Since the 1980s, scholars have made the case for examining nineteenth-century culture—particularly literary output—through the lens of economics. In Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, two luminaries in the field of Victorian studies, Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, have collected contributions from leading thinkers that push New Economic Criticism in new and exciting directions.

Spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this volume adopts an inclusive, global view of the cultural effects of economics and exchange. Contributors use the concept of abstraction to show how economic thought and concerns around money permeated all aspects of nineteenth-century culture, from the language of wills to arguments around the social purpose of art.

The characteristics of investment and speculation; the fraught symbolic and practical meanings of paper money to the Victorians; the shifting value of goods, services, and ideas; the evolving legal conceptualizations of artistic ownership—all of these, contributors argue, are essential to understanding nineteenth-century culture in Britain and beyond.

Contributors: Daniel Bivona, Suzanne Daly, Jennifer Hayward, Aeron Hunt, Roy Kreitner, Kathryn Pratt Russell, Cordelia Smith, and Marlene Tromp.

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  Abstracting Economics
  Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp
• Part ONE: Broad Abstractions
  Character, Professional Expertise, and Nature
  • Chapter One: Born to the Business
    Heredity, Ability, and Commercial Character in Late Victorian Britain
    Aeron Hunt
  • Chapter Two: Shifting the Ground of Monetary Politics
    The Case of the 1870s
    Roy Kreitner
  • Chapter Three: The Comparative Advantages of Survival
    Darwin’s Origin, Competition, and the Economy of Nature
    Daniel Bivona
• Part TWO: Particular Abstractions
  Economics and Culture
  • Chapter Four: Art Unions and the Changing Face of Victorian Gambling
    Cordelia Smith
  • Chapter Five: El Metálico Lord
    Money and Mythmaking in Thomas Cochrane’s 1859 Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination
    Jennifer Hayward
  • Chapter Six: From Cooperation to Concentration
    Socialism, Salvationism, and the “Indian Beggar”
    Suzanne Daly
  • Chapter Seven: Walter Scott’s Two Nations and the State of the Textile Industry in Britain
    Kathryn Pratt Russell
  • Chapter Eight: Antidomestic
    The Afterlife of Wills and the Politics of Foreign Investment, 1850–85
    Marlene Tromp
• Contributors
• Index