Dr Andrew Lawson

Abstract

This article discusses the formation and transformation of the elite, the middle class and the artisan class in the antebellum period. It then analyses the work of three major authors from each of these classes: Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Lippard, showing how each author responded to the challenges and contradictions of their particular class location.

This article argues that Bacon’s Essays follow the evolving logic of agrarian capitalism by positing in each individual a stock of capacities that can be induced to expand. The article shows how the successive editions of the book make an initial investment in moral maxims and aphorisms which are then subjected to a process of incremental development and growth. Economic and ethical discourses of improvement function in Bacon’s work as overlapping and mutually reinforcing practices, laying the foundations for the “active human subject” of neoliberalism.

This article examines Franklin’s efforts to manage his debts in the early stages of his career as a Philadelphia printer, highlighting his feelings of guilt at spending money entrusted to him by the Rhode Island merchant Samuel Vernon. It goes on show how a combination of political, legal, and religious pressures on debtors in the 1730s required Franklin to pay more attention to his bookkeeping practices, arguing that these more vigilant accounting habits informed the schemes for moral self-regulation described in the Autobiography

This article examines the clash between John Smith and Edward Maria Wingfield as an emblematic example of wider social frictions between a rising yeomanry and a declining gentry, setting the conflict in a discursive context that combined approval and condemnation of the thrifty yeoman with a traditional denigration of commerce. The article shows how Smith rose to prominence in the Virginia colony by deploying bargaining skills acquired as the eldest son of an enterprising yeoman farmer. In Smith’s hands, private bargaining becomes a practice and a discourse of legitimation, a means of overcoming his subordinate position in the social hierarchy. In the Virginia colony, trade, money and markets – a system of abstract equivalences – cause social distinctions to melt.

This article examines representations of credit instruments in two popular antebellum fictions: Asa Greene’s The Perils of Pearl Street and Charles Frederick Briggs’s The Adventures of Harry Franco. Drawing on a range of business histories it describes the operation of promissory notes and bills of exchange in the cotton-for-credit system, focusing on the “principle of deferral” and the ways in which these instruments attempted to solve the problem of time in long-distance exchange. By establishing concrete connections between characters, times, and places these fictions demystify the antebellum financial system, revealing an economy based on new forms of social interdependence.

The revolution in prices, in R. H. Tawney's words, "injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary relationships". The virus of trade had "nourished itself like an alien body within the pores of feudal society". Men and women worked the countryside as itinerant traders—petty chapmen, badgers, hawkers, hucksters, and peddlers—bringing dry goods, foodstuffs, and "unconsidered trifles" to out of the way places. Violations of economic exchange were theft, the unlawful possession of another individual's property, or inundation, the oversupply of a good in the market, leading to price falls and a falling off of trade. Powhatan grasped the centrality of the criterion of exchangeability, but as paramount chief he was able to avoid contamination by the virus of trade. His last offer to John Smith was "40 bushels" for "40 swords".

By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower middle class, Andrew Lawson in Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle defines the tensions and ambiguities about culture, class, and politics that underlie his poetry. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from across the range of antebellum print culture, Lawson uses close readings of Leaves of Grass to reveal Whitman as an artisan and an autodidact ambivalently balanced between his sense of the injustice of class privilege and his desire for distinction. Consciously drawing upon the languages of both the elite culture above him and the vernacular culture below him, Whitman constructed a kind of middle linguistic register that attempted to filter these conflicting strata and defuse their tensions: “You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.” By exploring Whitman’s internal struggle with the contradictions and tensions of his class identity, Lawson locates the source of his poetic innovation. By revealing a class-conscious and conflicted Whitman, he realigns our understanding of the poet’s political identity and distinctive use of language and thus valuably alters our perspective on his poetry.

"Downwardly Mobile" explores the links between a growing sense of economic precariousness within the American middle class and the development of literary realism over the course of the nineteenth century by Rose Terry Cooke, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Hamlin Garland. The book argues that, in each of these writers, the opacity and abstraction of social relationships in an expanding market economy combined with a sense of pervasive insecurity to produce a "hunger for the real" - a commitment to a mimetic literature capable of stabilizing the social world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. The book relocates the origins of literary realism in the antebellum period and a structure of feeling based in the residual household economy which prized the virtues of the local, the particular, and the concrete, against the alienating abstractions of the emerging market. In a parallel line of argument, the book explores the ways in which sympathetic identification with lower-class figures served to locate American realist authors in a confused and shifting social space. downward mobility.

This article examines 'Song of Myself' as, in Whitman's own words, a 'language experiment.' Whitman's poetry struck contemporaries like Charles Eliot Norton as a strange 'compound' or mixture of high and low styles: of New England transcendentalism and 'New York rowdyism.' In this article, I argue that such linguistic mixtures function not as the sign of 'democratic' fusion or 'heteroglossia,' but of class antagonism. Whitman's strategy of juxtaposing elevated and common languages is the legacy of his involvement with the radical-democratic 'Locofoco' movement of the 1830s, political activity in which he attacked aristocratic pretension and rights of ownership. The article examines a series of linguistic-political clashes in 'Song of Myself': between the languages of Concord transcendentalism and carpentry, Augustan decorum and sensational fiction, opera and urban insurrection. Whitman's satiric intent is to deflate the high and elevate the low, but his position is made problematic by his position as a lower-middle-class autodidact: while he wants to ridicule elite culture he also needs its glow of distinction. © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

In 1865, with the South defeated and the peculiar institution of slavery finally eradicated, American capitalism had what Vernon Parrington called “its first clear view of the Promised Land.” Liquid capital which had accumulated in Philadelphia and New York banks during the war could now be released into railroads, stockyards, refineries, and mills. Suddenly, there were vast new fortunes to be made from livestock, timber, steel, petroleum, and wheat, as well as unparalleled opportunities for corruption. America may have been a “vast, uniform middle-class land,” in which every citizen was putatively “dedicated to capitalism,” but government subsidies, tariffs, and land-grants were carefully steered toward the corporate elite, in what Parrington dubbed “the great barbecue.” Most notoriously, the Philadelphia banker, Jay Cooke, obtained 50 million acres of western lands for his Northern Pacific Railroad and established a separate company, the Credit Mobilier, to channel subsidies directly into the pockets of company directors, while the railroad's coffers were opened to provide Republicans with sweeteners in the form of campaign money and railroad stock. Ordinary Americans had believed in an open society, one that was competitive and fiuid, in which entrepreneurial energy and ingenuity would be rewarded. Now it appeared that “amoral wealth-seekers” were blocking access to the “social escalator.” An onlooker at this spectacle was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who, as Mark Twain, became both a sharp critic of capitalist excess and the virtual spokesman for a confused and contradictory middle class, buffeted and transformed by the period he named the Gilded Age.

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

The book argues that, in each of these writers, the opacity and abstraction of social relationships in an expanding market economy combined with a sense of pervasive insecurity to produce a "hunger for the real" - a commitment to a mimetic ...

Parallels are explored in this article between Stephen Crane's depiction of warfare in The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the period of industrial unrest and economic instability that followed the Panic of 1893. Crane's novel, it is argued here, works images of proletarian exploitation and insecurity into its depictions of Civil War soldiers. Moreover Crane was driven towards an identification with proletarian distress as a result of his own experience of exploitation at the hands of the system of commercial publication for the mass market.

This article examines how the foreclosure crisis has been represented in a range of narrative genres: the reportage of Paul Reyes's Exiles in Eden: Life among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession (2010), Michael Moore's documentary film Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), and Paul Auster's novel Sunset Park (2010).These narratives attempt to contextualize the human beings caught in the center of the subprime mortgage storm, but in the process each of them runs up against an opacity or obscurity, a crisis of representation. The article argues that underlying the financial crisis is an inability to recognize and comprehend deeply embedded structures of inequality, a failure common to both the financial system and the wider culture. Drawing on recent accounts of the techniques of credit scoring and mortgage securitization in the disciplines of business history, accounting, financial management, and human geography, the article concludes that subprime mortgage lending involved social relations of supremacy and subordination, as well as representational strategies which identified individuals solely in terms of credit risk, while failing to grasp the conditions of poverty and disadvantage which constituted them as a class.

This article reassesses James's class location, arguing that, as a non-productive rentier, Henry James Senior instilled in his son the primal fear of consuming the family's hoard of capital. I argue that this fear decisively shaped the aesthetic theory of the "impression" which James borrows from Walter Pater and develops in Roderick Hudson (1875). In the novel, James explores the economic and aesthetic dilemmas of hoarding versus expenditure: the need to save up impressions so as to produce a tangible return, as well as covertly expressing his fears that this investment might ultimately prove sterile and profitless.

This article explores the parallels between the narrative tropes of Moby-Dick and the conduct of the Mexican War of 1846‐48. Drawing on the theories of Austin and Butler, the article develops an account of the performative speech acts deployed by President James K. Polk in order to secure Congressional support for the war, and the rhetorical power exercised by Ahab on the Pequod. It also examines in detail Melville’s use of the Biblical figures of King Ahab and Belshazzar, showing how the novel turns the Biblical-republican typology used in the American Revolution against the British to indict America’s own practice of imperialism. The article concludes by reflecting on both the vision of perpetual war which Melville presents as the consequence of Polk’s assumption of imperial power, and the parallels between Polk’s prosecution of the war with Mexico and the US invasion of Iraq.

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. it analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

This article explores the homology between states of affect as represented in literary texts by Emerson, Poe, and Alcott, and the stages of the business cycle of 1832–1842. It argues that recurrent cycles of mania, panic, and depression served to habituate Americans to the business cycle and to naturalize market forces.