...by the Yorkshire clothier, I was paid to a wool-stapler; he paid me to a Nottingham weaver; the weaver changed me with the landlord at the Bull in Bishopsgate-street; the landlord paid me to the one-eyed Norwich warehouse-keeper; from him I went to a gingerbread-baker for gingerbread sent by the waggon into the country. By Timothy Treaclebread the gingerbread-baker, I was paid to Mrs. Coppernose, a rich brazier’s widow, for rent: all this was performed in less than three hours. The duce fetch these men of business, says I to myself, they give very little rest, either to money or bank-notes.
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Thomas Bridges' The Adventures of a Banknote was published in London in two volumes in 1770. Two further volumes followed in 1771 and a new edition of all four volumes was printed in 1772.
The premise of the adventures is a simple one. This anthropomorphised bank-note, on its route of exchange, becomes an acute observer testifying to more than the restless urgency of business. In the course of ‘his’ travels (the excitement early in life of being doubled up carefully and put into the bosom of a young wife clearly marks the masculinity of this particular promissory note), Bridges’ bank-note comments on the social, political and literary scene, records the material trivia of everyday life, and eavesdrops on the conversations, ribald tales, racist stories and sexual liaisons of his respective owners and their friends and acquaintances.
The father (‘the person that deposits cash for a bank-note may properly be called its father’) of Bridges’ bank-note storyteller is a poet. On receiving thirty guineas from a publisher for a manuscript of verses, the poet pays his rent and his debts at the chandlers, at the tripe-shop (for cow-heel and pig’s liver), at the pot-house (for pennyworths of beer) and at the bakers. Having twenty-one pounds, six shillings and ninepence three farthings left over, and realising that such a sum is insufficient for the purchase of a knighthood, the poet decides that the best way to raise his dignity is to send twenty pounds to the bank for a bank-note payable to Timothy Taggrhime Esq.
After the Bank has dubb’d you an esquire, no man will dare to say a word against it; you may then boldly add the title esquire to your name the very next work you publish...The fathers of the generality of bank-notes are noblemen’s stewards, placemen’s gentlemen, city userers, knowing stock-jobbers, bankers’ clerks, and bishops’ toll-gatherers: from such roots what branches can you expect? But my father was another kind of an animal to what any of these creatures were: he was the first of his profession that ever entered the Bank to carry money, and I verily believe he will be the last.
Thomas Bridges was the son of a Hull physician. For a time he was a wine merchant and a partner in the firm of Sell, Bridges and Blunt in Hull. When the firm collapsed in 1759 as a result of the failure of its banking activities, he took up his pen and flourished briefly as a minor dramatist and populist writer, producing a comic opera, humorous verse pieces and burlesque poems. His ‘travestie’ of Homer’s Iliad, written under the pseudonym ‘Caustic Barebones’, was promoted as being ‘adapted to the capacity of honest English Roast Beef and Pudding Eaters’.
Bridges promised as many as twenty volumes of his bank-note’s adventures but mercifully only four volumes appeared in print. Whether Bridges or his publisher or the public initially tired of these tales and overheard conversations from all walks of life is unclear. The format was not an original one. A short tale, Adventures of a Halfpenny, had been printed in the twice weekly London periodical The Adventurer in April 1753. In 1760 the first volumes were published of Chrysal; or The Adventures of a Guinea,
Wherin are exhibited views of several striking Scenes, WITH Curious and interesting ANECDOTES of the most Noted Persons in every Rank of Life, whose Hands it passed through IN AMERICA, ENGLAND, HOLLAND, GERMANY and PORTUGAL.
Written by Charles Johnstone, a not very successful Irish lawyer, two further volumes followed in 1765. Chrysal - the name is derived from the Greek word for gold - is a guinea coin. Chrysal is both material currency and a metaphysical representation of the spirit of the gold from which it was minted. It has psychic qualities, ‘a power of entering into the hearts of the immediate possessors of our bodies, and there reading all the secrets of their lives.’ Johnstone’s coin is not only a recorder of commercial transactions and pecuniary ambitions but a motivator for them: ‘when the mighty spirit of a large mass of gold takes possession of the human heart, it influences all its actions, and overpowers, or banishes, the weaker impulse of those immaterial, unessential notions called virtues.’
The eighteenth-century money-as-story-teller format did not end with Bridges. Helenus Scott’s The Adventures of a Rupee, Wherin are interspersed various anecdotes Asiatic and European, published in 1782, added a further flavour of international commerce to the genre.
Whereas the novelist Sir Walter Scott viewed stories told through the passage of coins from person to person as ‘an ingenious medium for moral satire’, Deidre Lynch, in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998), described them as ‘fictions of social circulation’. She analysed these eighteenth century narratives within the context of a society trying to come to terms with the increasing importance of market exchange, and commercial activity generally, in structuring human relationships and everyday social interactions. In her view, giving literary voice and character to coins and banknotes - personalising and anthropomorphising money - was one of a number of ways in which men and women in the eighteenth century sought to understand their increasingly commercial society. It served in part to humanise ‘an economic system that, in an era marked by greater financial risk-taking in business and estate management, by an increasing dependence on credit arrangements, and by more and more bankruptcies, made English men and women uneasy.’
Sound familiar?
ReplyDeleteThe Adventures of a Bank-Note has a number of key features of the ‘picaresque’ English novels of the eighteenth century. There is a travelling story-teller who provides the link between a series of otherwise disconnected incidents. The incidents themselves, or stories within the story, provide an opportunity for the display of a collection of ‘larger-than-life’ characters who people public places in colourful ways but have no interior fictitious lives. Adventures, rather than character development, provide the rationale for the story line. Indeed, Bridges’ bank-note makes a direct reference to Laurence Sterne’s picaresque novel, Tristram Shandy, which was published in nine volumes in the years from 1759 to 1767. He anticipates travelling with a shopkeeper to France but the shopkeeper, ‘understanding from his companions that bank-notes must be paid to loss in France’, has him exchanged for cash: ‘[I] was disappointed in my expectation of crossing the British Channel; but, on second thoughts, I am very glad I was disappointed, for I should have given a very poor account of France after Tristram Shandy.’