GIFTS AND INTERESTS: JOHN HALIFAX GENTLEMAN AND THE PURITY OF BUSINESS

This essay examines the rhetorical and narrative strategies Dinah Mulock Craik adopts in John Halifax in order to come to terms with a profoundly ambivalent Victorian perception of the process of commodification, the lure of profit and the social status of tradesmen, businessmen, and entrepreneurs. The analysis focuses on the interplay of gifts and interests that constitutes an important feature of this narrative of economic success. First, I briefly rehearse some Victorian arguments on the vulgarity of commercial and industrial modernity by looking at business manuals that evoke the ethic of the gift in order to legitimate money-making activities. I then address the issue of the “double truth” of the gift (Bourdieu). This issue is crucial to an understanding of how Craik’s novel responds to the historical and ideological process whereby instrumental rationality comes to be naturalized. Finally I focus on the interaction between different “regimes of value” the novel. The text acknowledges the “subjective” truth of the gift (the habitus of generosity and altruism), especially through the narrator’s voice. Yet, the plot never fails to reward the pursuit of self-interest with symbolic and material gains. In other words, “sentimentality” and “economism,” the Scylla and Charybdis of gift theory, are represented simultaneously in John Halifax. My analysis emphasizes the latter because economism was not a dominant or unquestioned paradigm in Craik’s cultural template. That her novel articulates a story in which the pursuit of self-interest is not stigmatized or considered vulgar is significant in historical terms. Equally relevant is the emphasis on disinterestedness that marks the representation of John Halifax’s upward mobility. Ultimately, the narrative distils the innocence or purity of business by a continuous re-negotiation of the balance between giving and taking, between the virtue of disinterestedness and the logic of maximization Keywords: gift theory, business, John Halifax, self-interes

"The mind washes its hand in a basin":Walter Bagehot Literary Essays and Impure Criticism

Bagehot’s literary essays provide fertile ground for the exploration of mid-Victorian negotiations with notions of aesthetic impurity. Bagehot looked at the increasing democratization of culture and the changing habits of readers with more excitement than apprehension. His critical perspective was predicated not on an elitist form of detachment from the unrefined philosophies of the commercial classes, but on a kind of respectful proximity to the practicalities affecting the life of what he called the «transacting and trading multitude». In order to bring literature to business, Bagehot brought business into literature. His stance lacks purity and solemnity: standards of value imported from the business sphere co-habit with more traditional notions of aesthetic excellence; a mixture of high-brow and middle-brow concerns inspires his assessments of literary works. As this article demonstrates, Bagehot’s criticism thrives on an impure and sometimes awkward combination of aesthetic and business values.

'Not a mere tangential outbreak':gender, feminism and cultural heritage

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of recent contributions to the \u201cgender and heritage\u201d debate, focusing in particular on suggestions and recommendations about how to expand and further advance the gender agenda in the heritage field of research. The first section considers the arguments put forward in a series of articles that evaluate the level of knowledge and development achieved in the heritage field, exposing shortcomings and impediments. The second section takes a closer look at the dialogue between feminist theory and museum studies, arguing that feminist interventions in the museum sector, which have a long history dating back to the 1970s, are predicated on a fruitful intermingling of theoretical insights and practical strategies. The final part offers a synthesis of gender-aware proposals and methodological models elaborated, and in some cases tested, in the literature under review

The Disappearing Act: Heritage Making in Charlotte Riddell's Novels

This article examines the strategies of heritage making in Riddell\u2019s City novels, popular in the 19th century, but little known today. Drawing on late Victorian debates about the preservation of the past and its material remains, the article focuses on the relationship between fictional and non-fictional elements, in Riddell\u2019s urban realism, which frequently pivots on heritage concerns. The main argument is twofold: 1) heritage discourse provides an apt frame for the self-validation of the author\u2019s daring narrative choices; 2) Riddell\u2019s understanding of heritage changes as her vision of capitalism darkens, culminating in a vocal denunciation of the destructive forces at work in the very idea of progress. Her novels generate heritage value in the very gesture of recording the many disappearing acts mournfully witnessed by the narrator

Speculation and Social Progress. Financial and Narrative Bubbles in Charles Lever's Davenport Dunn

Victorian novels of finance have garnered much critical attention in recent years. Yet Lever\u2019s Davenport Dunn has been largely overlooked. This essay investigates Lever\u2019s imaginative engagement with finance capitalism, casting new light on his unique take on the appeal of speculation in an Irish context. Set both on the Continent and in Ireland, Davenport Dunn deviates significantly from the standardised tales of financial felony that circulated widely in Victorian print culture. Attending closely to the novel\u2019s formal features and narrative strategies, this essay argues that the logic of financial speculation is internalised on the formal level. The novel accords a degree of legitimacy to financial speculation by multiplying lines of divisions between gambling and speculation and by shifting attention to the role of a female character, who stands to win from her commitment to speculative schemes. Notable for its realistic particularity, Lever\u2019s representation of the Irish speculator and his entourage probes the limits of moralistic understandings of finance in ways that have hitherto been unacknowledged

Descriptions and evaluations: The Victorian man of business revisited

This paper addresses the twin issues of “description” and “evaluation” with reference to Victorian discussions of the business ideal. The first section offers a brief overview of novelistic portrayals of businessmen, notable for their villainy. Scholars have repeatedly commented on the marked anti-business bias, the denigration of business and trade, that is an integral part of the critique of capitalism articulated in many a canonical Victorian novel. Did the same animosity permeate discussions of business in the periodical press? How was the businessman described and evaluated in the pages of Victorian periodicals? My investigation is an experiment in distant or vertical reading: using as database the ProQuest digital archive of British periodicals, I analyze the occurrences of three text segments (“man of business”, “business habits” and “business life”) looking for repeated associations of words and recurrent phraseology. The final section discusses the tentative results of my investigation: although clusters of positive evaluations can be detected, the structural limits of this experiment call for some caution

Good practices of social participation in cultural heritage

The REACH repository of good practices related to social participation in cultural heritage is a fundamental component of the Social Platform established by the REACH project. Carried out with the contribution of several project partners, this collection currently comprises 110 records of European and extra European participatory activities in the field of cultural heritage, with an emphasis on small-scale, localised interventions, but also including examples of larger collaborative projects and global or distributed online initiatives. This document provides a critical reflection on the results obtained in this mapping exercise carried out during the first year of the project’s life. Its aim is threefold: 1) to explain in detail the methodology adopted for the collection of good practices; 2) to offer a quantitative reading of the data gathered in the repository so far; 3) to analyse the most recurrent participatory approaches and public engagement strategies that emerge from the records included in the REACH dataset. The REACH repository has a global geographic scope and a multifocal thematic orientation. Due to this expansive reach, a variety of initiatives are recorded which capture the nuances of participation in action. Both quantitative and qualitative assessments of these records are included in this deliverable. While Chapter 2 is devoted to a detailed presentation of the overall approach, accounting for methodological choices, Chapter 3 contains the core of the analysis. It highlights five emerging patterns of participatory approaches, identifying areas of commonality that characterise a sizable proportion of the collected records. These areas are de fined in relation to specific groups of beneficiaries (minorities, indigenous communities and women) or in relation to modalities of participation (the role of the arts, digital platforms and archaeology). The results of the activities charted in this document can be summarised as follows: The REACH repository is vast but uneven: some countries are very well represented, others are underrepresented or absent. To address this imbalance more records will have to be created, while others are streamlined. However, even in its present shape, the REACH dataset provides illustrative examples of social participation that can be a source of inspiration to many. Through an attentive scrutiny of the participatory activities mapped in the repository, it was possible to identify some common tendencies that reveal how participation is implemented in a fairly broad selection of cases. The dataset of good practices has been published as an Open Data collection at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3415123, under the Free Culture Creative Commons License “AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International”, as a catalogue of resources that can support and stimulate other people’s work.European Commission: REACH - Re-designing access to CH for a wider participation in preservation, (re)use and management ofEuropean culture (769827

Speculation and Social Progress: Financial and Narrative Bubbles in Charles Lever’s Davenport Dunn

Victorian novels of finance have garnered much critical attention in recent years. Yet Lever’s Davenport Dunn (1859) has been largely overlooked. This essay investigates Lever’s imaginative engagement with finance capitalism, casting new light on his unique take on the appeal of speculation in an Irish context. Set both on the Continent and in Ireland, Davenport Dunn deviates significantly from the standardised tales of financial felony that circulated widely in Victorian print culture. Attending closely to the novel’s formal features and narrative strategies, this essay argues that the logic of financial speculation is internalised on the formal level. The novel accords a degree of legitimacy to financial speculation by multiplying lines of divisions between gambling and speculation and by shifting attention to the role of a female character, who stands to win from her commitment to speculative schemes. Notable for its realistic particularity, Lever’s representation of the Irish speculator and his entourage probes the limits of moralistic understandings of finance in ways that have hitherto been unacknowledged