This chapter takes up the literary reverberations of two types of photography – still and moving – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The invention and popularization of still photography in the nineteenth century posed a challenge to all existing forms of representation, visual or otherwise: Whereas earlier forms offered necessarily imperfect, inexact, and approximate renderings of depicted subjects, the detached “camera eye” promised total transparency, accuracy, and objectivity. With the invention of silent film and, later, talkies, the camera extended its dominion of objective representation into further dimensions and modalities. Carver reads work by William Empson, William James, W. H. Auden and others to argue that cameras served “not only to make the visible world familiar, as early inventors hoped they might do, but also to make it strange.”

One of Ford’s heart patients in The Good Soldier (1915), a Mr Hurlbird, has a habit of handing out ‘cool California oranges’ to everyone he meets. Ford offers little explanation for this behaviour beyond the clue that Hurlbird is a ‘violent Democrat’ – a phrase that would perhaps have conjured in the minds of contemporary readers the endeavours of William Jennings Bryan and other economic pragmatists to introduce a version of what we would now call ‘quantitative easing’: namely, an agreement from the US central bank to print money according to demand. This chapter proposes that British attitudes towards monetary value in the first two decades of the twentieth century were beginning to give way to the influence of American pragmatists like Bryan. Keynes writes in an essay of 1923: ‘The fluctuations in the value of money since 1914 have been on a scale so great as to constitute … one of the most significant events in the economic history of the world.’ Monetary value was beginning to change its character from a non-negotiable essence to an instrument of policy. This chapter traces the imprint of this incipient British economic pragmatism in the work of Keynes, Conrad, and Ford.