William North’s The City of the Jugglers and the “Conventional Necessity” of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Republished in 2008 by University of South Carolina Press after over 150 years of bibliographic oblivion and reconnected in 2009 to currents of academic debate through a dedicated issue of Victorian Newsletter, William North's The City of Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls: A Romance of Golden  Age (1850) significantly troubles generic limits of nineteenth-century novel. That is, in Butlerian terms, it parodically represents many normative elements of dominant literary form of its day, and in so doing reveals that form's fundamentally constructed, arbitrary, even grotesque character. On a first reading, City may appear to belong alongside Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875), and other works concerned with capitalist speculation and England's expanding credit economy. Recently, Tamara Wagner's Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction has dramatically expanded scope of such financial fiction well beyond such critical chestnuts, tracing Victorian novelists' fascination with improvident investment across silver fork, social problem, domestic, sensational, high realist, and detective subgenres. Even within rapidly diversifying portfolio of economic criticism managed by Wagner, Gail Turley Houston, Martha Woodmansee, and Mark Osteen, and others, however. North's text appears as a complex multi-asset security blue chips. Unlike its best-known contemporaries--in which collapse of Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company allows for climactic exposure and domestic exorcism of selfishness, or fall of Melmotte's empire of credit paves way for a conservative retrenchment of standards of gentlemanliness--City follows fraud for its own sake, and not as a figure for other characterological or social concerns. In thus reversing the typical emphasis, moving formally marginal material--the financial... plots--to center of narrative, North's fiction may well be unique novels of economic (Lamouria 18; Stem 50). (1) According to its modern editor, Patrick Scott, City is even more than that, however: It is a book that, taken seriously, could reconfigure views about of 1840s (Scott, Introducing 14). (2) The text's capacity to challenge our understanding of period fiction, in fact, grows out of its central fixation on London's financial juggle. By making financial speculation its sign rather than its signifier, City internalizes at level of form notion of unfettered free trade that it repudiates. That is, its critique of market comes to look like market: monstrously inclusive, with none of aesthetic protections normally afforded to either text or reader by generic convention. North's own relationship to period conventions, whether societal or literary, was a vexed one at best. As reconstructed by Allan Life and Page Life, North's life, in years leading up to publication of City, seems grounded in his long-running rebellion against patriarchal authority, punctuated by unwise professional choices, imprisonment for debt, a possible illegitimate child, and increasingly paranoid exchanges with his contemporaries. North's literary production over this same period manifests a similar disdain for polite standards. In 1844, at age of nineteen, he published Anti-Coningsby, a heavy-handed parody of Benjamin Disraeli's first Young England novel most notable for its opportunistic anti-Semitism. The next year, North released The Imposter, a conventional three-decker in form whose characters, including self-proclaimed bastard son of Lord Byron, rather surprisingly speak and act according to phrenological organ that each represents. Praised, despite its flaws, for its entire originality...a new theme--a new style by The Critic (576), novel is, according to Life and Life, among most fascinating might-have-beens of Victorian literature (68). …