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Patterns of Property and Possession in Fielding's Fiction

1990; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecf.1990.0059

1911-0243

James Thompson,

Race, History, and American Society

Patterns of Property and Possession in Fielding's FictionJames Thompson Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) tells die history of a number of lost objects which range from the foundling protagonist and his patrimony to wives, daughters, a muff, and several bank notes. The most prominent story of errant money begins with die £500 Squire Allworthy gives to Tom (p. 310), which he subsequently loses (p. 313).1 Black George appropriates die money (p. 314), and passes it on to Old Nightingale , in whose hands Squire Allworthy recognizes it (p. 920), and so it is presumably restored to Tom, die natural or rightful owner (p. 968). We are treated in similar detail to die fortunes of the £200 which Squire Western gives to Sophia (p. 359), who also loses her money (p. 610). Her wallet is found by a beggar who passes it on to Tom (pp. 631-35), and who, in turn, restores- it to its proper owner: "I know die right Owner, and will restore it her ... die right Owner shall certainly have again all diat she has lost" (p. 634)—a promise which emblematizes die narrative of lost property in die novel. Partridge, of course, repeatedly urges Tom to spend die hundred pounds (pp. 675-76, 679, 711), but Tom restores it to Sophia whole: "I hope, Madame, you will find it of the same Value, as when it was lost" (p. 731). 1 Quotations from Fielding's fiction are from the Wesleyan Edition ofthe Works ofHenry Fielding, ed. Martin Battestin: Tom Jones (1975, reprinted Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Joseph Andrews (1967); Amelia (1983, reprinted 1984); Jonathan Wild, ed. David Nokes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982); 77ie Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon in 77ie Works of Henry Fielding, ed. William Ernest Henley (1902, reprinted New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), vol. XVI. Page references are to these editions. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 1, October 1990 N) m O sc H m m Z XI n m Z H C 73 << n H d ? Reproduced by permission of McMaster University library. PROPERTY AND POSSESSION IN FIELDING 23 In good Aristotelian fashion, me peripeteia in this tale of economic wandering coincides widi Allworthy's recognition of his original bills: Old Nightingale, die financier or broker, announces: "I have the Money now in my own Hands, in five Bank Bills, which I am to lay out either in a Mortgage, or in some Purchase in the north of England." The Bank Bills were no sooner produced at Allworthy's Desire, than he blessed himself at die Strangeness of die Discovery. He presently told Nightingale, that diese Bank Bills were formerly his, and then acquainted him with the whole Affair, (p. 920) This scene is one in a long series of recognitions, of Mrs Waters, Partridge , Tom's ancestry, his goodness, each in its own way a classic anagnorisis. But this recognition of money is by far the most curious, for it is difficult to say what, exactly, is being recognized here. Is it some true identity, ownership, or value which diese bills reflect or retain and which, in die economy of plot, must be revealed and recognized? How does Allworthy recognize his notes, and, moreover, why has Fielding interpolated diese little tales of monetary loss and restoration? The monetary subplot in Tom Jones reflects a conservative desire to stabilize cash and paper credit, and to represent and contain currency within traditional patterns of property and possession; a desire which is determined by a specific stage in the development of money. That is to say, in a view we could characterize as "late feudal" (following Ernest Mandel), Fielding domesticates cash transactions and commodities by inscribing diem in a traditionally fixed, hierarchical (and agricultural) economy, where real property is the essential model for all otiier types of property, especially currency.2 Another way to put this is to say diat Fielding represents cash transactions in die traditional comic form of die "lost and found": objects, characters, and values are lost, temporarily separated from their rightful owners, so diat die comic plot can eventually reassert order by restoring lost objects to their owners, as if possession were a ttanscendent relation , unaffected by die vicissitudes of time, accumulation, and profit.3 The 2 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres (London: Verso, 1978). Samuel L. Macey characterizes Fielding's attitude towards money as "aristocratic" (Money and the Novel: Mercenary Motivation in Defoe and his Immediate Successors [Victoria, B.C.: Sono Nis Press, 1983], p. 122.) Michael McKeon writes of "Fielding's profound distaste for monied culture" (77i« Origins ofthe English Novel [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987], p. 503). 3 Fielding's comic order has been discussed in terms ofProvidence. See Aubrey Williams, "The Interpositions of Providence and the Design of Fielding's Novels," South Atlantic Quarterly 70 24 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION History of Tom Jones, a Foundling opens witii the discovery of a "lost" object, an infant, and die plot of die novel is concerned with die process of restoration, returning the infant to his family and thereby restoring me heir to his inheritance.4 But the protagonist is only one of a multitude of objects lost and found in die novel; children, estates, wives, jobs, reputations, even a kingdom follow the same lost and found pattern , in which a temporary, unworthy claimant is foiled and die object is inevitably returned to its rightful owner: notiiing is finally lost in Tom Jones.5 Here we will focus on one representative example of mis ordering pattern, die loss and restoration of money, for Fielding observes a kind of comic rule of conservation, under which it is finally impossi- (1971), 265-86 and Martin Battestin, The Providence of Wit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Henry Knight Miller connects the persistence of romance form (cycle and return) with providential thematics (Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones" and the Romance Tradition [Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1976], especially chap. 2, pp. 22-41). What appears as transhistorically romantic to Miller I argue has peculiar historic specificity, for the comic interpositions of providence work to support a late aristocratic concept of property. On the differences between Fielding's and earlier providential plots, see Leopold Damrosch, Jr, "Tom Jones and the Farewell to Providential Fiction," in Henry Fielding, Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 221-48, reprinted from God's Plot and Man's Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). See also John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 186-87. 4 Homer O. Brown, in "Tom Jones: The Bastard of History," boundary 2 7 (1978), 201-33, observes that Tom remains a bastard and therefore ineligible to inherit the estate. He is a "genealogical aberration" (p. 207), a disruption of the dynastic narrative. Similarly, Brown sees the allegorical or métonymie function of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 in Tom Jones as "history as order" (p. 224). From Coleridge to its most classic statement in R.S. Crane ("The Plot of Tom Jones " [1950], reprinted in Essays on the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. Robert D. Spector [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965], pp. 92-130), the favourite word used in all sorts of descriptions of the novel and its plot is "order" or "ordered." Studies of Fielding's mematics are similarly filled with concern for the "whole," as in Damrosch: "Fielding's poetics finds significance in the whole, and is committed to showing how everything is interconnected. This narrative epistemology is reflected in the world of social relationships" (p. 236). So too, Paul Hunter opens his discussion of Fielding's elaborate patterns of symmetry with the observation that "Viewing Tom Jones is a little like viewing the eighteenth century as a whole" (Occasional Form [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975], p. 167). The fragility of this totalizing order, at least for the later Fielding, is explored by CJ. Rawson in Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Terry Castle also explores die subversion of apparent order in Amelia in Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 177-252. Here, I am interested in exploring both the economic dimensions of the fictional order, and the historical forces it is arrayed against. 5 A similar conservation or continuity is apparent in Fielding's psychology: see John S. Coolidge, "Fielding and 'Conservation of Character,'" in Modern Philology 57 (1960), 245-59. Similarly, Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that Fielding's characters are not subject to transformation: "The characters in eighteenth-century fiction show less capacity for essential change than we like to believe is possible in life, and die limited possibilities for change they have depend upon external kinds of learning about the world outside themselves." Imagining a Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 7. PROPERTY AND POSSESSION IN FIELDING 25 ble to lose anydiing.6 The story of money in Tom Jones is bound up with die nature of currency in die period and its inherent instability, and so we need to understand die situation of currency in eighteenm-century English society before we can understand its function in Fielding's fiction. The monetary system in eighteenth-century England was far more unstable tiian anything we are accustomed to now. To conservative observers such as Alexander Pope, Jonatiian Swift, and Henry Fielding, this instability must have accentuated dieir hostility to a cash nexus, die growing dependence on short-term credit and public debt.7 In Pope's Epistle to Bathurst, for example, paper credit exacerbates all of die dangerously changeable, movable, fluid qualities of money, as opposed to the stability and constancy represented by land and the hereditary estate, a metonym for genealogical and possessive continuity:8 Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly! Gold imp'd by thee, can compass hardest things, Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings; A single leaf shall waft an Army o'er, Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore; A leaf, like Sibyl's, scattered to and fro Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow, (lines 69-76) Pope's and Fielding's hostility must be understood in the context of the social impact of paper money in early modern Europe, die significance of which Fernand Braudel explores: "If most contemporaries found money a 'difficult cabbala to understand,' this type of money, money that was 6 Brian McCrea in Henry Fielding and the Politics ofMid-Eighteenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981) focuses on "the central role of property in Fielding's political and social writings" (p. 201), which he characterizes as Lockean: the purpose of the state is to protect property: "Fielding was unequivocal and unsparing in his defense of property" (p. 203). "His political career is understood, most truthfully, as one instance of the transformation of Whiggism from a revolutionary political philosophy that challenged royal authority to a conservative political philosophy that protected the values and interests of a property-owning elite" (p. 207). 7 For the history of these developments, see P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development ofPublic Credit 1688-1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967). 8 See Earl Wasserman, Pope's Epistle to Bathurst (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), for a thorough discussion of economics in the poem. 26 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION not money at all, and this interplay of money and mere writing to a point where die two became confused, seemed not only complicated but diabolical. Such tilings were a constant source of amazement."9 More suggestively, Marc Shell explores the correlation between language and money as representation: money, which refers to a system of tropes, is also an "internal" participant in the logical or semiological organization of language, which itself refers to a system of tropes. Whether or not a writer mentioned money or was aware of its potentially subversive role in his thinking, die new forms of metaphorization or exchanges of meaning that accompanied the new forms of economic symbolizadon and production were changing the meaning of meaning itself.10 The purpose of this paper is not simply to identify the notes in Nightingale 's hands, but radier to explore one dimension of die historicity of Fielding's discourse by focusing on his representation of money and value; diat is, to connect Fielding's narrative with a particular stage in the development of money.11 Tracing similar forms of representation of value through Fielding's fiction, we can discern a consistent resistance to capital. 9 Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 358. 10Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modem Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 3-4. 1 1 Fredric Jameson offers a suggestive model for this connection between money form and fiction: "The art-novella, then, may be governed by the experience of money, but of money at a specific moment of its historical development: the stage of commerce rather than the stage of capital proper. This is the stage Marx describes as exchange on the frontiers between two modes of production, which have not yet been subsumed under a single standard of value; so great fortunes can be made and lost overnight, ships sink or against all expectations appear in the harbor, heroic travellers reappear with cheap goods whose scarcity in the home society lends them extraordinary worth. This is therefore an experience of money which marks the form rather than the content of narratives; these last may include rudimentary commodities and coins incidentally, but nascent Value organizes them around a conception of the Event which is formed by categories of Fortune and Providence, the wheel that turns, bringing great good luck and then dashing it, the sense of what is not yet an invisible hand guiding human destinies and endowing them with what is not yet 'success' or 'failure,' but rather the irreversibility of an unprecedented fate, which makes its bearer into the protagonist of a unique and 'memorable' story" ("The Ideology of the Text," in The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971-1986 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), I, 52). For other relevant studies of literature and economics, see Max Novak, Economics and the Fiction ofDaniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic ofNaturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Roy R. Male, Money Talks: Language and Lucre in American Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981). PROPERTY AND POSSESSION IN FIELDING 27 The story of eighteendi-century English currency, in terms of botii economic practice and economic theory, turns on diree interrelated factors: die rapid expansion of the economy; the establishment of mechanisms for credit on which that expansion was predicated; and the shortage of government-issued currency—copper, silver, and gold coins. Until 1797 coin was die only legal tender in England, and yet a vast number of financial transactions had to be carried on by otiier means. Because silver fetched a higher price in die Far East and on die continent than the price established by statute for die English Mint, newly minted silver coins, and later gold and copper as well, were culled from circulation, melted down, and shipped abroad as bullion—an illegal, but profitable and tiierefore common practice. The long-term history of a coinage always follows an endless cycle of issue, eventual debasement from wear, clipping, and counterfeiting, leading to the necessity of large scale recoinage . In this period, however, recoinage (in 1696-98 and 1773-74, as well as die devaluation of die guinea in 1717) had little or no effect on die number of coins in circulation, precisely because the new, heavier coins were the readiest targets for melting, following Gresham's Law that "bad money drives out good." The result of such culling and melting was a severe and chronic shortage of coin of die realm throughout die century.12 What coin remained in circulation was disastrously debased : in 1777, die government found that a sampling of £300 in silver, which ought to have weighed 1200 ounces, weighed 624 ounces.13 In theory, currency was based on its "intrinsick" value as precious metal, but mis theory bore little or no relation to practice because die silver coinage was bodi severely debased and entirely inadequate to the volume of circulation. Lord Lowndes claimed in A Report containing an Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins (1695) that "the Moneys commonly currant are Diminished near one Half, to wit, in a Proportion sometiiing greater than that of Ten to Twenty two." Light silver "when offered in Payments, is utterly Refused, and will not Pass, and consequently dodi not serve the end or Purpose for which it was made." He goes on to describe the social disruption caused by inadequate coinage, a disruption which is essentially a crisis in the concept of value: 12T.S. Ashton writes that "in 1773, coin of the realm was hardly obtainable" (An Economic History ofEngland: The Eighteenth Century [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1955], p. 186). 13CR. Josset, Money in Britain: A History ofthe Currencies ofthe British Isles (London: Frederick Wame, 1962), p. 112. 28 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION In consequence of the Vitiating, Diminishing and Counterfeiting of the Currant Moneys, it is come to pass, That great Contentions do daily arise amongst the King's Subjects, in Fairs, Markets, Shops, and other Places throughout die Kingdom, about the Passing or Refusing of the same, to the disturbance of die Publick Peace; many Bargains, Doings and Dealings are totally prevented and laid aside, which lessens Trade in general; Persons before they conclude in any Bargains, are necessitated first to settle die Price or Value of the very Money they are to Receive for their Goods; and if it be in Guineas at a High Rate, or in Clipt or Bad Moneys, diey set the Price of dieir Goods accordingly, which I think has been One great cause of Raising the Price not only of Merchandizes, but even of Edibles, and odier Necessaries for the sustenance of the Common People, to their great Grievance.14 The monetary system maximized instability and as a consequence suffered chronic shortages and periodic crises, widi increasing frequency towards the end of die century.15 In all senses, this was a transitional system , neither realist nor nominalist, or both realist and nominalist, based neitiier on bullion nor on paper money. Such contradictions are evident everywhere in die pamphlet literature, much of which argues against lowering die value of money—recoinage by way ofdebasement—by insisting on die "intrinsick" value of precious metal. Locke's influential argument in Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering ofInterest and the Raising of the Value of Money encapsulates all the contradictions of eighteendi-century monetary theory: silver has both real and imaginary value, and intrinsic and extrinsic value. Silver coins are indistinguishable in value from an equal amount of bullion, for value is based on solely on quantity, but value is also based on quality (fineness), and botii quantity and quality are in turn guaranteed by die autiioritative stamp which functions as a pledge to insure its weight and fineness. In short, silver money is a physical, material object tiiat has value, but mat value is based on conventional agreement: precious metals have no real inherent value, but are accepted only by custom and contract: 14William Lowndes, A Report containing an Essayfor the Amendment ofthe Silver Coins (London, 1695), reprinted in John R. McCulloch, ed., A Select Collection ofScarce and Valuable Tracts on Money (1856, reprinted New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966), p. 233. Josset confirms Lowndes's picture (pp. 112-13). 15"Banking statutes do appear to have maximized instability. ... English banks remained small, with six partners or fewer, and unincorporated. Yet, in their operation (in great contrast with most continental states) no public control was exerted on the extent of their note issues, their cash ratios, their reserves, cheque transactions or expansionist credit policies. Thus, instability was maximized" (Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1914 (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 36). PROPERTY AND POSSESSION IN FIELDING 29 Now Money is necessary to all diese sorts of Men as serving both for Counters and for Pledges, and so carrying with it even Reckoning, and Security, diat he, that receives it, shall have the same Value for it again, of other tilings that he wants, whenever he pleases. The one of these it does by its Stamp and Denomination; the other by its intrinsick Value, which is its Quantity. For mankind, having consented to put an imaginary Value upon gold and Silver by reason of their Durableness, Scarcity, and not being very liable to be Counterfeited, have made diem by general consent the common Pledges, whereby Men are assured, in Exchange for them to receive equally valuable things to diose they parted with for any quantity of these Metals. By which means it comes to pass, that the intrinsick Value regarded in these Metals made die common Barter, is nodiing but the quantity which Men give or receive of them. For they having as Money no other Value, but as Pledges to procure, what one wants or desires; and they procuring what we want or desire, only by their quantity, 'tis evident, that the intrinsick Value of Silver and Gold used in commerce is nothing but their quantity.™ The inherent value of silver is a point which Locke never tires of repeating: "Silver, i.e. die quantity of pure Silver separable from the alloy, makes the real value of Money. If it does not, coin Copper with the same Stamp and denomination, and see whether it will be of the same value" (p. 145). And then, in answer to the question, why then do we not simply exchange in bullion, by weight, he answers simply that it would be inconvenient, for it is hard to tell the difference between fine and mixed silver.17 Despite its function as pledge, in Short Observations on a Printed Paper Intituled, For encouraging the Coining Silver Money in England, and after for keeping it here (1695), Locke dismisses die value of die stamp: "die Stamp neither does nor can take away any of the intrinsick value of die Silver, and dierefore an Ounce of Coined standard Silver, must necessarily be of equal value to an Ounce of uncoined standard 16John Locke, Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade (1696, reprinted New York: A. M. Kelley, 1968), p. 31. This volume contains: Some Considerations ofthe Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money (1691); Short Observations on a Printed Paper Intituled, For encouraging the Coining Silver Money in England, and after for keeping it here (1695); and Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value ofMoney. Wherein Mr. Lowndes Argumentsfor it in his late Report concerning "An Essayfor the Amendment of the Silver Coins," are particularly Examined (second edition, 1696). Page numbers refer to this collection of pamphlets. 17"The Stamp was a Warranty of the publick, that under such denomination they should receive a piece of such weight, and such a fineness; that is, they should receive so much silver. And that is the reason why counterfeiting the Stamp is made the highest Crime, and has the weight of Treason upon it: Because the Stamp is the publick voucher of the intrinsick value" (Addenda to Some Considerations, pp. 146-47). 30 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Silver" (p. 2). The fundamental argument here is a tautology—silver is silver: "it will always be true, that an Ounce of Silver coin'd or not coin'd, is, and eternally will be of equal value to any otiier Ounce of Silver" (p. 10). In 1757, eight years after Fielding's Tom Jones appeared, we find die same insistence on permanence and immutability of silver coins, and die same language of real, inherent and intrinsic worth in Joseph Harris's An Essay upon Money and Coins: "Money ... differs from all commodities in this, that, as such, its value is permanent or unalterable; that is, money being the measure of the values of all other tilings, and that, like all otiier standard measures, by its quantity only; its own value is to be deemed invariable." Along widi die emphasis on immutability, we find the same hostility to paper: after a consideration of the physical properties money should have—scarcity, immutablity, easy divisibility, ability to be tested for fineness, resistance to wear—he argues against experimentation widi paper money: We see that some of our plantations, make a shift without any money, properly so called; using only bits of stamped paper, of no real value. But, wherever that material, which passeth as or instead of money, hath not intrinsic value, arising from its usefulness, scarcity, and necessary expence of labour in procuring it; there, private property will be precarious; and so long as that continues to be the case, it will be next to impossible for such people, to arrive at any great degree of power and splendour.18 Yet a mere twenty years later, Adam Smith could claim that "the substitution of paper in the room of gold and silver money, replaces a very expensive instrument of commerce widi one much less costly, and sometimes equally convenient. Circulation comes to be carried on by a new wheel, which costs less botii to erect and to maintain [i.e., as fixed capital, which he has been examining] than the old one." When he writes of bank notes, paper and silver specie, it is to assert dieir fundamental equivalence: "these notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence diat such money can at any time be had for them."19 The gold and silver which circulates in any country, and by means of which the produce of its land and labour is annually circulated and distributed to the proper 18Joseph Harris, An Essay upon Money and Coins Part I, 1757, reprinted in McCulloch, pp. 372 and 374. 19Adam Smith, The Wealth ofNations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 309, 310. PROPERTY AND POSSESSION IN FIELDING 31 consumers, is, in the same manner as the ready money of the dealer, all dead stock. It is a very valuable part of die capital of die country, which produces nodiing to the country. The judicious operations of banking, by substituting paper in die room of a great part of this gold and silver, enables the country to convert a great part of this dead stock into active and productive stock; into stock which produces something into the country. The gold and silver money which circulates in any country may very properly be compared to a highway, which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and com of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either. The judicious operations of banking, by providing, if I may be allowed so violent a metaphor, a sort of wagon-way through the air; enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures and cornfields, and thereby to increase very considerably the annual produce of its land and labour. The commerce and industry of the country, however, it must be acknowledged, though they may be somewhat augmented, cannot be altogether so secure, when they are thus, as it were, suspended upon the Daedalian wings of paper money, as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver.20 There is not a simple continuum of monetary theory from Locke to Smith; rather, Locke, Harris, and Smith exemplify positions taken throughout the century. And even if Smith's view appears to be sharply divergent from those of the earlier two writers, the seeds of diat view are implicit in the deep contradictions found tiiroughout Locke's economic theory. The suspicion and hostility to nominal or paper currency evident in Locke and Harris were shared by otiier writers throughout the century. But, as a consequence of die constant dearth of coin, merchants, manufacturers , bankers, and employers regularly had to resort to the use of various forms of scrip or symbolic money, from metallic tokens stamped with die emblem of a shop's guild to elaborate systems of paper money, all issued by small, private institutions.21 (In order to protect die monopoly of the Bank of England, banking laws limited banks to no more than six partners.) Business was transacted in negotiable, interest-bearing securities in addition to coin of die realm.22 Of the various forms of paper 20Smith, p. 341. 21As Sir Albert Feavearyear puts it in his history of English money, "Roughly speaking, paper money of all kinds in the first half of die century stayed within the sphere occupied by cheques today. Outside that sphere coin alone was used" (The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], p. 160). 22According to T.S. Ashton, "Some of these including exchequer bills, navy bills, and lottery tickets (as also the short-term obligations of the East India Company, the Bank of England, and the South Sea Company) could be used to settle accounts between individuals, and may perhaps, therefore, be thought of as falling within the so