My apologies in advance for the lack of page numbers- my e-text doesn’t have any!

Reading Chapter III of The Mill on the Floss, I was struck by the use of the language of education to convey credit, particularly that of Mr. Stelling. Mr. Tulliver wants his son Tom to go to a school where he can learn a skill set more appropriate for a middle-class career, and seeks the advice of his middle-class friend Mr. Riley. Mr. Riley realizes the capability of education to raise one’s social credit, and recommends the Clergyman Mr. Stelling, recognizing that an education from a person of this profession will add to Tom’s social credit. The lower-class Mr. Tulliver seems to have difficulty understanding this, and is concerned that a Parson would “be almost too high-learnt to bring up a lad to be a man o’business” such as Tom, while expressing that Clergymen possess “a sort o’ learning as lay mostly out of sight”. While Mr. Tulliver recognizes that Clergymen have great learning, he is unable to identify this knowledge exactly and labels it as “out of sight”, yet the Clergyman’s educational credit leads Mr. Tulliver to assume it exists. However, Mr. Tulliver does not initially see this form of credit as being applicable to Tom’s, who will be going into ‘business’, which Mr. Riley refutes by stating: “a clergyman is a gentleman by profession and education and besides that, he has the knowledge that will ground a boy, and prepare him for entering on any career with credit”, implying that educational credit is required in order to start a career that generates credit in itself.

Towards the end of the chapter, we learn that Mr. Riley is also forming assumptions about Mr. Stelling’s qualifications, as he does not actually know him. However, Mr. Riley is able to recommend him based on other people of credit, stating that “he believed Mr. Stelling to be an excellent classic, for Gadsby had said so, and Gadsby’s first cousin was an Oxford tutor; which was better ground for the belief even than his own immediate observation would have been, for though Mr. Riley had received a tincture of the classics at the great Mudport Free School, and had a sense of understanding Latin generally, his comprehension of any particular Latin was not ready”. Mr. Riley takes on a role similar to Roxana at this moment, whose own account is not reliable but is validated by other creditable sources, and can therefore be taken as truth.

Interestingly, Mr. Riley’s assumption of Mr. Stelling’s credit, though he knows it is not founded in personal experience, convinces him of Mr. Stelling’s merits. By the end of the discussion, Mr. Riley has decided, “that if Mr. Tulliver had in the end declined to send Tom to Stelling, Mr. Riley would have thought his ‘friend of the old school’ a thoroughly pig-headed fellow”, expressing both his newfound conviction of Mr. Stelling’s qualifications and of his own class-based credit over Mr. Tulliver. It is also based in the credit of other people that Mr. Riley is able to make assumptions about Mr. Stelling’s economic credit, including the amount Mr. Stelling would charge for his time and services, and about what Mr. Stelling is qualified to teach. Though “he knew very little of that [Stelling’s] M.A. and his acquirements”, Mr. Riley still feels confident enough to tell Mr. Tulliver that “when you get a thoroughly educated man, like Stelling, he’s at no loss to take up any branch of instruction.” This passage demonstrates a moment where education becomes synonymous with personal credit and economic credit in the text, which, if Tom goes on to be educated by Mr. Stelling, might be a continuing theme in the novel.

Any thoughts about the relation between education and credit, or anything to add about this passage?

We spoke about the advances Austen made in character dialogue a little bit last Thursday and I wanted to take this opportunity to comment on what was being said. A moment that interested me appears on pages 185-186 and features Miss Bates talking to Emma about Frank Churchill repairing Mrs Bates’ glasses. In this passage, Miss Bates invites Emma over to her house, reports to Emma her earlier conversation with Frank Churchill, and includes many hyphenated breaks in the dialogue. What interests me about this moment is the different techniques Austen incorporates within one set of quotation marks: there is the initial layer of Miss Bates’ direct speech to Emma, followed be her indirect report of what Frank Churchill had told her, and followed by the implied questions Emma asks her, signified by the hyphenated breaks, and their subsequent answer. Thinking in terms of novelization, this technique of dialogue features two relationships based on confidence: between Emma and Miss Bates and between the reader and the novel. In the former, Emma has to trust Miss Bates in what Frank Churchill has said to her, and have confidence that what she said is true. In the latter, the reader has to fill in the implied questions Emma asks Miss Bates so that they match Miss Bates’ answers. By incorporating these two relationships within her dialogue, Austen succeeds in including the readers themselves into the dialogue, therefore increasing the self-awareness of the amount of confidence between the reader and the novel.

I was wondering what anyone else thought about the dialogue in Emma, and if there is a way to compare it to Roxana? Is there a way to read the dialogue of this novel more economically?

A connection I have made between Roxanna and Emma, is that the time period in which both novels were written coincide with distinct periods of war. To this day war seems to have a profound effect on the economy, and more specifically the ability to save a nation from economic doom, or send it into depression. The beginning of World War II marked a dramatic change in the American work force. Women were entering into predominantly male positions as a many American males were drafted and sent off to war. Comparing times in which unemployment rates in America peaked to the start and end of the WWII, a very clear negative correlation can be seen. Times of war are marked with a decrease in the unemployment rates, while peace times seem to spark a sharp spike. More recently the DotCom crash of 2000 – 2002, and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001 are also closely matched, with war being the solution to an economic down turn.

Connecting this pattern to Roxanna and Emma, and the various historical events that took place during the period in which they were written, the discourse surrounding the economy is not entirely immune from the perils of war. Miles very deliberately drew attention to this by highlighting the time period in which Jane Austen both began and completed the novel Emma. Times of war seem to question the stability of currency and shake the trust people have in the economy, and standards of currency as well.

I am curious if anyone else has anything to offer on the idea of war, money, and the world economy?

Adding to the discussion we had today in class about the Gold Standard and Ideology, I found an interesting blog post which is a contemporary address to the movement that it would be a good idea to reintroduce the Gold Standard.

Gold and Ideology

I thought it was especially interesting that the author ends his post with a quote from Samuel Johnson about marriage, and relating that, specifically the notion of a failed marriage, to the idiocy of reintroducing the Gold Standard. There it is! Marriage as a traditionally viewed rock solid social institution, and the Gold Standard as something constant that we can put our faith into! We talked about marriage with Roxana, and we will discuss it revolving around ideology, the Gold Standard and Emma. How perfect is that?!

I frequently listen to CBC podcasts, namely Ideas and The Current. This recent production titled “It’s The Economists, Stupid” sheds some light on the ironies of our current economic system.

I found one point particularly engaging: That economists, as our main source of information on the market, create instability through their projections. However, these predictions are based primarily on feelings, judgments and best guesses. Instead of being transparent about this, they state these predictions as fact. This can result in mass panic and economic instability, even economic crisis. However, we look to these same economists for solutions to economic crises as they occur. This questions is particularly pertinent in our discussion of credit.

It’s definitely worth a listen.

My question to you is:

Will transparency create stability (we won’t worry as much about the predictions of economists) or will it create mass panic (if economists don’t know for sure, can anyone guarantee anything)?

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/it-s-the-economists-stupid-1.3219471

By now we all should be well into – if not finished – Austen’s Emma. We have also spent quite a bit of time thinking about the state of the British monetary system and the controversies surrounding it in Austen’s time.  A number of you have commented already on the way the language of wealth, value, rank, and so on permeate Austen’s language. On Thursday I suggested that one of the ways Austen’s novel engages with the broader philosophical debate on money is through her use of Free Indirect Discourse (style). While the bullion debates tried to foreclose or resolve the “embarrassing” question of what, exactly, guaranteed the value of money, Austen’s use of FID provides a way for us to see “behind” the subjective points of view of her main character and toward some more “objective” standard of value (namely, her narrator). But can we trust in the narrator’s controlling presence, this “narrative institution”? Or, to put the question another way, can we trust the “machine” of Austen’s prose in the same way that we trust institutions like the Bank of England?

More specifically, what do you all make of the way Austen imagines Emma’s relationship with and manipulation of Harriet? If Walter Scott was right, and Harriet circulates through the novel “like a bank bill” what does this say about the way Austen herself manipulates monetary themes and issues?

What other ways might we see Austen engaging with the broader issues of the bullion debate? How, for instance, might we compare Austen’s novel with Defoe’s? How does the concern with marriage, class (or social rank), with landscape or nationhood that we find in both novels allow us to speak about the way capitalism had progressed by the turn of the 19th century?

Here we are in the middle of week 2 and well into the first novel on the course, Defoe’s Roxana. In class on Tuesday we discussed our first impressions of the novel, its style, and oddly “stream of consciousness” form. Now that you’ve had a bit more time to get further into the novel, is anything changing about this style? What is your sense of Roxana herself as a character or a speaker? She is of course clearly obsessed by money. How does this obsession make itself apparent? Why is she so obsessed?

One more question to get you thinking: why don’t the male characters have any names?

Feel free to answer using the comments function. Or write a new post with your own questions or reflections on what we’re reading right now!

No literary genre has been shaped so directly and so pervasively by market capitalism as the novel.  In this course, we will consider how novels comment on matters of economy, money, and finance and how, in turn, changes in the economy influence the novel.  Reading a selection of fiction from the eighteenth century to the present alongside essays on money and monetary economics from the same periods, we will examine ideas of representation, value, character, and power common to both fiction and economics. We will think about the way fiction supplements and challenges the exchange practices of the market and also about how alternative modes of exchange—personal, communal, sexual—are represented in monetary and fictional literature.

Note: no background in economics is necessary to take and enjoy this course. However, we will be doing quite a bit of reading in the history of monetary economics to supplement our readings of the novels.  Students should be open to interdisciplinary methods of research and modes of reading.