6 - Bankerization panic and the corporate personality in Dracula

Summary

During the years Bram Stoker worked on Dracula (1897), the economy revived itself from the doldrums of the Great Depression. Historians note that between 1893 and 1913 coal and steel production grew, and exports of manufactured goods and raw materials rose, while engineering and shipbuilding increased. Perhaps the most influential legacy of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism was the laying of the railways, for at the turn of the century 22,000 miles of railway had been put down in Britain. Nevertheless, one Victorian noted of the last decade of the century that they were “long, dragging, dull times.” Prices stayed level or fell and unemployment continued. Continuing the extended slump, the banking crisis of 1890 almost sank the Bank of England, which underwrote the House of Barings' bad investments in Argentina. The Times, 15 November 1890, reported thus, “Such a week of sensational horrors and heart-rending anxieties as that which is closing to-day can hardly be within the remembrance of the present generation of Englishmen.” “No fertile imagination could exaggerate the gravity of the crisis,” said economist George G. Goschen, lamenting that the panic “risked the supremacy of English credit.” George Bartrick Baker began his article “The Crisis on the Stock Exchange” (1890) with the statement that “Not since the collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878 has the Stock Exchange been in such a state of nervous apprehension of evil as that which has recently threatened to culminate in a disastrous panic.”