Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• LAHIKAINEN, AMANDA

Titel

"British Asignats": Debt, Caricature and Romantic Subjectivity in 1797

Ist Teil von

• Studies in romanticism, 2014-12, Vol.53 (4), p.509-540

Ort / Verlag

Boston: THE GRADUATE SCHOOL, BOSTON UNIVERSITY

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Much like our current debates about financial crises, fiscal cliffs, and quantitative easing, debt was frequently the subject of heated debate throughout the eighteenth century, notably during the South Sea crisis in 1720 and the Bank Restriction Act of 1797.3 The fact that money and public credit were based on both faith in government institutions and individuals created a deep sense of anxiety that graphic satirists, Gillray in particular, exploited in representation. Britons were particularly fixated on the negative example set by Revolutionary France since the failure of assignats had recently laid bare the fragility of a system based on trust and agreement/' The groundwork for this trust and agreement, or the culture of paper money, much like the topic of financial forgery, has been overlooked in recent scholarship and deserves further attention in relation to the graphic arts as well as Romanticism (despite Kevin Barry's pronouncement that on "February 26, 1797, a run on the Bank of England precipitated English Romanticism").7 This article argues that the increasing proliferation of paper money, itself a representation of social relationships, helped occasion a change in Romantic subjectivity.