Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815-1914 (Financial History)

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.