"A Due Circulation in the Veins of the Publick": Imagining Credit in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

am to speak of what People are busie about, but not one in Forty understands: Every Man has a Concern in it, few know what it is, nor is it easy to define or describe If a Man goes about to explain it by Words, he rather struggles to lose himself in Wood, rather than bring others out of it. (1) In 1695 Charles Davenant, political arithmetician, observed that whole Art of War is in a manner reduced to Money. (2) Indeed, costs of England's extensive military activities in late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were enormous and dominated public spending. To sustain such spending, borrowing was undertaken on a massive scale--most prominently, from 1694, through Bank of England. Such developments--alongside emergence of speculative markets in stocks, insurance, lotteries, and numerous other projects--widened opportunities for ownership of property based on credit, rather than land or goods. (3) Paper became more prevalent and more visible, and forms it took became more diverse; in 1690s Exchequer bills, lottery tickets, various Bank of England sealed bills, and running-cash notes circulated alongside private bankers' notes and other forms of privately negotiated bills. The destabilizing effects of what has become known as financial revolution, with its non-land-based investments and speculations, were seen to be far-reaching--turning, in John Pocock's words, counters of language into marketable and threatening that all men, and sublunary things, will now become things of paper.4 A lot was at stake. Many were caught up in schemes of period, pursuing, in words of one contemporary, butterflies, on account of, suggested another, the greatest part of World being Soft and Silly, and taken with Sound and Emptiness. (5) The nature of money was questioned, and was conceived to be particularly vulnerable. As Davenant put it: Of Beings that have Existence only in Minds of Men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit; 'tis never to be forc'd; it hangs upon Opinion; it depends upon our Passions of Hope and Fear. (6) as Daniel Defoe observed in quotation that opens this article, was preoccupying, perplexing, and difficult to pin down. Unlike commodities such as wheat, cloth, or gold, as one modern critic has written, credit has no easily-apprehended form already existing in world, which means that it must be given form if it is to be object of social, political, or economic discussion. (7) In early eighteenth century, was conceived of as a female figure, most notably Defoe's Credit, and scholars have argued that this metaphor was employed to highlight public credit's fickle and insubstantial nature. I would not want to dispute this. However, we must be wary of allowing Defoe's current dominance of Augustan scholarship to obscure prominence of other images of which writers deployed in this period, and purpose of this article is to offer a corrective. In numerous pamphlets and broadsides which debated controversial proposals for various banking schemes in late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, writers appealed to metaphors that glossed over distinctions between money and and that stressed motion, distribution, and circulation of mediums of trade. Some of these metaphors appealed to images of water flowing. Most, however, developed well-established association of money with blood to describe circulation of in body politic. Thus public was not always imagined as capricious, slight, and fantastical but could, to some extent, also be imagined as effective, substantial, and dynamic. I Scholars have largely concentrated their attention on images developed by Augustan writers of asa woman. Lady most prominent of such images, was introduced by Defoe in 1706 in his periodical, Review, as a coy Lass who once disoblig'd, [is] most difficult to be Friends again with us, of any thing in World. …