The Problem of Profit: Finance and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

By Michael Genovese

Attacks against the pursuit of profit in eighteenth-century Britain have been largely read as reactions against market activity in general or as critiques of financial innovation.  In  The Problem of Profit, however, Michael Genovese contends that such rejections of profit derive not from a distaste for moneymaking itself but from a distaste for individualism.

In the aftermath of the late seventeenth-century Financial Revolution, literature linked the concept of sympathy to the public-minded economic ideals of the past to resist the rising individualism of capitalism. This study places literary works at the center of eighteenth-century debates about how to harmonize exchanges of feeling and exchanges of finance, highlighting representations of communitarian, affective profit-making in georgic poetry as well as in the work of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Laurence Sterne, among others. Investigating commercial treatises, novels, poetry, periodicals, and philosophy, Genovese argues that authors conjured alternatives to private accumulation that might counter the isolating tendencies of impersonal exchange.

However, even as emotional language and economic language arose together in the 1700s, the attendant aspiration to form a communitarian economy in Britain was not fulfilled. By recovering an approach to moneymaking that failed to thrive,  The Problem of Profit argues for the relevance of an unfamiliar narrative of capitalistic thought to today’s anxiety over the discord between personal ambition and public good.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813942902

Book preview

The Problem of Profit

The Problem of Profit

Finance and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Michael Genovese

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2019

ISBN 978-0-8139-4289-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4290-2 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Detail from The Arrest at the Compter, a Song, (1749?). (Courtesy of Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction · The Problem of Profit

1 · People and Profits

2 · Organic Commerce, Georgic Sympathy

3 · Feeling Paper; or, Giving Credit to Periodicals

4 · The Character of Self-Interest in David Simple and Amelia

5 · Writing Off Sensibility in Hume, Johnson, and Sterne

Coda · Finance without Feeling

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

The Problem of Profit began as a very different dissertation at the University of Virginia, and it would not have found its way as a book without the unconditional support and guidance of those I first met years ago. Their professional encouragement and constant belief in my work have been true gifts. I thank J. Paul Hunter, John O’Brien, Alison Booth, and the late Gregory Colomb, who were there from the beginning, pushing for precision and thoroughness and always generous with their time and rigorous in their readings. I also am thankful for the mentorship that Patricia Meyer Spacks, Cynthia Wall, and Jennifer Wicke provided to a young graduate student in his early years. Rivka Swenson and Chloe Wigston Smith have inspired me as eighteenth-century scholars and as friends. I could not have asked for better readers and friends than Omaar Hena, Ellen Ledoux, Erich Nunn, David Sigler, and Eric Song, all of whom contributed in ways that always improved my writing and thinking. Finally, I am deeply grateful for the advice, comments, and assurance that Jill Rappoport gave me over the years. The success of this project owes much to her.

Many institutions provided fellowship and/or residential support for my writing and research. The University of Virginia and the University of Kentucky generously funded travel and research during my time at both institutions, and I am additionally grateful to Kentucky for the year of junior leave it provided. The resources of the Chawton House Library, the Newberry Library, the William Andrews Clark Library, and the Huntington Library were essential to my archival digging. Additionally, I am grateful for support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded a summer of intense writing and a week of research at the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. The research staff at these libraries were immensely helpful, and thanks go to them all.

While teaching at Villanova University and during my career at the University of Kentucky, I have benefited from the mentoring and generosity of many colleagues. Evan Radcliffe, Seth Koven, and members of the Delaware Valley British Studies seminar offered advice at a key point. And at Kentucky I have been fortunate to receive the encouragement and guidance of a wonderful community of scholars: special thanks to Jonathan Allison, Frederick Bengtsson, Stefan Bird-Pollan, Jeffory Clymer, Andy Doolen, Matthew Giancarlo, Peter Kalliney, Joyce Macdonald, Ellen Rosenman, Emily Shortslef, Michelle Sizemore, Michael Trask, Nazera Wright, and Lisa Zunshine for all their help. This book is the outcome of innumerable conversations with these generous colleagues, and their many suggestions never failed to improve it.

Years ago, while participating in the Eighteenth-Century Reading Group at the University of Pennsylvania, I remarked that profit didn’t have a history: either someone was making money or they weren’t, and that was that. I’m happy that I turned out to be wrong. The friends I made during my time in Philadelphia—David Alff, Toni Bowers, Gabriel Cervantes, Joseph Drury, Anna Foy, Michael Gamer, Suvir Kaul, Dahlia Porter, John Richetti, and Jared Richman—were instrumental in sharpening my ideas through many conversations and chapter readings. I thank them all for their careful feedback on my work and for their unshaking commitment to honest criticism that only made it better.

I had the privilege to present early parts of my work on David Hume at UCLA’s Eighteenth-Century Working Group, and I would like to thank the members of that group—especially Sarah Kareem, Maximillian Novak, and Felicity Nussbaum—for their thoughtful comments and general advice on the project as a whole. Daniel Carey, Daniel Gross, Simon Stern, and Carl Wennerlind were valuable interlocutors over e-mail, and I am grateful for their responses to queries and for the insights they provided on my work.

My friends and colleagues in eighteenth-century studies have been sources of encouragement, knowledge, and inspiration throughout my career. Whether as panel or conference organizers, copanelists, or just fellow fans (or at least scholars!) of the period, they have provided endless opportunities for me to refine my thoughts and bounce ideas around over the course of many, many meals and gatherings. For all of the invaluable and challenging feedback on my work, I thank Misty Anderson, Liz Bellamy, Dwight Codr, Darryl Domingo, David Fairer, Nicole Horejsi, Catherine Ingrassia, Jacob Sider Jost, Jess Keiser, Paul Kelleher, Kathleen Lubey, Deidre Lynch, Jessica Richard, Courtney Weiss Smith, Vivasvan Soni, Howard Weinbrot, Brett Wilson, and Eugenia Zuroski, along with the many others I have already mentioned above. In addition to having my work honed over the years at conferences of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, I was able to present my work at the Columbia Eighteenth-Century Seminar’s 50th Anniversary meeting and at a meeting of the Johnson Society of the Central Region. I am thankful to have had such a rich network of scholars to engage with over the years.

Part of chapter 2 first appeared as An Organic Commerce: Sociable Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century Georgic in Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.2, pp. 197–221 (Copyright © 2013 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies). Part of chapter 4 first appeared as "‘A Mixture of Bad in All’: The Character of Self-Interest in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple" in The Age of Johnson 22 (2012): 207–31. I am grateful to both journals for permission to reprint portions of those articles here. I would also like to thank the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Walters Art Museum for permissions to reproduce images. Angie Hogan, my editor at the University of Virginia Press, guided this manuscript on its way to becoming a book, and I am immensely grateful for all her work, as well as for the extensive improvements suggested by the anonymous reviewers. I could not have asked for more thorough, careful readers.

Finally, I thank my parents, Frank and Susan Genovese, for loving me and standing with me over these many years, and for always believing in this project. And I give special thanks to Brandy Anderson for her wisdom, love, and confidence. Always encouraging me and never settling for sloppy prose or vague thinking, she helped me carry this book to its end.

I dedicate this book to my sons, Isaac, Max, and Ezra, and my stepdaughter, Marlo. Their playfulness and laughter made the heaviest days lighter and reminded me that there is joy in not knowing what all that typing is about.

Introduction

The Problem of Profit

To buy and sell, be the Employment of every man, more or less; and the Common People, for the most part, depend upon it for their daily subsistence.

—Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade (1691)

Lastly, What Profit to the Undertakers? For we must allow them to Gain, and that considerably, or no Man wou’d undertake such a Work.

—Daniel Defoe, Essays upon Several Projects (1702)

Dudley North and Daniel Defoe, merchant and tradesman respectively, affirm what remains a largely accepted premise about eighteenth-century British commerce: that its purpose was to make a person rich. As debatably virtuous as profit might have been, viewing Common People as buyers and sellers was symptomatic of a growing acceptance that a private person was justified in pursuing his or her own advantage. Lionized in Thomas Tusser’s sixteenth-century advice that Good husbandrie baggeth, / up gold and follow[s] profit earnestlie, profit was the reason to work the land, just as it was the reason to venture into the merchant world.¹ Josiah Child, director of the East India Company in the late 1600s, joins these economic spheres by anchoring profitable . . . Traffick and Commerce in the Cultivation of the Earth and the Labour of the Husbandman.² Making money held Britain together, linking land, city, and sea under mankind’s allowance to Gain. By 1776, Adam Smith had canonized the value of profit making as such in his statement that every man lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant—that is, one who exchanges in excess of mere survival.³

This idea that man lives by trading and trades to make money celebrated the commercial individual, and if he or she turned mercenary, it was taken as the inevitable result of profit seeking.⁴ That approach, however, was contested, notably not just by those hostile to market activity but also by writers who were adamant about the legitimacy of profit. The private person who saw him- or herself as the sole originator of profits was depicted as dangerous, disruptive, and even delusional. The problem posed when supporters of profit making disapproved of the individualism behind it is the topic of this book.

Throughout the following chapters, I argue that eighteenth-century literature purposefully constructed a communitarian version of profit, one that countered the axiom that a tradesperson’s motivation should be self-enrichment. To this end, periodical essays, poems, and novels combined the value of monetary accumulation with that of sympathetic association to divorce financial gain from the individual as self-owner unburdened by social obligation. Holding together the seemingly contradictory ways in which people affectively and financially interacted, this literature treated the autonomous self not as the starting point for the pursuit of profit but as an obstruction to it. It defied the capitalistic call of possessive self-interest by incorporating overt and subtle allusions to profit to imagine how pursuing it entailed rejecting the private, liberal self.⁵ In its stead, novels, poems, and essays envisioned a financial and affective intersubjectivity—a constant sharing of money and feeling—that could sustain social groups larger than the family but smaller than the nation.⁶ Produced from literature that dared to see profit as what it could have been, such groups were modern in how they crossed traditional boundaries but nostalgic in how they invoked fading practices of trust and trade.

This sociable vision of profit is, of course, not what triumphed. Instead, a belief in people as free and individually responsible creatures—as Joyce Appleby puts it—arose that located the motivation for gain in private desire: eighteenth-century Britons followed the money as self-sufficient atoms constructing a social order . . . according to their self-interest.⁷ What this rise cannot account for is how the emerging ideology that supported what John Richetti generalizes as the individual’s potential for growth and achievement was found wanting in ways that called for critique.⁸ Central to this critique was the literary attempt to promote profit making by devaluing—not upholding—the idea of an individual as . . . proprietor of his own person or capacities.⁹

As I argue below, writers across genres—essayists, poets, novelists—justified profit not as the fulfillment of self-interest but as a means of solidifying relations forged from sentiments, or feeling. In this literary history, the self as interpersonal construction, the relational self as Jerrold Seigel puts it, dominates in opposition to John Locke’s principium individuationis, which, when ascribed to identity, treats the self as that which can consider itself as itself, is determined . . . by identity of consciousness, and establishes "the Work of [a man’s] hands . . . [as] properly his."¹⁰ However, the greater worth granted to interpersonal selfhood was not just a neutral shift in perspective. When eighteenth-century literature invokes profit as socially beneficial, it purposefully undermines the value of the individualistic self without dismissing all pursuits of money.¹¹ This literary mode presented what I call sociable profit as a critique of the commercial present in ways that were both nostalgic and progressive. To unite the financial and the sentimental, it imagined relationships whose productive power was not located in individualized components or isolated persons. As I maintain throughout The Problem of Profit, this literary mode and the economy it opposes to possessive individualism are best characterized as georgic.

While this term is usually reserved for agricultural poetry, aligning it with that poetry’s structuring of economic community and rethinking georgic as a social, sympathetic approach to profit allows us to identify the affiliations between this verse and other genres. Treatises, periodical essays, and novels fall into this expanded georgic mode to the extent that they address economic activity without assuming the worth or inevitability of monetized individualism.¹² Georgic profit—or accumulation that is both affective and monetary—develops from a historical prioritizing of the public over the private. Seventeenth-century authors presented thriving as a matter of common profit, and eighteenth-century georgic uses this precedent for social gain to imagine how strangers might be bound into an organic whole. United in their nostalgia for a past in which making money necessitated extending affect toward others, the works I discuss transform the material parts of profit—labor, credit, debt, trade, and bullion itself—into agents of sociable community.

Whether they historically existed in practice or not, the communal economies evoked in eighteenth-century nostalgia arise as critical alternatives to an economic order that increasingly prioritized private financial surplus.¹³ For the period’s literature did not take the dominance of this capitalistic goal as a given, nor did it only symbolically channel the economic conditions of its time or just unconsciously articulate the contradictions of economic history.¹⁴ Georgic works actively take positions against habits that may have come to constitute modernity but were not universally found tolerable, and they do so to refute, not expose, history. By entangling finance with feeling, they reimagine how commercial growth might spark buyers and sellers to both seek profit and resist their most individualistically wayward tendencies.¹⁵

While early commercial and agricultural tracts hint at sentimental components of profit, the most complex reflections on profit as a problem of feeling lie in the speculative efforts of essays, poems, and novels. Profit is sometimes raised explicitly in a work, but more often it is referenced obliquely through descriptions of commerce or commentary about trade or money. Moments in shops or at markets, discussions of credit and debt, and advice on productivity imply profit seeking, and contemporary pamphlets and treatises about finance give further evidence as to how much readers attended to the topic of gain. In the following chapters, I show how sentimental sociability and financial transactions were inescapably entangled and how even when one part of this combination is difficult to identify, hints of finance or of feeling invariably appear (sometimes directly, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes analogically) alongside the other. The terms that I use—georgic sympathy, georgic profit, affective finance, sentimental literacy—were not in play in the 1700s, but I draw these concepts from a wide range of writing in the period that imagined profit as a force that expanded community. This literary imagination rarely appears as a declaration of profit’s social value. Authors instead depict how everyday success in borrowing, laboring, buying, and trading required that profit be respected as a sentimental, social endeavor. What makes these presentations seem naïve or even unbelievable today is the modern notion that profit is directed by the individual, emotionless in his or her desire for gain.

Even Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) does not escape the contemporary understanding that affect was pervasive in financial pursuits. Crusoe, the economic individual par excellence in literary history, is not an obvious starting point for investigating the communitarian values that would marginalize him. Karl Marx, after all, famously picks him as the hero of self-created wealth who obscures social relations of production and reduces intersubjectivity to exchange values.¹⁶ The individualistic nature of his productivity does not, however, comfortably carry over to his handling of monetary surplus. His response to profit upon returning home is in fact a symptom of the unease that surrounded newfound wealth and autonomy. To come to terms with his windfall, Crusoe must face his estrangement from traditional, sociable trade practices.

Ultimately, he barely acknowledges that sociability, and he never accepts it. Yet his struggle reveals the problem of taking ownership of surplus. Crusoe admittedly works best as a counterexample to the communitarian economics I highlight in the following chapters, but here I aim to introduce how traces of feeling remain relevant even to this individualistic profit seeker. Although Crusoe eventually asserts his autonomy, he still powerfully experiences the affective response to gain that other texts, in contrast, promote as a socially necessary quality of moneymaking.

Profit in Robinson Crusoe is menacing, a curious claim for a novel long implicated in the rise of the primacy of individual economic advantage (as Ian Watt put it) by an author who generally approves of trade as tolerable insofar as ’tis Profitable.¹⁷ Even if, as Maximillian Novak points out, Defoe admired the merchant, but not the capitalist or even the tradesman who made excessive profits, his novels still present exciting fantasies of private fortunes gained through investment, management, speculation, and adventure.¹⁸ Crusoe’s fortune accrues despite his absence from his Brazilian landholdings, but his individual productivity on the island seemingly justifies private profits by metonymically transferring the group labor of distant others (undoubtedly, mostly slaves) to one man.¹⁹ It is impossible to express here the Flutterings of my very heart, Crusoe states, when I found all my Wealth about me.²⁰ The novel problematically rewards solitary work with the proceeds of a multinational, transatlantic trade network, thereby allowing a first-person perspective (my . . . I . . . my . . . me) to substitute for the work of many.

However, Crusoe’s fluttering heart suggests disquiet with this substitution. Having returned to Europe rich, he reacts to affluence not with enthusiasm but with alarm: I had now a great Charge upon me, and my Business was how to secure it. . . . I could not yet pitch upon one, to whom I durst commit the Gross of my Stock . . . ; and this greatly perplex’d me (RC, 240–41). That great Charge—his material burden—is synonymous with his accumulated annual Profits (RC, 240). He experiences these gains as a difficult weight, which contrasts with the familiar opposition between surplus and expense whereby the former is meant to bear the Charge of the latter (as a near-contemporary merchant put it).²¹ That Crusoe’s colonial adventure has exceeded its costs should invigorate him; instead, he construes new assets as worrisome liabilities.

On its face, his is a financial dilemma: without access to a banking infrastructure or merchant contacts, Crusoe cannot determine where or with whom to leave his money. But his reaction to profit suggests an uncalculated and more immediate source of unease: I turned pale, and grew sick; and had not [the Portuguese Captain] run and fetch’d me a Cordial, I believe the sudden Surprize of joy had overset Nature, and I had dy’d upon the Spot. The next paragraph reaffirms the mortal danger: I verily believe, if it had not been eas’d by a Vent given in that Manner [letting blood] . . . , I should have dy’d (RC, 239). His body experiences abrupt agitation and relief; neither the illness nor the cure has anything to do with financial details. Rationalized as a crisis of banking only later, profit—as welcome as it might be—first registers as an emotional shock that threatens to make Crusoe’s gains irrelevant.²² They overpower him merely by becoming his.

Profit’s involvement with the passions reveals how vulnerable Crusoe is to sensibility, or the body’s physical and often passively registered expression of feeling.²³ Not immediately a spur for rational consideration, profit instead draws out a refined sensitivity in Crusoe. As the dissenting minister Benjamin Grosvenor had described in 1716, one cannot command such emotion, for sudden Flushes of Passion and Surprise cause the blood and Spirits to rush violently thro’ these most slender Passages that are finer than the slenderest Threads of a Cobweb.²⁴ Crusoe’s Surprize of joy—a feeling theorized at the time to be the Spirits moving more briskly and exciting a greater Heat through all the Members—emphasizes his sensibility as his body reacts automatically to the pleasurable suddenness of his wealth.²⁵ He is perplex’d at first not by banking but by feeling, and he cannot control his prerational, affective response to financial gain. The problem with profit is revealed to be not an issue of finance but of conflicted sentiments that Crusoe barely survives.

This pain derives from the isolation with which Crusoe continues to identify. Believing that he alone deserved to be "Master, all on a Sudden, of above 5000 l. Sterling," he separates himself from the producers of his profits (RC, 240). The novel does not even make him a capitalist seizing surplus value from workers but transforms him—metonymically—into producer, owner, and reaper all in one; his solitary labor is the story behind his wealth. Neither Friday nor the other castaways who share the island partake in these gains: when money is at stake, Crusoe stands alone.²⁶ Such economic segregation is insidious and mirrors his private experience of affect, the Flutterings of [his] very Heart (RC, 239). Both versions of autonomy suggest that individualism causes insecurity and even pain. Whether he is holding close his emotions or his finances, he does not benefit.

The entangling of affect with financial gain vanishes in Robinson Crusoe as Crusoe solidifies his independence: I was now to consider which Way to steer my Course next (RC, 240). But his self-assertiveness does not erase the traces of anxiety the novel betrays over the value of private profit. In the example of Crusoe, individualized profit is not a goal attained but a crisis of feeling. He overcomes whatever dismay his sudden wealth sparked, but his turning to himself is but one response—not the only response—to this problem of profit.

As Crusoe demonstrates, eighteenth-century literature certainly acknowledged profit as desirable. But problems arose when that profit was ascribed to the autonomous individual. This disjunction developed as exchange long premised on interpersonal, often emotional communities mixed with an emergent encouragement of private commercial gain.²⁷ The economic circumstances of Defoe’s time were a blend of lingering feudal confidence in landed wealth and enterprising trust in movable property; of provincial agricultural markets and expanding networks of domestic and foreign trade; of somewhat tired mercantilist theories of protectionism and increasingly vocal promotions of free and open commerce.²⁸ My prejudicial rhetoric is intentional, for it reflects a tendency in scholarship to bend the eighteenth century toward a modernity equated with the principles of autonomy and the practices of self-examination.²⁹ The economic sector of such modernity becomes an isolated domain of production and exchange, and Laura Brown characterizes it by the priority of profit.³⁰ But for poets, novelists, and essayists, accumulating money was never straightforwardly modern in this way, and it needed to account more for the first than the second halves of my above pairings.

The literary tradition that arose merged new and customary notions of gain to criticize the economic and affective autonomy that almost cripples Crusoe. It brings past habits into the present in ways that challenge some of our most commonly held narratives of eighteenth-century literary history, such as the rise of private subjectivity, the development of liberal governmentality, and a growing commitment to progress.³¹ Giving little support to our modern faith in the self-interested motives of economic activity, this tradition aspires to a form of profit seeking that puts sympathetic interrelations at its heart without invalidating the desire to pursue improvements that also benefit oneself.³² The works discussed in the following chapters contain characters who seek out surplus just as surely as Crusoe does, but they do not condone the selfish possession of or impassioned enthusiasm for it.³³ As market life changed, literary works in the georgic mode conveyed that profit making should be valued for its contributions to sociability, not autonomy.

Reimagined through the language of sentimental and financial interdependence, new groupings of people were developed out of past forms of community. This process is foundational to how the eighteenth-century georgic mode implants intersubjective sympathy in the Love of Gain.³⁴ Adapting the older customs of close-knit groups to the different commercial world of the 1700s, this mode treats increasingly everyday encounters among strangers as scenes of affective and monetary outreach.³⁵ Such meetings promise unforeseen benefits as financial and emotional investments are extended beyond familiar boundaries.³⁶ Increase comes from without, but not at the expense of others, for all parties stand to lose from disengaging into comfortable, yet unchanging, stability. This potential for profit through sociability resonates across the period’s economic imagination, which, as Robert Mitchell describes, was newly a collective imagination that stabilized what "counted as a social system."³⁷ As a literary tradition friendly to the sentimental relations behind profit coalesced, it brought the past forward to create a progressive, critical utopianism out of older forms of production, exchange, and monetization.

Nostalgia characterizes this use of the past to counter tendencies of the present. Applying nostalgia to early eighteenth-century literature verges on the anachronistic, but the term appropriately describes an affective reaction to changing economic circumstances, even though its origins have nothing to do with finance. First coined as a medical term for homesickness by Johannes Hofer in 1688 and associated with an aversion to social intercourse and a preference for solitude, nostalgia was tied by medical writers to an excess of ‘sensibility’ as the century proceeded.³⁸ Its primary characteristic was a feeling of melancholy arising from a longing to return to one’s country or to particular places, a diagnosis that hints at a debilitating individualization in the nostalgic.³⁹ Returning to the social identity of the village or nation from which he or she had been separated offered a cure, and Jean Starobinski has hypothesized that this medical theory was well suited for a time when Europeans were migrating to cities even as the local social characteristics of village, province, custom, and dialect continued to exert all their influence.⁴⁰ When it appears discursively, nostalgia can spark movement even among those not actively experiencing loss by conjuring what John Su describes as exploration[s] of how present systems of social relations fail to address human needs.⁴¹ Nurturing feelings for a communal past could break through the isolation of the present caused by changing modes of commerce and the increased entrance of strangers into people’s circles.

When a georgic poem such as John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) or a novel such as Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744) is read in this way as critical substitute for (not escape from) a flawed economic present, we can understand it as taking place in the present-to-come. Paul Ricoeur explains this temporal concept as a threefold present: "A present of future things, a present of past things, and a present of present things. . . . It is easy to rewrite each of the three temporal structures of action in terms of this threefold present. The present of the future? Henceforth, that is, from now on, I commit myself to doing that tomorrow."⁴² As the mimetic quality (Ricoeur’s mimesis3) of the literary work is extended from myself to a society of readers, it obliges them to refigure the world wherein real action occurs, to make the future a new present.⁴³ Readers commit themselves to a world that [they] might inhabit and into which [they] might project [their] ownmost powers according to a horizon of experience constructed from both the internal details of the work and the external relations it has with the world.⁴⁴ While georgic poems and periodical essays do not obviously conform to narrative strictures, they do embed readers in fleshed-out and purposefully mundane worlds (of agriculture, of public spheres, of buying and selling) in which change takes place, often in terms of rural, commercial, personal, or civic improvement. Eighteenth-century literature affirms the prospect of readers similarly transforming their own financial and sentimental attitudes toward production (as I show in chapter 2), toward credit and debt (chapter 3), toward other people’s self-interest (chapter 4), and toward money itself (chapter 5).

Utopian as the future present of georgic or sociable profit might be, it derives from a familiar and referenced past whose practices root it in possibility even if the implementation of georgic profit—with its promise of flowing, shared affect—may never come to pass. Nonetheless, to authors invoking the past as a critical guide, historical or lived authenticity mattered less than the ability to creatively set that past against current experience; as Kelly Oliver writes, alternatives to the present are opened up by reading the conditions of possibility of [a different] future into the past (it will have been).⁴⁵ Utopian images of community in literature convey hope by blending sympathy and finance in a present that is aspirational, not descriptive.⁴⁶ Taking this hopefulness seriously means breaking from a habit of denigrating or minimizing nostalgia—especially when it is economic—as false history and false emotion. As a sentimental affectation or pose that threatens to commercialize the past or serve a political agenda, nostalgia always risks being no more than a regressive form whose pathos, as Fredric Jameson complains, is best cured with a history lesson.⁴⁷ As a conceit that idealizes the past, nostalgia can crystallize what came before into selective precious moments that Linda Hutcheon warns are characterized by distortions and reorganizations.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, she also recognizes that nostalgia’s rejection of the here and now produces counternarratives.⁴⁹ Its radical potential is realized when writers communicate disaffection by contrasting their own time with the past made present (or projected into the future).

Eighteenth-century sentiments for past practices of profit promote transformation or adjustment, not mere repetition. They are reactions against modernity that nonetheless shuttle readers into an alternative future present in accordance with the modern conception of unrepeatable and irreversible time, which Svetlana Boym observes is a common feature of nostalgia.⁵⁰ The mode of life and work presented by eighteenth-century georgic finance may be regressive, and it admittedly does not correspond to the precapitalist vision that later authors (such as the Romantics) tended to oppose to bourgeois modernity.⁵¹ Nevertheless, it still creates a form of critical unrealism that represents a legitimate denouncement of contemporary norms.⁵² Forward looking but not economically disciplined, self-interested but not individualized, sociable profit challenges the assumptions about time, money, sentiment, and selfhood common in scholarship on the eighteenth century and modernity.

Authors reveal profit’s complexity as they endorse growth and improvement but draw from the past’s antagonism toward individualized economic activity. Scholarship that handles early modern merchants as economic individualists . . . ruthless in pricing and debt collection cannot accommodate this anti-individualistic defense of profit, which is not a protest against commerce.⁵³ This defense of profit instead demands relationality and vulnerability to others within profit-making activities. By emphasizing what Adela Pinch terms the transpersonal or transindividual nature of affect, sociable profit insulates characters from the inwardness or privacy of liberal individualism that, as critics such as Jonathan Kramnick and Sandra Macpherson have argued, is not the defining ethic of eighteenth-century literature—or, I would add, of its economics.⁵⁴

Accumulation still thrives in a communal economics, and while it might seem like a hopelessly imprecise word, accumulation usefully accounts for a range of economic and affective expansions that took place over the eighteenth century. Consumption grew as the English gained access to new markets and new products; government grew as public debt exploded; estates grew as landowners reorganized farms and enclosed commons; and personal wealth grew as new opportunities for profit arose.⁵⁵ Scholarship has generally resisted finding social value in this growth. Jordy Rosenberg, for instance, stresses the violent forces that organize and regulate accumulation, and these forces may very well predominate when the constant movement of profit has no purpose other than mak[ing] more profit, the economic situation he highlights.⁵⁶ However, that economic situation was not understood to be inevitable, or even the default, by authors informed by older ideas of communal responsibility (including Defoe, although not in Crusoe).⁵⁷ They directed readers to extend themselves to strangers, even in relations of competitive buying and selling. The accumulation of interpersonal contacts demanded by this extension would only be undermined by economic practices premised on violence and exploitation.⁵⁸ In literature that binds monetary growth to other-directed sentiments rather than to the replication of that growth, accumulation is regulated by engagement that respects the other, even when competitive self-interest is in play.

Never organized as an institutionalized whole, the networks in the literature I discuss are marked by intimacy and a sense of localness, no matter how far they stretch.⁵⁹ They emerge from contextual, specific practices (such as harvesting or borrowing or exchanging) that recur but are impermanent. In contrast, the contemporary business corporation was a metaphorical body directing itself over time toward a consistent, uniform goal; moreover, as John O’Brien notes, the corporation was understood to exacerbate (not resolve) the conflict between individual self-interest and the interests of the state, or, more generally, the public.⁶⁰ The alternative social logic of georgic is one of multiple, shifting communities coordinated by profit (usually understood today as an antagonistic end) but not dismissive of members’ affective responses.⁶¹ Mirroring patterns most visible in poetry, popular novels and essays promote relations of credit, production, and trade in ways that may look regressive but were used in progressive ways to criticize accumulation dismissive of shared affect. The language of mutual sympathy emerges in literature as a way to incorporate strangers into new associations premised on the intimacy (not just politeness) of face-to-face transactions, regardless of how unsustainable this ideal became in practice.

The low churchman Samuel Bradford’s defense of increas[ing] [one’s] wealth as a just recompence for diligently serving a whole Community encapsulates this sense that financial success requires attention to others as fellows.⁶² His sermon on profit borrows from a long history of conceptualizing legitimate profit as other-directed, or common (which I discuss in chapter 1). Whiggish as his politics leaned, Bradford does not assert that trade alone will civilize or hold together a nation. When laboring in the service of one’s calling, one must do no harm to any particular member of the society, a traditional standard that aims for an almost intrusive knowledge of others’ situations.⁶³ One’s business should be judged according to whether it is profitable to others as well as to our selves, which presumably means reflecting upon the improvement of others. Bradford assumes a more abstract whole when he suggests that honest buyers and sellers promote the benefit of the whole Society and together [conspire] to the general good, but even then he sees fit to give a condition: "the whole Society of which they are members (emphasis mine).⁶⁴ Not necessarily a preexistent condition, membership must be earned by reap[ing] profit in ways that are of service to every particular Member of [a community]."⁶⁵ Profit making should increase acquaintance and help others particularly (not generally, abstractly, or nationally). It can then work as a social consolidator defined by mutual care.

That feeling does not map onto individual subjectivity is well established in affect theory; that financial achievement is similarly relational becomes clear when we move from a logic of possession to one of acquisition. Emotion "arises in the midst of inbetween-ness" as the body both affects and is affected by the world.⁶⁶ Monetary relations develop in the same space: between self and other, between self and object, between self and medium (for coin is hardly an inert mediator).⁶⁷ One does not make more money—a social relation of credit and debt denominated in a money of account, as Geoffrey Ingham defines it—without exposure.⁶⁸ Profit disrupts the boundaries of the embodied self, a quality advertised cheerfully (and morbidly) in a 1682 advertisement for a tontine, an agreement whereby one earns money off the corpses of co-investors, for the more dye, the greater is the Income to the Survivours.⁶⁹ The idea that money is most valuable when it seamlessly moves across people corresponds well with Bradford’s support for the general good. Moreover, it also corresponds with David Hume’s ideal of compleat sympathy, the easy flow of which carries a hint of fictionality or illusoriness (as Jonathan Lamb notes) but nonetheless points to a utopian openness of self to other.⁷⁰

In literature that wrestles with how to justify increase, the circulation of sentiments through spontaneous sharing and the circulation of money through trade contribute mutually to profit’s value.⁷¹ Sympathy—sometimes associated with but not equivalent to benevolence or humanity—is not itself a feeling in the eighteenth century; it is the process or medium (sometimes even fluid) whereby any sentiment travels from one person to another, often involuntarily.⁷² Even in the seventeenth century, gestures of sympathy had been established as vital to social cohesion, and Sir Kenelm Digby—one of the earliest writers to focus on sympathy—could not deny its power even as he warned of its dangerous infectiveness.⁷³ A century later in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), sympathy entails an active use of the imagination, but earlier theories of it or the related moral sense proposed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury; Francis Hutcheson; and David Hume saw it as occurring willy-nilly.⁷⁴ Hutcheson considers how sympathetic communication results naturally from the Constitution of our Nature, which dislikes solitude, and he warns that since our several affections are naturally contagious, we must be wary of acting against our duty to the publick.⁷⁵ The rhetoric here maps well onto defenses of accumulation that fear the damage private greed