Speculation and Social Progress: Financial and Narrative Bubbles in Charles Lever’s Davenport Dunn

Abstract

Victorian novels of finance have garnered much critical attention in recent years. Yet Lever’s Davenport Dunn (1859) has been largely overlooked. This essay investigates Lever’s imaginative engagement with finance capitalism, casting new light on his unique take on the appeal of speculation in an Irish context. Set both on the Continent and in Ireland, Davenport Dunn deviates significantly from the standardised tales of financial felony that circulated widely in Victorian print culture. Attending closely to the novel’s formal features and narrative strategies, this essay argues that the logic of financial speculation is internalised on the formal level. The novel accords a degree of legitimacy to financial speculation by multiplying lines of divisions between gambling and speculation and by shifting attention to the role of a female character, who stands to win from her commitment to speculative schemes. Notable for its realistic particularity, Lever’s representation of the Irish speculator and his entourage probes the limits of moralistic understandings of finance in ways that have hitherto been unacknowledged. .