Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 by Timothy Ablorn

Abstract

The cultural representation of misers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be a niche interest, but Alborn’s Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 offers a valuable contribution to general historiography in the age of digital research. Alborn traces how the perception of misers shifted across his selected period: Sermons and poems decried misers’ moral failings; ethicists and economists gave ambivalent acceptance; plays, operas, and novels made them social pariahs and punchlines; and nineteenth-century biographies and novels considered their pecuniary acumen. This exploration marks an important case study in the intersection between capitalism and popular literature and culture. Alborn accurately notes, however, that it does not “address either the formation or distribution of capital” in an economic sense (11). Instead, the book explores how British culture represented misers to themselves. Although this intervention adds important layers to the already thick description of capitalism’s cultural influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Alborn’s book deserves both accolades and scrutiny for a methodology based on both a distant reading of genres and a close reading of individual texts to prove its claims. The scope of Alborn’s archive is staggering. The first four chapters are organized around genre. Although the organization of the latter three is more scattershot, all the chapters range across genres with the same alacrity. The variance comes from Alborn’s interest in “boundarydrawing: when did someone qualify as a miser ...?” (11). Part of the cleverness of Alborn’s approach is that he allows the texts to create this boundary for him, rather than imposing a definition. But allowing a culture to unveil its structure is always a historiographically complex task. In a critique of her own book, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1994), Poovey challenges textual analysis as a proper basis for cultural history: “No amount of evidence of the kind [textual criticism] supplies ... would be sufficient to prove” broad historical claims. In other words, if four sermons are inadequate to prove