Studying English Literature in Context Critical Readings

Beginning with Great Expectations, this essay explores the relationship between money and representation in nineteenth-century literature through two major Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Gissing. It argues that money is both ubiquitous and complex in their writing, and that it simultaneously provokes and resists attempts at literary representation. Money is first shown to be central to the complex of guilt and desire that drives Great Expectations. The discussion then turns to Mr Merdle and Mr Lorry, bankers who appear in Dickens’s novels Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities respectively. They are read as representing two different sides of money, the public/fantastical and the private/intimate, which cannot be effectively combined in a single character. The final part of the essay considers Gissing’s response to Dickens, arguing that Gissing attempts, in novels such as The Nether World and The Odd Women, to correct what he saw as Dickens’s incomplete realism through a renewed focus on the harsh realities of economic life. The limited horizons of Gissing’s characters are so overwhelming, however, that they dominate his narrative vision, meaning the very attention to money that is supposed to make Gissing’s fiction more realistic also restricts the representative range of his writing.