Sunday 3 January 2010

Beware of the stockbrokers!



How easy it is to miss social context in old novels. I ran recently into Lord Henry's comment in the 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray:

With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.

The straightforward reading of this is that it's a sneer from the moneyed classes at those who have to make money by hands-on financial wheeling and dealing. However, it turns out to be deeper than that: there was good reason to consider 19th century stockbrokers uncivilised. There's an interesting passage in Joseph Kenny Meadows' 1841 Heads of the people: or, Portraits of the English, revealing how the Stock Exchange, open only to members, had a short way with strangers.

Should any one be curious enough to wish to see either these Bulls or these Bears, let him by no means enter their den in Capel Court, Bartholomew Lane. Lack of sedentary employment renders them sportive and frolicsome, and the prevailing humour pervades both old and young. They are all wags of the first water — practical Joe Millers. If kicking a stranger's hat about the Exchange were pleasant badinage, or unceremoniously shouldering the intruder, were agreeable banter, they night pass for wits. As it is, they are great in physical repartee; full of animal spirits — manual Sheridans.
- Heads of the people: or, Portraits of the English, Joseph Kenny Meadows, Carey & Hart, 1841

"Work hard and play hard" applied even then, clearly.
- Ray

3 comments:

  1. > How easy it is to miss social
    > context in old novels.
    > ... ... ...
    > The straightforward reading of
    > this is that it's a sneer from
    > the moneyed classes at those who
    > have to make money by hands-on
    > financial wheeling and dealing.

    Or, conversely, readers now might interpret it from a current context − bankers, estate agents, etc, as hate figures because they make their juggling the fates of others?

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  2. Even as I wrote it, I thought "The Author is Dead" - but there are so few windows into the past that I'm all for opening them where possible. And I admit I saw it on Yahoo! Answers, which makes me want to kick against its ethos of zero enquiry into context of quotations.

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  3. I absolutely agree – wasn't criticising!

    I just saw, from my angle, a different fragment of the view through the window :-)

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