Victorian Economy And Artistic Taste

How Victorians Invested Their Capital

How Victorians Could Invested Their Capital

Dale H. Porter, Professor of History and Humanities, Western Michican University The average investor in mid-Victorian England had fewer choices than his twentieth-century counterpart. If he wanted low risk and moderate returns, he
could tell his solicitor to put his money into national debt shares or into real estate rents and mortgages. The debt was made up of a variety of bond and stock issues supporting specific government projects, together with the 3 percent
consolidated bank annuities ("consols") available since 1751. Rents and mortgages in the rapidly expanding London building estates were discounted by small and medium-size builders to obtain capital for further speculative constructions Bills of exchange, first used as negotiable paper and then as credit instruments, were riskier. They were sold along with railway and other construction stock issues at a highly variable discount rate, usually for short terms of less than three months. Returns on domestic railway investments varied enormously but averaged just under 8 percent in the 1840s, better than most other domestic opporunities. Overseas railways built by British contractors also matched high dividends with high risk, with the exception of the Indian railway
system, which was guaranteed by British authorities. Finally, one could speculate on loans to foreign governments, on imported commodities such as tea or cotton, or on gold and other precious metals.Until 1856, most business investments involved the assumption of unlimited liability by everyone in a company, a condition that tended to restrict the supply of venture capital. A company could incorporate, after 1844, simply by registering at the Board of Trade; in doing so, however, its prospectus was made accountable to government supervision and its operations opened to public scrutiny. Most commercial, industrial, and construction enterprises were still operated as partnerships or sole proprietorships, and, in the case of the Thames Embankment, such contractors often had trouble raising capital for large-scale projects. Nevertheless, the railway boom got the public used to investing and reassured individuals that the failure of a company did not usually mean the loss of one's entire assets.
 

This passage has been excerpted from Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment:
Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London. Akron, Ohio:
University of Akron Press, 1998, which is reviewed eleswhere in the Victorian Web GPL.

What was Victorian taste, really?

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

 

 

    What did the Victorians like? What kind of furniture, silverwork, jewelry, wallpaper, and glass did they buy for their own homes? Even to begin to answer that question one must put the terms "Victorian" and "Victorians" within quotation marks twice -- first because the Victorian years, which lasted from 1835 (or even 1830) to 1903 or a few years beyond, obviously divides into three, four, or even five periods. Whereas the early part of Victoria's reign saw interest in a medievalor Gothick Revival in all aspects of architecture and design, much of the mid- and late-Victorian period was a time of the lush, abundant look that most of us associate with the term "Victorian." Then, from the 1880s onward, a series of reactions against High Victorian taste took place -- Aestheticism, Art Nouveau, Japonisme, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Celtic Revival and the Liberty Style, and finally Art Deco, which reached its height much later, in the 1930s and '40s. Therefore, when anyone talks about "Victorian taste," we have to find out to which part of Victoria's reign they refer.

Second and equally important, Victorian taste varied widely according to social classand the not-always-closely-related matter of economic status. To begin with, many members of the nobility and land-owning gentry, who lived in homes their families had occupied for centuries, found themselves surrounded by Elizabethan, Jacobean, and eighteenth-century furnishings, and unless they were self-consciously interested in contemporary taste, they were often unlikely to replace perfectly good furniture or silver, however old and out-of-fashion, with any examples of new taste. A conservative, prosperous, but not particularly wealthy member of the squierarchy, like Ralph Calbury of Trollope's The Way We Live Now, had no fashionable furnishings. Similarly, members of the working classes, farm workers, and unemployed poor, who together made up far more than half of the Victorian population, did not have the resources to furnish their homes with properly Victorian things.

By and large, then, questions of Victoran taste refer primarily to the middle and professional classes, to factory owners in the industrial North, such the Thorntons we meet in Gaskell's North and South, and a very view wealthy trendsetters -- the kind of people we see made the subject of Punch's mockery..
 
 

Suggested Readings

Gloag, John. Victorian Comfort: A Social History of Design, 1830-1900. A. C. Black, 1961. (Reprinted 1973 by David and Charles, Newton Abbot.)

Levy, Mervyn. Liberty Style, The Classic Years, 1798-1910. New York: Abrams, 1986.

Naylor, Gillian. The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals, and Influence on Design Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.