Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction

Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Finance, Family, and the Law investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance. While recent criticism has concentrated on this fictions engagement with newer financial forms, this book contends that Victorian novels both attest to the persistence of inheritance and reveal its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. Focusing on Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickenss Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collinss Armadale (1866), and George Eliots Middlemarch (1871-72), each chapter explores a recurring pattern of contrast and conflation between inheritance and financial speculation. Taking an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, Reich shows how this pattern gives narrative shape to concerns that were also emerging in contemporary political and legal debates around succession, bequest, landed estates, and conceptions of the family. Attending to the novels concrete and figurative allusions to these forms as well as their tentative alternatives, Reich also illustrates how the novels self-reflexive subversion of both characters and readers expectations based on inheritance conventions challenge our modes of reading. Inheritance and Speculation thus not only illuminates the integral role played by inheritance in Victorian fictions mediation of the credit economy, but also offers a new understanding of the complex role of convention in this fiction.