11 - Business, Publishing and the Gentleman Reader

Summary

Through the mediation of print, propertied gentlemen and gentlewomen, principal customers of the booksellers, viewed economic progress in their world and the moral implications of new wealth and new methods of business. With eighteenth-century presses providing more people with more information upon economic matters than ever before, a broad range of readers were offered unprecedented advice on how to conduct their financial affairs and how to understand the nature of commerce. Newspapers, pamphlets, manuals and magazines popularized current intellectual debate, often absurdly simplifying intricate propositions but also widening their audience and inviting public response. Booksellers and compilers made handsome profits from handbooks on trade and financial management. Such commercial venturing was not without its effect on the manner in which arguments were presented and counsel tendered.

The ‘gentleman reader’ was also a consciously constructed ideal. Many of those reading the commentaries on the economy were women and many of the propertied added to or resisted the ascription of gentlemen: clerics, scholars, merchants, lawyers, other professionals. Many owners of land and capital did not conform to the ‘gentlemanliness’ increasingly characterized in literature and drama. The literary fashioning of social stereotypes during the eighteenth century focused particularly on the negative, in which the avaricious tradesman, or the man or woman of all too rapid or squandered wealth, became the butt of jokes and a caricature of rapacity and idiocy. Yet the goal of many of those penning these stereotypes was to defend moderate wealth creation and point to ideal values by demonstrating the limits of proper behaviour. Those limits were described, often in outrageously negative lampoons, to defend capitalist values. In other words, the early-eighteenth-century revulsion for the financial market, and the distrust of credit so evident in literary commentaries and on the stage, was replaced by the end of the century by an acceptance in a wide range of writing of the merits of the wealth creation by merchants and of the good of trade, so long as it followed civilized parameters.

The final question pursued by this book is how the broader representation of trade, finance and industry related to the expanding commercial and financial press and jobbing printing that have been the central concern of earlier chapters, but which have so often been neglected.