"The Burden and the Heat of Common affairs": Bagehot and Bourgeois Happiness.

I this paper, I analyse Walter Bagehot’s literary essays, mostly published in the 1850s, in which ideas of happiness, pleasure, enjoyment and satisfaction acquire class-specific connotations. Despite what philosophers had been preaching from time immemorial, the dream of happiness coincided with the “petty pursuits of petty fortunes” for an increasing number of people in the nineteenth century. I argue that Bagehot redefines this pursuit as not intrinsically ignoble, associating it with the love of experience, the excitement of a life of action, and the thrill of the chase, regardless of its aim. The first section of my essay focuses on the form of ‘intellectual entertainment’ that Bagehot posits as specific to commercial modernity. I then discuss the conjunction between happiness and ‘experience’ that constitutes the hallmark of his re-evaluation of bourgeois life. The final part takes into consideration a short essay written for The Economist in 1875 in which Bagehot tackles the fraught question of financial speculation from an unusual perspective, arguing for the role of the imagination in determining the aggregate satisfaction that speculators derive from their activities. Although not explicitly theorized, the idea of happiness – “the spirit of thorough enjoyment” – is frequently invoked in Bagehot’s essays as a mark of distinction. Whether associated with the Whig character and liberalism or with the temperament of the bourgeois man of action, this idea permeates Bagehot’s energetic vindication of the intellectual and cultural relevance of what he himself called “the buying and bargaining universe”.