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Book Review
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
| Margot C. Finn. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914. (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, number 1.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 362. $70.00.
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| High personal indebtedness is a feature of almost all advanced consumer societies, and in England it has been an endemic problem at least since the later seventeenth century. Margot C. Finn's new study examines debt, credit, and society in the almost 175 years during which England passed through the financial, consumer, and industrial revolutions, consolidated its global empire, and turned into a modern state. Finn makes a powerful case that the credit nexus constituted one of the main mechanisms by which capitalism remade not just consumer relations but political and legal institutions, social life, marriage, and personal identity in the early modern and modern period. |
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Credit and debt preoccupied novelists, became an obsession for memoirists, spawned new institutions (most notably new trade associations and political lobbies), altered the legal system, affected questions of prison reform, influenced notions of gender (especially of married women's property rights), and, in general, occupied a central place in the lives of English people in past centuries. Finn's book conveys all this with panache, pathos, scores of fascinating stories, and some well-chosen illustrations. But her overarching argument is more subtle, and, at least initially, somewhat counterintuitive. It is that historians of Britain have been too swift to link market relations to the arrival of "rational" and individualistic economic actors and interests. Historically, the credit nexus was, she argues, a much more complex, hybrid set of processes than liberal economists imagine, one in which personal relations were key, status considerations such as class and gender played significant roles, and traditional notions of morality, personal worth, reciprocity, and paternalism hung on well into the twentieth century. The argument is compelling, her evidence is strong, and one is left with little doubt that she is right. |
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Part one of the book deals with debt and credit in fiction and autobiography and contains subtle discussions of Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and numerous others, as well as diarists and memoirists both famous and obscure. Although Finn is by no means the first to explore the theme of debt and English literature, her account is especially valuable because of her unparalleled understanding of the way debt and imprisonment for debt actually functioned in the period about which she writes. Indeed, her account of the ways judicial reform, shifting class relations, and new expectations about gender intersected with indebtedness over the course of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adds very significantly to the historical record as well as to one's readings of many of the classics of English literature. And she has unearthed some truly remarkable autobiographies, such as the tortured memoirs of the artist and insolvent debtor Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846), who was ultimately driven to suicide at least in part by his credit woes. |
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