PREFACE. Having for many years paid special attention to the commercial and economic stratum of the English language, which offers a wide and as yet only partly investigated object of study, we were naturally led in the direction of commercial economy, when seeking a subject for a literary thesis. Literature and commercial economy are two domains of human thought that lie as far apart as possible, and it is no doubt chiefly due to this circumstance that literary work has been so seldom investigated up to the present time by commercial economists. Authors on commercial subjects, like Hartley Withers, illustrating their statements by quotations from literature, are very scarce indeed. Another cause of the scarcity of work of this nature may be due to the fact that works of fiction have, generally speaking, little to teach to the student of economics. Men of letters, like all other artists, will as a rule feel little drawn towards commercial and industrial life and its materialistic problems, which to them must always be more or less uncongenial. The result is that their knowledge of the doings of those classes of society commonly denoted as the business community, is frequently of a superficial and limited, not to say defective nature. Nevertheless, we hope to show in the following pages that works of fiction offer a surprisingly large number of details that gain immensely in importance and significance, when looked at from what may be called the commercio-economic point of view. A reader with some knowledge of economics and business life will be able to fully understand the exact or deeper sense of many a passage in novels of older writers, that must necessarily escape the notice of the general run of readers, owing to the fact that such passages refer to conditions in society that have entirely disappeared and been forgotten. Thus it is no exaggeration to say that books like The Christmas Carol and Hard Times can never be fully understood and appreciated by readers who have not previously acquired some knowledge of the social and economic conditions of England about the middle of last century. But if the reader of novels may profit by the study of commercial economy, students of this science may in their turn derive some benefit from literature. Every novelist has to work out his conception of the particular work of art that he wishes to produce, by using large masses of details from every-day life, and amidst all these traits and incidents, forming together the milieu of his novel, there will often be a large number of facts and observations throwing an unexpected light upon the problems and conditions with which the commercial economist has been rendered familiar by the study of his subject. The exact influence of these on the average contemporary member of society, however, may be more strikingly brought home to him in a fictitious story than in his more serious and truthful text-books. Thus it is that the student of commerce and industry may profit by the study of literature in the same manner as an historian who will often gain a clearer and more intimate conception of some special period or person by the reading of historical novels written by competent authors, however inaccurately actual facts may in both cases sometimes be represented in such works of fiction. It thus becomes clear that both the student of literature and the commercial economist may to some extent benefit each by taking cognizance of the work done in the other's field. That the two domains of human thought, however far they may lie apart, are at present felt to be more or less closely allied in some respects is also proved by the new branch of secondary education the Government of this country has recently introduced in the shape of the so-called "litterair-economische scholen." For the purposes of the present thesis we have restricted our investigations to what is commonly called the Early Victorian period, and to which we have assigned the same limits as some other writers have fixed before, namely the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century.1 In the choice of this particular period we have been led by the following considerations. In the first place the two decades mentioned may be called the period of the birth of modern England, not only economically, but also to a smaller degree, politically. Those twenty years, which witnessed the final change from an agrarian to an industrial state, and from a more or less feudal form of government and administration to a modern democratic form, present one of the most interesting fields for the study of economists. Moreover, there is probably no other period in English history in which the sayings and doings of the business classes were so forcibly thrust upon the notice of the general public. This was due first to the struggle of the rising trading classes for political power and freedom in the rapidly industrialized state, which aroused a good deal of political controversy and passion, while in the second place it was brought about by the slavery and social misery attendant upon the newly established factory system. No less important is the second quarter of the nineteenth century from a literary point of view, for it witnessed not only the birth of modern industrial England but also that of the modern novel. Fiction had rarely before been represented in English literature by great names like those of Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, Dickens and Thackeray. At the end of the period it had risen to the rank of serious literature, for which apologies were no longer needed.2 We have not extended our investigations to the drama, which at that time had not yet become a means of propagating social doctrines. Though it became a form of popular amusement again, as in Elizabethan times, its aims were restricted to mere entertainment, by either inspiring terror, or giving amusement both in highflown and sentimental language. It did not treat in a serious manner of the great social and economic problems of the times. Neither have we paid attention to the aspects of business life shown by Early Victorian poetry. Though in many instances poets were stirred by the practical affairs of life — Dean Winstay advised the tailor-poet Alton Locke to choose only practical subjects for 1) L. Cazamian, Le Roman Social en Angleterre, Introduction. Paris, 1904. 2) Though not needed, they were nevertheless still made occasionally, for instance by Mrs. Marsh in the Preface to Emilia Wyndham. |