Description
This book explores the role of the City of London in British culture during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The author challenges traditional views of the City as either corrupt or successful, and instead uses novels as a source of socio-economic representation. By comparing different novels, the book shows how cultural shifts can be seen through the perspective of the general population. It also highlights the potential of novels as historical documentation.
This is an engaging socio-cultural study of the place occupied by the City of London within British cultural life during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Michie interrogates the dialectic nature of two traditional views of the City as a global financial centre: London as a theatre of corruption, fraud and scandal; and as a place of unbridled success and power for the ambitious elite. Rather than rely on the opinion of orthodox figures contemporaneous to the period under examination, Michie recognises the novel as a pertinent source of socio-economic representation. By comparing both literary and popular novels at different times, this work illustrates how the evidence for cultural shifts can rest upon the generality of the population. Marrying literary and economic analysis, Guilty Money foregrounds the limitless possibilities of the novel as a work of historical documentation.
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