3 - Investing in empire

Summary

Political and social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his most careful biographer need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last commercial panic.

Daniel Deronda (499)

In 1860, when Eliot was wondering what to do with a son who was not wanted at home, she had another new worry: what to do with more money than she could spend. On September 27, she wrote in her diary that she was expecting Thornie home from Hofwyl on his way to study in Edinburgh, that she had recently “written a slight Tale – ‘Mr. David Faux, confectioner,’” and that she had “received from Blackwood the first cheque (£1000) for the ‘Mill on the Floss’” (Journals, p. 86). At this time, as we have seen, Thornie was destined for India – and so were the profits from The Mill on the Floss. After leaving Thornie in Edinburgh, Lewes visited a stockbroker in London “who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly,” adding that for “1825£ she gets 1900£ worth of stock guaranteed 5%.” Eliot recorded that she had “invested £2000 in East Indies Stock, and expect shortly to invest another £2000” (Journals, p. 87).

Eliot's choice of “East Indies” railway stock was representative of a trend in English investing. She joined a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.