Charlotte Riddell's City Novels and Victorian Business. Narrating Capitalism

My book is the first scholarly monograph on Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906), well-known in the 1860s and 1870s as the author of novels set in the City of London and dealing with the world of commerce and finance, represented in sharply drawn realistic details. I make a strong case for the relevance of Riddell’s novels as narrative experiments that can teach us much about the intersection of gender, genre and economics, about Victorian business culture and the literary history of capitalism. This monograph has three aims: 1) to cast light on a female author who commanded an impressive knowledge of the London business world and produced several novels that narrate the fate of individuals caught up in the financial and emotional entanglements of modern markets; 2) to enrich our understanding of Victorian business culture and the narratives that contributed to the rationalization and problematisation of the business vocation as a peculiarly modern, work-oriented and very demanding life-script; 3) to reconsider the relation between literary form-giving and capitalist modernisation: Riddell’s unusual choice of subject matter is inextricably bound up with her experimental approach to realism and the novel form; she pioneered the genre of the business novel, developing her own template for the realistic portrayal of local life in the global City. The book integrates historicist and formalist readings of the novels, and engages with current critical debates about gender and economics, the Victorian cultural critique of capitalism and the role of financial education.