On “Queer Street”: Queer Masculinity and Financial Agents in Dickens

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Meg Dobbins is an Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. She received her PhD in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature, economic history, queer theory, women writers, and the history and theory of the novel. She is currently working on a book project titled Queer Accounts: Victorian Literature and Economic Deviance which explores queer forms of socio-economic mobility in nineteenth-century British literature.

Notes

1. Research on the medical, legal, and literary construction and criminalization of homosexuality in the nineteenth century is now extensive. For a review of recent queer theory in nineteenth-century studies, see Kaye.

2. Specific references occur in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and “The Second Stain” (1904).

3. For an introduction to New Economic Criticism, see Woodmansee and Osteen. For a recent overview of economic criticism in Victorian Studies, see Nancy Henry.

4. For more on women and economics in Victorian literature, see Kreisel, Michie, Henry, and Dalley and Rappoport.

5. The Limited Liability Act of 1855 limited liability to what an individual actually invested, yet Debtors Prison was not abolished until 1869.

6. Taylor enumerates the myriad opportunities for fraud in nineteenth century finance: “Because directors were looking after other people's money rather than their own, their oversight of employees was sometimes lax, which encouraged embezzlement. Because control was vested in paid managers, these managers often pursued policies that benefited their own interests rather than their shareholders. Because company shares were usually publicly traded, maintaining confidence was essential, which created incentives for concealing losses, even insolvency, from shareholders and the winder public” (Boardroom Scandal 2).

7. See Young, Bailey, and Crossick for more on the social history of the lower-class professional.

8. For more on Dickens's views on industry, finance, and consumerism see Brantlinger and Gurney.

9. For the sake of brevity, I do not discuss Dombey and Son (1848), though it is worth noting the novel's references to “Queer Street” and descriptions of the villainous manger Carker as queer. For a persuasive analysis of Carker's financial role, though one that overlooks the question of sexuality, see Hunt.

10. For more on this passage, see Furneaux 74. For more on Victorian views of bachelorhood, queer sexuality, and the significance of bachelors, see Sedgwick's Epistemology.

11. On Dickens's portrayals of Jews, see previous work by Lane, Heller, Meyer, and Stone.

12. For more on the Gothic and economics, see Thiele and Houston.

13. As Sean Grass summarizes, the ending of the novel is often criticized for being “unconvincing” and “upsetting … in the way that John Harmon and the Boffins take Bella Wilfer in, make her life into an appalling lie, then receive her self-abasing and immediate forgiveness because they have supposedly acted in the name of teaching her a trite ‘lesson’”(3).