7 - Economic man, economic machine: images of circulation in the Victorian money market

Summary

Introduction

The centrality of the healthy body to nineteenth-century social discourse has recently received much scrutiny from people working in a whole range of disciplines (see Coleman 1982; Gallagher 1986; Haley 1978; Mirowski 1989). A common focus has been the rise of public health movements in England, France, and the United States, the leaders of which conceptualized society as a corporate body in danger of contamination from its unhealthy individual members. Catherine Gallagher, for instance, takes the case of the English reformer Henry Mayhew, who suspected urban nomads of physically and morally polluting the vulnerable producing classes; she isolates a passage from Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, where he identifies “the pickpockets – the beggars – the prostitutes – the street-sellers … – the sailors and such like,” who “prey upon the earnings of the more industrious portions of the community.” Besides accusing this class of numerous forms of moral depravity, Mayhew medically diagnosed them as suffering “a greater determination of blood to the surface of the body, and consequently a less quantity sent to the brain, the muscles being thus nourished at the expense of the mind” (quoted in Gallagher 1986, 90). Such suspicions established the circulatory system – physical as well as economic – to be at once vital and menacing to the well-being of Victorian society. By circulating the products of capitalism, Mayhew's nomads performed an essential role in the marketplace: So no matter how much he feared their ascendence, he could not wholly reject them without rejecting the marketplace itself.