A Conspiracy of Paper

HISTORICAL NOTE

THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE of 1720 was a real event, best remembered as the first stock-market crash in the English-speaking world, but it was also the culmination of years of confusion and abuses within the London financial markets. For Great Britain in the early eighteenth century, stocktrading, government issues, and lotteries were all relatively new, and the uncertainty that comes with newness created an exciting culture within Exchange Alley. Certain thinkers—some as well-known as Daniel Defoe, others anonymous or forgotten—cast the financial markets as either foreboding or wondrous, promising either bounty or doom. This volatile atmosphere yielded a massive body of writings about the new financial order, which has lately generated an intense scholarly interest in the South Sea scheme, the crash, and eighteenth-century British finances in general. Within the past five years, historians, literary critics, and sociologists have shown a markedly increased interest in the fiscal volatility of this period, and this interest suggests something about the economic uncertainty of our own era.

This novel grew out of my work as a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, where my research focused on the ways in which eighteenth-century Britons imagined themselves through their money. After years in the archives, reading pamphlets, poems, plays, periodical essays, and long-forgotten novels, I failed to find the source that told me precisely what I wanted to know about the new finance. So I wrote one. My goal in this novel has been to capture both the unbridled enthusiasm and the pervasive anxiety of the period leading up to the South Sea Bubble.

Most of the characters in this novel are purely fictional, though they are frequently composites of figures who appeared in eighteenth-century writings and in the historical record. No such person as Benjamin Weaver ever lived, but I found inspiration for his character in the story of Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836), who credited himself with inventing what he termed the “scientific method of boxing” and who later became a professional debt-collector. Jonathan Wild and his henchmen Mendes and Arnold, however, were indeed real people, but I have taken numerous liberties with their characters. From the mid-1710s until his execution in 1725, Wild controlled much of the criminal activity around London, and he is generally acknowledged as the first modern crime lord. Until the early part of this century, Jonathan Wild was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic, but the twentieth century has lately produced enough of its own colorful criminals who are well able to take the great thief-taker’s place in our cultural imagination.

I have, in the language of this novel, tried to suggest the rhythms of eighteenth-century prose, although I have made many modifications in the interest of readability. My intention was to invoke the feel of contemporaneous speech without burdening readers with idiosyncrasies that often seem inhospitable or circuitous by today’s standards.

Finally, I would like to address the matter of money. British money in the eighteenth century broke down this way: twelve pence equaled a shilling, five shillings a crown, twenty shillings a pound, and twenty-one shillings a guinea. Early readers of this novel have often asked what those denominations are worth in today’s currency. Unfortunately, there is no direct mathematical formula that would accurately convey value, because the uses of money varied so dramatically within the different social classes. A poor laborer in London might earn twenty pounds a year, with which he would feed his family bread, beer, and occasionally meat, buy inexpensive clothing and cheap lodgings. A fashionable gentleman might spend twice that amount on an evening’s entertainment without risk of being called extravagant. Benjamin Weaver talks of earning one hundred to one hundred fifty pounds in a year, which constitutes a solid middle-class income, particularly for a man living alone. For someone who wished to wear fashionable clothing, entertain guests in high style, keep numerous servants, and drive a handsome equipage, five hundred pounds a year could prove a tight squeeze. Money’s value, of course, is most visibly constituted by what it can buy, and in eighteenth-century London, what money bought depended on the social position of the spender.