitly commercial enterprises beyond the publication of these par- ticular texts (Frances Trollope's business, Anthony Trollope's and Dickens's copyright concerns). Cultural production and commerce are in an even more explicit partnership in these instances. For a discussion of Victorian copyright issues, see Nowell-Smith.

ANNETTE VAN | TROLLOPE'S SPECULATIVE AMERICA 85

In this passage, Dickens constructs Americans as a nation of individuals who prefer the art of the deal to ethical integrity - "smart dealing" is the American aesthetic. These are people who are constructed as street-smart rather than intel- ligent, and whose aesthetic is one that values means over ends, appearances over consequences. While this characterization functions as a warning to those who might deal with Americans, i.e., Americans are a risky proposition, it simultane- ously points out a climate uniquely suited to the speculative and the possibility of quick profit. If Americans are none too concerned with "public credit" and

"public resources," it stands to reason that they would be more open to less-than- above-board financial practices. Dickens's Americans are dangerous but market- sawy, and his America, a land of risk-takers replete with possibility.

In its discussion of the relation between economic behavior and cultural capi- tal, Domestic Manners prefigures the central concern of The Way We Live Now.

Trollope contextualizes her travel narrative within a pantheon of diverse texts - novels, plays, classics, and other travel narratives. The opening landscape is described as worthy of being a model for Dante's Bolgia (9). "Back woods dwellers" are compared to Robinson Crusoe (43); a maid is compared to Walter Scott's "Jeanie Deans" (47); an argument is narrated in which Trollope exposes an American's "imperfect" knowledge of Pope (72); no American literature is deemed the equal of Waverley (74); a landscape is described in reference to Shakespeare and the painter Cuyp (82);17 a domestic scene recalls one of Edgeworth's (97); and so on. In referencing so many authors and painters in her narrative, Trollope exhibits the cultural knowledge that she claims most Americans lack, thus positioning herself as better educated and worldlier than those of whom she writes.18 She addresses the text to those who share her back- ground and taste, a readership that would likely be sympathetic to her critiques of America and Americans. In addition, she displays self-consciousness knowledge of her narrative as text, as in the business of fulfilling certain literary and aesthetic conventions. And, as if anticipating the response to Domestic Manners and wanting to preempt skepticism of the accuracy of her observations, Chapter Thirty-One is devoted to her defense of Basil Hall's travel narrative Travels in North America in the years 1827-28, written only a few years earlier and received with great upset by many Americans, in which she claims she has found

"not one exaggerated statement" (278). Even when she feels her descriptive powers fall short, Trollope is able to say whose style she ought to be evoking. She cuts short a description of a village because she admits that she has "not the magic power of my admirable friend, Miss Mitford, to give grace and interest to

17 Ironically, an editor's footnote reveals that the line Trollope quotes from Shakespeare has been misattributed (340).

18 Dickens distances himself from Frances Trollope by arguing that there is no necessary correla- tion between hard work and a lack of literacy. He gives as his example the young female fac- tory workers at Lowell who believe "[i]t is their station to work. And they do work. They labour in these mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably work, and pretty tight work too" (117). These same women engage in a number of cultural activities - a fact that Dickens acknowledges "will startle a large class of readers on this side of the Atlantic"

(some of them presumably readers of Domestic Manners) (116).

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the humblest details" (100). The intertextual quality of Domestic Manners provides the foundation from which Trollope makes her disparaging remarks, yet, in the tradition of conduct books, it also establishes a canonical list of artists and authors with which her readership, both English and American, should want to become more familiar in order to improve their "manners." In this way, she is certainly helping her "admirable friend, Miss Mitford," promoting Mitford's book sales on both sides of the Atlantic.

For the most part, Frances Trollope's America is ugly. Some of the natural landscapes are described as attractive but, generally, cities and buildings are uni- formly inferior to those of Europe. Not only are Americans lacking aesthetic quality in their arts but in all facets of their everyday lives. The exceptions to this rule are actual markets. In Domestic Manners, American markets are the best that the American aesthetic can offer, marrying art to the commercial. Trollope ar- gues, "[pjerhaps the most advantageous feature in Cincinnati is its market, which, for excellence, abundance, and cheapness, can hardly be surpassed in any part of the world." (51). And later, she notes that the market of Philadelphia

is, indeed, the very perfection of a market, the beau ideal of a notable housewife....

The neatness, freshness, and entire absence of every thing disagreeable to sight and smell, must be witnessed to be believed. The stalls were spread with snow-white napkins; flowers and fruit, if not quite of Paris and London perfection, yet bright, fresh, and fragrant. ...I thought the market a beautiful object. (214-15)

Here, the visually appealing markets are advertised as the best that American cities have to offer. They are abundant, cheap, fresh. The Philadelphian market, in particular, is portrayed as a work of art, "a beautiful object," full of color and vibrancy, even if "not quite of Paris and London perfection." This work of art, however, is no still-life; these are commodities that she is listing, all ready for exchange, ready to move.19 The underlying function of claiming the market as America's highest art form is to define America by its commerce, by its market aptitude and skill in economic exchange. Americans are sellers and /or buyers only with no lives outside of the market.20

As I have argued, American lack of "refinement" or "graces" neither dimin- ishes the nation as an arena for generating transnational capital nor prevents its citizens from being desirable consumers (318). Quite the opposite, in fact, as lack of time or even desire for leisure renders Americans more suited to making money and desperately in need of English cultural exports. As a travel

19 Of Philadelphia, Dickens writes that the city exerted a mysterious transformation over him. As he was walking around, "[m]y hair shrunk into a sleek short crop, my hands folded themselves upon the breast of their own calm accord, and thoughts of taking lodgings in Mark Lane over against the Market place, and of making a large fortune by speculations in corn, came over me involuntarily" (145). Dickens is obviously making a sardonic commentary on the preoccupa- tion of Philadelphians with commerce here, claiming that to merely walk the streets of Philadelphia was to become obsessed with speculation.

20 The perception of America as a market culture persists today with the narrativization of the US as the seat of global capitalism and the hegemony of the New York Stock Exchange as a global economic indicator.

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narrative /commodity itself, Domestic Manners becomes wildly successful, becom- ing a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, saving Trollope and her family from debt. The text's impressive sales also function to shore up its own story about the American appetite for English culture, that America is a nation without adequate cultural production of its own. Trollope ends Domestic Manners precisely with this observation, declaring "if refinement once creeps in among them, if they once learn to cling to the graces, the honours, the chivalry of life, then we shall say farewell to American equality, and welcome to European fellowship one of the finest countries on the earth" (318). The inference that it is from European shores that this "chivalry" shall rather secretly ("creeps") spread its civilizing influence is clear. This conclusion reveals Trollope's investment in continuing discursive, socio-economic, and political intercourse between America and England, with the construction of America as endemically market-ready and ripe for speculation.21

Culture and Commerce

Domestic Manners argues for the incompatibility of commercial obsession with good culture and uses America as the exemplar of what happens to culture if commerce is privileged. The Way We Live Now revisits this argument but, cru- cially, stages it in London with the figure of Lady Carbury. The change of loca- tion is surprising given Anthony Trollope's repetition of his mother's criticisms of America a decade earlier in North America. In that text, Trollope characterizes Americans as speculative but distinguishes between philosophical and material speculation, Americans being understood as deficient in the former. He writes,

The mind of the Englishman has more imagination, but that of the American more incision. The American is a great observer, but he observes things material rather than things social or picturesque. He is a constant and ready speculator; but all speculations, even those which come of philosophy, are with him more or less mate- rial. (203)

This passage makes clear that, for Trollope, American talents for speculation do not spill over into other, philosophical or artistic, areas. And of American's appe- tite for literature, he goes on to claim that they are "the most conspicuous

21 Harriet Martineau's roughly contemporaneous How to Observe. Morals and Manners (published 1838, drafted approximately 1834), provides a neat coda to Domestic Manners by elaborating a theory that a nation's cultural production is symptomatic of that nation's development as well as its form of government. America is described as "without a literature" (145). A nation

"without a literature" or government or culture is a blank page, ready to be written upon in regards to national and individual interests without ethical consideration. The notion of the blank space to be filled in accordance with Europeans needs is, of course, a familiar trope in co- lonial and imperial discourse. Its presence here, however, is worth noting for giving the alibi for cultural, specifically literary, dissemination alongside of the usual economic exploitation.

For an analysis of Martineau's travel literature, see Frawley.

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consumers" of books "[b]ut of what class are the books that are so read?" (494).22 Trollope's restaging of an aesthetic and social crisis of value in London rather than America in The Way We Live Now would seem to indicate an acknowledge- ment that speculation, with its unsavory elements, had already penetrated deep into the heart of the England. And, in response to this undesired penetration, the novel suggests that one might fruitfully return speculation to its more natural environment, America. The two texts, thus, combine in producing a narrative wherein America functions as both origin and future of speculative activity, re- casting transatlantic relations so as to posit the younger rather than older nation as colonizer.

Trollope complicates his earlier position further by ascribing "big picture"

powers of observation to the Americans Fisker and Hurtle (which would seem- ingly require the faculty of imagination), and by enacting a crisis of cultural value in the figure of Englishwoman Lady Carbury. Lady Carbury, who was ini- tially to have been Trollope's "chief character," spends the novel desperately try- ing to promote herself as an author (Sutherland xiii). She is described "as a woman devoted to Literature, always spelling the word with a big L," who is quickly exposed as a bad writer of factually-challenged histories (1: 1). That she has trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction is apparent early on and throughout: she uses Shakespeare to write about Cleopatra; a reviewer skewers her, speaking "of the historical facts which had been misquoted, misdated, or misrepresentation, as being familiar in all of their bearings to every schoolboy of twelve years old" (1:96). Her skill at misrepresentation is further highlighted by her flirtations to procure good reviews for her work, and is exacerbated by her additional proclivity for willful misreading - she turns a decided blind eye to her son Felix's problematic activities, always giving him the benefit of the doubt de- spite all evidence to the contrary.

It is evident that Lady Carbury's enthusiastic and determined production of bad and /or false culture is a significant part of the novel's indictment of "the way we live now." As such, it connects directly to the novel's critique of specula- tion. Lady Carbury's misrepresentations, scheming self-interest, and self-deceit ally her with Melmotte, who is a master of misrepresentation, self-interest, and deception - the difference between the two seems to be only on the order of

22 The narrative linking American civil rights to an over-zealous preoccupation with money per- sists also. Eerily repeating his mother's earlier assertions, Trollope ascribes religiosity to the American pursuit of the dollar and links American greed to democratic government. New York, for Trollope, is a billboard for this confluence of desires:

Free institutions, general education, and the ascendancy of dollars are the words written on every paving-stone along Fifth Avenue, down Broadway, and up Wall Street Every man can vote, and values the privilege. Every man can read, and uses the privilege. Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night. (191)

The structure of this passage constructs a familiar hierarchy: reading is used, voting is valued, but the dollar is worshipped. Money trumps culture at every turn and money-making is guarded more fiercely than even enfranchisement.

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magnitude.23 Indeed, Lady Carbury reveals how thoroughly the speculative now inhabits all aspects of English culture. Her crimes, her manipulation of her re- views and subsequent exposure of the dishonesty of reviewers, all reinforce the novel's anxiety around the loss of value precipitated by a speculative economy.

And, this cultural crisis is obviously no longer just an American, a peripheral, problem - it is a fact of late-Victorian life.

That a character like Melmotte can reinvent himself is disturbing.24 That a bad book can receive good reviews is unacceptable. In North America, Trollope rein- forces how much speculation disrupts notions of moral character and worth. Re- ferring to a resident of Fifth Avenue, Trollope writes "there are rumours about him and the Cuban slave-trade; but my informant by no means knows that they are true" (214). 25 The speculative "rumours" make it impossible to accurately know or sum up the New Yorker. This tendency for Americans to fail to signify their material and social worth adequately is a serious problem. Trollope com- plains that,

7 have never walked down Fifth Avenue without thinking of money. I have never walked there with a companion without talking of it. I fancy that every man there, in order to maintain the spirit of the place, should bear on his forehead a label stat- ing how many dollars he is worth, and that every label should be expected to assert a falsehood. (194)

Increased social mobility and the depreciations and appreciations of individuals' financial status within a speculative economy posed a real challenge to Victori- ans.26 In a culture that tended to equate respectability with social status, where knowing where someone stood or what someone had (which pretty much amounted to the same thing) was paramount, the shifting values engendered by

23 The difference is also gendered. Trollope is able to resolve Lady Carbury's problems by folding her firmly back into the domestic sphere through marriage. This suggests that part of her transgression may also have been her initial insistence on a public career and refusal to re- marry.

24 In Dr Wortle's School (1879), Trollope revisits this issue of the precariousness of maintaining one's good name in a speculative economy. Speculation, in this case, takes the form of gossip.

Acknowledging the power of gossip, Dr. Wortle observes, "Credit ... is a matter so subtle in its essence, that, as it may be obtained almost without reason, so, without reason, may it be made to melt away" (45). For an explication of gossip as "verbal speculation/' see Spacks (172).

25 That this rich New Yorker should be tainted with the illicitness of the slave trade is relevant - it criminalizes him but also reveals spectacular success from risky, speculative behavior. And, in deeming this Fifth Avenue resident American "aristocracy," Trollope implies a lack of necessary correspondence between social power and influence and good character for Americans (214).

26 In her work on bankruptcy and the Victorian novel, Weiss argues that "[f]or those writers who were experiencing the uneasiness of life in a period of transition, bankruptcy emerged as a natural metaphor for the spiritual crisis which had produced economic change" (175). It seems clear that this logic also informs Victorian representations of speculation.

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speculation presented a threat to the notion of value itself.27 Trollope's "fancy"

that every New Yorker would lie about his "worth" is thus revealing in the way it signals anxiety about being unable to determine anyone's worth, especially in such a center of high finance.

Trollope's language, too, implies that it is the place itself, New York, which is unreliable, contaminated. It is "the spirit of the place" that lends itself to false- hood. The speculative spirit extends beyond the confines of New York, however, when Trollope accuses the American West of being the breeding ground for speculation and, by implication, cheating. At one point, he asks "[I]s it possible that a frontier should be scrupulous and at the same time successful?" (131). He continues, "[I]t seems to be the recognized rule of commerce in the Far West that men shall go into the world's markets prepared to cheat and to be cheated.... It may be said that out there in the western States, men agree to play the cheating game" (150). Not only are Westerners cheaters in North America but cheating is also a part of the social contract, naturalized as the correct and only way to en- gage in business dealings.

That speculation is, for Trollope, endemic to the American frontier becomes clear in the figure of Monroe P. Jones, western frontier speculator, a fictional creation in a non-fictional text, which Trollope uses to exemplify frontier spirit and character.28 Monroe P. Jones suffers loss and gain with little fanfare; he has eyes only for the game of speculation:

That Monroe P. Jones will encounter ruin is almost matter of course; but then he is none the worse for being ruined. It hardly makes him unhappy. He is greedy of dollars with a terrible covetousness; but he is greedy in order that he may speculate more widely.... As for his children he has no desire of leaving them money. Let the girls marry. And for the boys,- for them it will be good to begin again as he began.

(127)

The "greedy" Jones is only interested in money for the sake of speculation and, in a familiar refrain, his sin is reflected by his decided lack of family values. No matter that Trollope will actually agree with Jones later on in the text when he admonishes his readers "[t]he best right a woman has is the right to a husband"

(265). Although Trollope particularly hails New Yorkers and frontier dwellers as incurable speculators, it is not a stretch to read this as a pronouncement upon the character of Americans in general.29

27 Dickens also indicates the difficulty of knowing who and what Americans are or do in his story about a young man, Jem, who has recently emigrated from England to America. Jem sees America as offering so many opportunities for employment that he cannot make up his mind what he should do and, in consequence, is not yet doing anything - "At present, "

Jem writes his Mancunian friend, "7 haven't made up my mind whether to be a carpenter- or a tailor" (266) 8 For an analysis of how both Trollopes fictionalize Americans in their novels, see Heineman's

Three Victorians in the New World, especially the chapter on "Trollope's Americans."

29 The American faculty for capital accumulation is so evident to Trollope that he ends his de- scription of New York with a lengthy passage that compares that city to London and wonders whether New York could ever "equal London in population" even if New York was

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Despite the frontiersman's ethical limitations, Trollope's representation of Jones is of a man appropriate to the milieu in which he operates.30 This milieu is marked as frontier both spatially and temporally. Conrad argues that Trollope's America is a projection of the future and, as such, poses a challenge to novelistic narrative (narrative in the business of constructing history). He claims,

Trollope does acknowledge that America makes difficulties for the novelistic imagi- nation because it is a phenomenon of a new kind, a country which has reversed the logic of historical succession .... In America, history is not what has happened al- ready (since nothing has) but what will happen in a millennial future. The thrust of inquiry is predictive, not retrospective. America has altered time. (44)

Conrad's argument here suggests that Trollope's America is a story yet to be written, a story unknown. It is, thus, not only a place in which rampant economic speculation takes place but a space to be speculated upon and about. This logic accounts for The Way We Live Now's strategic geography, or how America frames the narrative. In a temporal paradox, speculators and speculation originate from the American frontier and it is to that frontier that they must return - a journey back to the future. The novel thus imagines a deferral of speculation to the future, with the future spatially ceded to America. In order to preserve English history, Trollope must divest from its future.

Monroe P. Jones is the obvious model for The Way We Live Now's Hamilton K.

Fisker - a "covetous" frontier type who lives for the game of speculation.

Nevertheless, Fisker is crucially ascribed some sense of honor, and he cares that

"his bond should be good." Trollope elaborates,

[n]ot only unscrupulous himself, but he had a thorough contempt for scruples in others. According to his theory of life, nine hundred and ninety-nine men were ob- scure because of their scruples, whilst the thousandth man predominated and cropped up into the splendour of commercial wealth because he was free from such bondage. He had his own theories, too, as to commercial honesty. That which he had promised to do he would do, if it was within his power. He was anxious that his bond should be good, and his word equally so. (2: 394)

Although Fisker's honesty is qualified ("if it was within his power"), it is evident that this American has a sense of honor and a concern for his good name. With these qualities, Fisker is neither Jones nor Melmotte. He is a kinder, gentler

admittedly "one of the ruling commercial cities of the world" (218). Even though Trollope ac- knowledges the potential ascendancy of New York in the global economy, he takes care to value other characteristics - population and culture, for instance - that can make the argument for continuing English dominance.

30 Heineman claims that 'Trollope realized that the essential traits of the westerners were neces- sary for survival in these rougher parts of the new country. He would never have selected a frontier life for himself or his children, but he conceived for the western man a genuine and perceptive admiration" (Three Victorians 221).

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speculator - contemptuous of scruples yet not entirely untrustworthy. He is a man for the future.

Frontier Futures

Frontiers are fraught spaces, new worlds. While they signify freedom they are also spaces of heightened risk. They are immensely attractive yet dangerous, rep- resenting both opportunity and threat to the hegemonic nation-state. In his discussion of the Marxian theory of the relation between capitalism and colonial- ism, David Harvey posits the ambivalent necessity of the frontier to capitalism:

If laborers can return to a genuinely unalienated life through migration to some frontier, then capitalist control over labor supply is undermined. Marx accepts the idea that higher wages and better conditions of life could exist in the United States precisely because of the laborer's access to a relatively open frontier. The survival of capitalism depends therefore upon the recreation of capitalist relations of private property and the associated power to appropriate the labor of others, even and espe- cially at the open frontier. (52-53)

The "unalienated" frontier poses a threat to capitalism because it frees labor from state control, and the nation-state has a clear interest in exerting regulatory con- trol over the frontier space. When this control can no longer be enacted through colonial relations as in the case of England's relation to America, it is nonetheless in the "home" nation's interest to encourage capitalist expansion and develop- ment in frontier nations even if the effect is increased economic competition.31 As Harvey puts it, "[p]rimitive accumulation at the frontier is just as important as primitive accumulation at home" because "[o]nly in this way can the capitalist class as a whole ensure control over both the demand for and the supply of labor power on a global scale" (59). The frontier consequently holds the key to the fu- ture of home and the emergence of global capitalism.

Harvey's theory of the frontier implicates The Way We Live Now in a national project more sinister than that of simple nostalgia. Trollope's longing for an England uncorrupted, an old-fashioned England, performs a nostalgia that re- writes history for its own purposes. It does so particularly in its suggestion that speculation comes from without rather than from within. From this perspective, England becomes America's victim- a story that elides England's real investment in the economic benefits of the frontier. The novel's giving over of the future to the American frontier is thus not necessarily a retreat into isolationism

31 Harvey describes the frontier as a space of "capitalism's internal contradictions" (53):

[Ufthe new region is to absorb the surpluses from the home country effectively, then it must be al- lowed to develop freely into a full-fledged capitalist economy that is in turn bound to produce its own surpluses and so enter into competition with the home base. If however, the new region develops in a constrained and dependent way, then competition with the home base is held in check but the rate of expansion is insufficient to absorb the burgeoning surpluses at home. (57)

In other words, even if the frontier emerges as an economic competitor, its development as a capitalist space is still critical to the economy of the "home base."