Antidomestic
The Afterlife of Wills and the Politics of Foreign Investment, 1850–85
Marlene Tromp
Wills have an extraordinary afterlife. They are not neutral or independent documents that distribute wealth and property and then get filed away in the proper pigeonhole. They operate in a complex social matrix of human relationships, economic structures, desires, and politics, and, I would contend, they are framed by the social systems they inhabit and have the power actively to shape the systems into which they enter. Wills have effects not only because the “dead reach out of the grave” to manipulate the behavior and the life circumstances of the individual beneficiaries (or disappointed heir-hopefuls) but also because they have a highly social afterlife that is worth investigation. Their impacts are broadly distributed, and they shape economics and the social consciousness outside the family circle, marking norms of status assignment and social relations. Moreover, because they operate in a network of ideas, even subtle shifts in willing can have social impact. “Bad wills” in particular—those that defy or disrupt the social norms of the moment—can reveal a great deal about unspoken cultural values, and specific enactments of (or failures to enact) those values can affect the social consciousness, not just the individual lives they directly touch, particularly because wills were a public affair and were widely reported in the nineteenth century. Raising wills to this level of social and structural analysis renders them visible as highly significant social and personal investments—a transfer of assets with the hope of their growth or maintenance in the future. Wills transmit entire bodies of wealth (inherited wealth accounted for 80–90 percent of national wealth in the Victorian period, according to Thomas Piketty1) to sites the testators perceive as being most worthy of investment, frequently the family.2 Because wills are deeply enmeshed in both the economic and the social, examining bad wills in the mid- to late nineteenth century can give us a lens through which to view economic anxieties during a period in which the economic terrain was rapidly shifting.3
In this chapter, I explore how real, material testamentary practices in mid-Victorian England became abstracted into the social consciousness and came to engage with deep social concerns, as well as to open an assessment of how these two elements impacted one another. I want to better understand, through this analysis, how testamentary events—where the money went—became abstracted through and into emotional anxieties and across landscapes to the investment of national wealth more broadly. This is not, then, just a study of metaphor (how personal bequests represented an “investment” in the domestic—or away from it) but also a study in metonymy: how a specific event (an individual’s will gifting a particular dollar amount to a person or organization), as a part of an enormous body of events (bequests across the nation), came to represent much deeper and broader social anxieties (about “where the money went”). In other words, I examine how an act such as Uncle Albert gifting his wealth to a society, instead of his nephew, came to represent a broader social concern about economically draining not merely the family but even the nation and willing “away” came to be seen as an un-English investment of resources.4 I hope, in this way, to bring to the study of this testamentary economic history a new insight born of my training in literary and cultural analysis, believing that such a transgression of field boundaries will have the capacity to enrich both areas and to render visible patterns in economics that are often far more detectable in/as movements of language, metaphor, and metonymy.
A last will and testament offers a particularly significant point of analysis because it was a transfer of wealth that was nearly always expected to be domestic (familial and local)—so much so, in fact, that we rarely even consider the possibility of it operating as a kind of antidomestic investment. What were, socially speaking, considered “bad wills” can be linked with foreign investment. Bad wills reveal more than an anxiety about the integrity and preservation of family, bloodlines, or the social elite; they also, in an abstraction of the economic into the social, reveal an anxiety about foreign investment. Posthumous investments of wealth, such as buying foreign lands, investing in foreign governments or foreign goods, and bequeathing wealth to foreign-born or antidomestic (illegitimate or clandestine) children often provoked a powerfully negative response. In this way, such wills spoke to a deep social anxiety about the foreign more broadly, what I have called elsewhere “economic xenophobia.”5 A will that leaves family wealth to those outside the domestic space becomes “unnatural” and serves as a metaphor for the “unnatural” failure to make domestic investment in the nation.
THE DANGER OF FOREIGN INVESTMENT
My interest in the social politics of economic investment, particularly investment in foreign states and industries, led me to this project. Very often, studies of economic patterns focus primarily on economic behavior, giving human affect wide berth as a predictive tool. In other words, the human elements of investment are perceived to be too volatile and irrational to provide meaningful insight into the movements of the market. Just as meaningful as the economic practices of a people (in what did they invest? how much did they save? what did they bequeath to surviving family and friends?), however—though not for their predictive value—are the affective impulses that underlie those practices. One can experience deep fear or anxiety about a practice and still engage in it. Reluctance to explore these affective patterns in addition to their behaviors can leave gaps in our understanding of the Victorians. While studying these attitudes cannot provide information about economic practices (though it may help us understand disruptions of patterns or anomalies), it can tell us about the culture: in this case, about certain attitudes in Victorian Britain toward foreign investment in its myriad forms.
In a recent article, I argue that we can detect an important affective trend—anxieties about the dangers of foreign investment—before they were expressly named and addressed in policy by the late-century parliamentary acts and financial literature.6 By the century’s end, despite the ongoing practical enthusiasm for foreign investment, there was a great deal of articulable anxiety about it as well. By 1875, the House of Commons had created a committee to investigate and report on financial investment in the foreign. Their report, “Loans to Foreign States,” issued warnings about disreputable foreign states and their agents, who solicited investment in morally bankrupt and fiscally dangerous nations and their growth.7 A year later, in 1876, Alexander Innes Shand noted that in the glory days of the past, “domestic trade” was brisk and people were wealthy, and that it might have been better if the money had been “confined to England.”8 Unfortunately, he indicates, “many investors strongly fancied foreign” investment.9 While they may have been aware of risks (as one might be with all economic speculation), the impulse to earn, and potentially earn big, kept them in the market. Indeed, as Ranald C. Michie notes, the government, too, felt compelled to stay in the game and avoided regulation of such investment and the serious fraud that they argued plagued it until 1939, even while they regulated other arenas in the public interest, such as employment and food adulteration.10 Michie suggests that the move to foreign investment helped investors find the high “yields they desired” when domestic development slowed.11
Significantly, because we can trace high rates of investment in the foreign, we have often failed to attend seriously to the cultural anxieties that circulated around and accompanied this investment. Take, for example, Shand’s compellingly xenophobic critique, in which he complained that British investors became “dazzled” by foreign investment in India, Turkey, Egypt, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and St. Domingo but that such practices were based on the mistaken notion that “the swamps were solid land” like the “New Forest or the Home Park at Windsor.” Moreover, he warned, the British investor might “[j]udg[e] foreigners by his experiences of our own honorable Stock Exchange[;] it no more struck him that there might be an easier standard of financial morality among Indians, and half-breeds, and curly-headed negroes, than that there might be a bottom to the deposits even of those innumerable sea-fowl that whiten the islands of the Peruvian seaboard.”12 Though one might earn a fortune in foreign investment or lose profoundly in an entirely domestic investment—as many did with railway shares crashes—the domestic debacles receive only a mention, and the bulk of Shand’s essay concentrates on detailing foreign dangers, along with his fear that the English would not see these dangers until it was too late.
This discussion of foreign investment clearly indicates economic xenophobia: a perception of an inherent financial danger in the foreign that, itself, created real risk for the English investor, rather than that risk being created by the various economic projects in which one might invest. Others agreed with Shand. The Accountant, for example, remarked that “upon the whole we adhere to this country because it is not certain that any foreign investments can be converted at the day of need readily in large quantities and without excessive loss.”13 These ideas were mirrored in other publications,14 such as The Economist. In an oft-repeated theme, they noted, “We are not much inclined generally to recommend foreign investments [because] the best class of English industrial securities, the ordinary stocks and shares of the leading railways and banks [are] decidedly preferable as they are more secure and yield a better return[. Still,] the disposition of investors who have a predilection for foreign securities towards South American Governments is now very noticeable.”15
Ironically, of course, railways and banks, though often profitable investments, were also the source of the most spectacular domestic crashes of the nineteenth century. Still, the experts depicted potentially volatile domestic investments as preferable to foreign ones. The turn to international investment has often—even in analyses in this century—been perceived as the source of Britain’s ultimate financial decline. Despite a widely shared and tenacious belief among the Victorians and their children that such investment was harmful to the British economy, recent research has indicated that this belief was mistaken.16 This is not to say that the decline of the British economy at the turn of the century has some other simple cause. The source of a bank failure, let alone a shift in economic precedence in the global marketplace, cannot be pinpointed to a single event. Economic relations are complex, and economies and businesses never exist in a vacuum but are interdependent. This interdependency makes narrow attribution of causes (“foreign investment caused the decline of the British economy” or “foreign investment fostered the growth of the economy”) incomplete. What is striking is the story that gets told about foreign investment, the social narrative that is revealed by and helps produce these anxieties.
The persistence of a limited and flawed narrative—that foreign investment was necessarily and inherently more dangerous and that such investment would ultimately cause a national collapse—tells us a great deal about the ideologies from which that narrative emerged. In other words, the widespread, but often misplaced or disproportionate, anxiety about foreign investment (particularly in non-Western foreign landscapes) on behalf of the individual and the homeland can provide insight into Victorian attitudes more broadly, even if it did not decrease such investment. The willingness to place money in the “foreign,” despite the sometimes catastrophic losses that drove the creation of the select committee on foreign investment in the House of Commons, indexes an economic xenophobia that escalated alongside the increasingly globalized economy.
In this chapter, I turn from the investments of the living to those of the deceased to look for similar patterns. I examine testamentary documents against the backdrop of increasing anxiety about foreign investment in the period, particularly focusing on 1850–85. While any time window might be revelatory, I have chosen these years for two reasons. First, they close in on 1875, a year in which a spate of articles emerged discussing the particular dangers of foreign investment. Second, these years bracket the 1866 financial panic triggered by the collapse of Overend, Gurney and Co., a major financial event that brought down almost all the international/foreign trade financial houses in London (an event that might be said to parallel the fiscal crises of this decade, which saw the near-collapse of Citigroup and Bank of America, as well as insurance giants such as AIG).17 In this chapter, then, I explore domestic wills (and, relatedly, national will) as a part of the chartable anxiety about the movement of wealth abroad. Understanding a will as a particular kind of investment with an afterlife in the social world, reaching far beyond the individuals named beneficiaries, can help us flesh out the narrative of foreign investment in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Testators, I propose, increasingly submitted to fears about foreign investment as the years passed and the economy became increasingly global. As xenophobic anxieties increased nationally, testamentary documents and debates came to speak about the dangers of antidomestic investment, both literally and as a metaphor for the national fiscal landscape.
THE STORY OF WILLS
Turning first to fictional representations of wills can help us to flesh out the social narrative around testamentary documents and also give us some sense of their significance to Victorians. In his massive study of capital, Thomas Piketty notes that nineteenth-century novels “are full of detailed information about . . . the contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women, including their marital strategies and personal hopes and disappointments. [They depict effects] with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match.”18 Examining fiction also situates wills in the frame of their broader social work, rather than marking them as isolated, individual documents with no afterlife. They can often seem isolated because there is typically little additional archival documentation to provide contexts for historical wills, unless they were the wills of public figures or involved significant contested wealth. Fiction throughout the period anticipates the anxieties that were later subject to legislative inquiry. A novel that just precedes the widespread attack on foreign investment in the mid-1870s and might be said to revolve around wills and their codicils is George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872).19 This novel speaks, often quite explicitly, to a pressing anxiety about antidomestic wills.
Many of the novel’s tensions, for example, emerge around a less-studied will in the novel: that of old Featherstone and his widely condemned choices. Not only does he give pitifully small bequests to his grasping siblings (who call his a “fool’s will” [339]) but also—most shockingly—his will primarily benefits his “frog-faced” illegitimate son, Joshua Rigg, publicly disinheriting his dear nephew Fred Vincy (413). Moreover, Rigg’s “vile accent” gives him away as a foreigner and the shrewd Mrs. Cadwallader identifies him as being “of another blood” (328). Featherstone’s devastating bequests damage his whole community by denying the care of his home and property to his domestic circle, for those family members not only would have tended it best but also would have kept the money at “home.” (His deathbed repentance for this terrible error does not come in time to more properly invest his wealth and shape the future of his estates but instead points up his choices as a failure.) While no one, perhaps, regrets him cutting his out-of-town siblings, who have wealth enough of their own, and Fred Vincy morally benefits from making his way in the world, Featherstone’s will is still depicted as cruel and mistaken. The failure of this will is demonstrated when Rigg, an “alien” in the community (472), sells the estate and lands out of the family to the soon-to-be-shamed Bulstrode, an equally dangerous investment that fiscally enriches the antidomestic Rigg but leaves the estate improperly attended.
Strikingly, given the parallel I wish to make here, Rigg plans to become a money changer in a seaport—a highly materialized form of foreign fiscal engagement, matching the antidomestic investment Featherstone made in him. Despite the fact that he usurps other legatees, Rigg wants nothing more than “to look sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations” (520). Such a practice might be profitable (the coins, here, propagate), but it also reflects an anxiety about national and fiscal miscegenation, metaphorically represented by Rigg. Deepening this narrative of domestic failure, Bulstrode, who buys the estate, is the progenitor of a bad will. He deceived his first wife about her daughter from a previous marriage, so that he comes into the money that should have been the daughter’s—undermining the very domestic investment his wife sought to make. A pretentiously pious liar and cheat, Bulstrode experiences an exposure and fall that demonstrates what a poor investment both his lost wife’s and Featherstone’s willed money has made. The resolution to this drama comes only when local boy Fred, who has made an honest living on home soil, can return as the caretaker to Stone Court and live happily ever after with his chosen and properly English bride.
With similar callousness and cruelty, Casaubon altered the will he had prepared with the “reliance and knowledge” of Dorothea’s family to limit the transfer of his wealth to his wife Dorothea. By threatening to disinherit her if she marries his cousin, this will is a double blow. Not only was Casaubon’s family left in poverty through a prior bad will, but the new will prohibited keeping the money in the family. Sir James Chettam calls the codicil a mean “and ungentlemanly action” (484). While the changes were designed to prevent money from going to Casaubon’s European cousin—a diversion considered appropriate by the majority of the community—to do so at the cost of disinheriting his thoroughly English wife (and casting aspersions on her fidelity and judgment in the same act) was an intolerable price to pay and, ultimately, served to transfer the body of the wealth outside the family altogether.
What no critic has yet suggested is that the wills in Middlemarch all enact antidomestic investment: each disinherits a member of a normalized, domestic family circle and redistributes domestic wealth—cutting a nephew for a foreign illegitimate son; a daughter for an unethical second husband; and an English wife for an indefinite “away from Dorothea.” Their afterlife disrupts normative patterns, and their most shocking acts are antidomestic: Featherstone’s distribution of money to an illegitimate foreigner (Joshua Rigg) and Causabon’s disinheritance of his English wife. Moreover, the narrator tells us, in reference to the tale of wills, that “while I tell the truth about loobies, my reader’s imagination need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords; and the petty sums which any bankrupt of high standing would be sorry to retire upon, may be lifted to the level of high commercial transactions by the inexpensive addition of proportional ciphers” (341). These stories of wills, for Eliot, metaphorically offer larger statements about the system in place. These men’s failures—the failure to make a domestic investment—plague the community.
In her excellent discussion of promissory obligations, Melissa J. Ganz has noted that “Eliot makes clear that an ‘indefinite promise of devotion to the dead’ is too broad and exacting,”20 but, in fact, this is precisely what wills often demand and what we demand of them. Wills call for indefinite promises of devotion (in life and beyond), and we expect such devotion in return. Compellingly, as Cathrine O. Frank has noted, as the form of the will became more and more regularized over the course of the century, the layperson’s testamentary power became increasingly limited.21 Significantly for my argument, it became increasingly difficult legally to give money outside the family. As the Morning Chronicle put it, “[T]he law gives [land] to a man’s heirs and [money] to his next of kin.”22 In virtually every contested case of a “bad will” reported in The Law of Charitable Bequests, which details at great length foreign investments in wills, the finding is in favor of the “heir in law and next of kin,” returning the money to the domestic and away from the foreign landscape that would have received it as a testamentary gift.
We can even find this fictional representation of the dangers of willing away money to the foreign much earlier than the mid-1870s. In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, a similar disinheritance of a family member is enacted by Philip Fairlie (Laura Fairlie’s father) with his sister the Countess Fosco—a fact that is often given little attention in analyses of the novel. As the narrator puts it, Mr. Fairlie “had lived on excellent terms with his sister Eleanor, as long as she remained a single woman. But when her marriage took place, somewhat late in life, and when that marriage united her to an Italian gentleman[,] . . . Mr. Fairlie disapproved of her conduct so strongly that he ceased to hold any communication with her, and even went the length of striking her name out of his will. . . . [H]e hated the foreigner simply and solely because he was a foreigner.”23 Fairlie, as it turns out, is right to be wary—Eleanor no longer seems properly English, and Fosco is the worst kind of villain. Indeed, the drama of the novel takes place largely because the clever Italian mastermind has an interest in dispatching Laura to gain a £10,000 legacy that Eleanor would gain from her brother’s will only upon Laura’s death (perhaps Philip’s error, then, is to leave any loophole at all by which the foreigner could get access to his wealth). Also striking about the will is the insistence on domestic investment that underpins Laura’s will. Her solicitor proposes in the event of her death that she might give her money to “any relative or friend whom she might be anxious to benefit,” unless she dies leaving children, in which case “their interest, naturally and necessarily, superseded all other interests whatsoever” (150). The domestic investment is the “natural” investment, and her solicitor is outraged when the marriage can only be settled if Laura’s will benefits Sir Percival directly (and not as a life interest, which would have been normative, but as real property), rather than those whom she has elected. Not only was Percival born a foreigner and raised and tutored abroad, but also this transmission of wealth fails the blood test of domestic investment. Rather than simply having the life interest due someone who has married into the family, Percival gains the right to take Laura’s real property out of the Fairlies’ domestic circle.
Similarly, in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), Lady Isabel’s father squanders his fortune, leaving an empty will with nothing for his daughter. So grotesque are his sins that moneymen, “half of them” Jews, who are marked in strikingly anti-Semitic ways as “internal foreigners,”24 gain access to what he has left behind.25 The community feels it was incumbent upon the Earl to have “made some settlement” for his beautiful, unmarried daughter, Isabel (143), but they learn, instead, that the lost Earl failed to channel some share of his former wealth into his most important domestic investment: his family. Every penny of his disposable goods goes to the “foreign,” a failure described in the strongest terms as “iniquitous,” “[u]npardonably improvident,” and “rank madness” (145). Indeed, had some fortune been settled on his daughter, the most “natural” investment for a portion of his fortune, rather than with the foreign money men, the dramas at the center of the novel could never have occurred.
In Dickens’s novels, these same patterns abound. In Little Dorrit (1857), for example, the eponymous heroine has her beloved burn the secret will that would have made her rich, while the money goes instead to support a family business in China, so that they might purify the family story of this great crime. Indeed, so great is the need for purification, that the new, young Clennam family must begin their lives without the benefit of foreign monies. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) works to right the failed will, cleansing the dangers of “foreign” wealth and returning the rightful power to will domestically to the English home. In this novel, the “wicked” Colonel Herncastle has stolen a valuable Indian diamond. While his will attends to his own well-being by commanding that the Moonstone be cut up in the event of his violent death, this protection does not extend to others, and through his will he intentionally endangers his family. He dies of natural causes and leaves the diamond to his niece, Rachel Verinder. A holy Indian relic, the Moonstone has pursuers who are willing to rescue the diamond from the hands of the English at any cost. It is, as Franklin Blake describes it, a “legacy of trouble and danger to his sister, by the means of her child.”26 This, then, is a thoroughly dangerous bequest of foreign goods in the domestic English family. The will produces death, debt, and heartbreak, before the troubles can be unraveled along a circuitous path to a homely domestic marriage, free forever of the diamond’s taint.
Many critics have defined wills and the problems they can create as a trope of Victorian fiction. Few, however, have looked at the patterns of testation to ask what fictional wills might suggest about the larger social context that Victorians inhabited. These wills provide a social backdrop simultaneously underscoring the importance of the will to the social life of Victorians and pointing up anxieties about the ways in which wills invested the wealth of the deceased. Against this backdrop, the larger structure of social anxieties and metaphors into which each individual will entered, I now turn to the legal documents themselves and to anxieties about testation in the mid-nineteenth century to explore what else they can tell us about the Victorians.
WILLS THAT MADE STORIES
Wills in the nineteenth century followed increasingly standardized forms. In fact, as Charles I. Nelson and Jeanne M. Starck have noted, while wills seem to give an extraordinary power to a testator (you can will your goods to whomever you like and under whatever conditions), court cases throughout the written will’s relatively short history embody a “struggle . . . in the courts between the desire to give effect to the manifest intent of the testator and the hesitancy to do so because of formalities imposed by statute.”27 Frank concurs, indicating that there was a “strong preference in trials concerning the validity of wills to trust to the sufficiency of the form itself and to measure its faults by how far it deviates from the rules of statute.”28 The regularization of the will left less control in the hands of the testator than some fiction might have suggested, making fiction a more powerful indicator of anxieties than of consistent material practice. Virtually every will in the National Archives of Great Britain executed for sailors at sea in the nineteenth century (a legal requirement for military personnel), followed a standard form, with nearly every one leaving the sailor’s “Wages, Prize Money Allowances, and other Sum or Sums of money, as now are, or hereafter may be due to [him] for [his] service on board the said Ship, or any other Ship or Vessel, of the Royal Navy, together with all . . . other Estate and Effects whatsoever and wheresoever” to his wife, children, or parents—the standard legatees for bequests. While one could certainly place some boundaries or limitations on monies—for example, Georgiana Quentin could quite composedly (and legally) bequeath wealth to her daughter, Augusta Compton, and her devoted servant, Maria Smallwood, “for [their] sole and separate use and benefit, exclusive of [their] present or future husband,” ensuring that their new wealth would be free from any man’s “debts, control, [or] interference”29—one could not so easily disinherit one’s blood relatives. Antidomestic investments happened, to be sure, but not without friction and cost. Practically exempt, of course, from these expectations were people without living immediate family. Philemon Pippen and Septimus Worrell, for instance, could bequeath money to an array of distant relatives and even friends, because neither of them had a wife or children, and such practices did not actively disinherit closer relatives.30
Significantly, these formulaic means of executing wills helped normalize social conventions in legacies, exercising the social will over the individual will. Violating these forms with antidomestic investments—leaving money away from the family or the nation was an unusual but not unprecedented phenomenon in Victorian wills—produced significant resistance. One could not simply dispose of one’s property as he or she pleased; the social sanction for producing domestic investment was high, though to act otherwise was, in some cases, possible. Baron Holland, for example, left control of his properties exclusively to his wife, who had quarreled with her sons. She restricted their access to the wealth and estates, and five years later (1845) died with a will that the heir to the title described as “unnatural, her children being almost excluded.”31 “Her will,” as Pat Jalland explains in her excellent book Death in the Victorian Family, “detailed an immense list of legacies and annuities, chiefly to those outside the family, as well as the £300 to her executors to pay for her own monument.”32 Indeed, so naturalized is the assumption that the wealth should remain in the domestic circle that Jalland herself is unremittingly critical of the choices made by Elizabeth, Lady Holland. In an entirely different fashion, but with similar effects, Woronzow Greig made antidomestic investments. He died legally intestate in 1865 because his official will, deposited with his banker, had been lost (Greig was a clerk of the peace in Surrey and had followed all the legal forms), and the family could at first only discover a codicil.33 This sent the bulk of his wealth to his mother and sisters as next of kin. Worse yet, a later uncovered “unproved” will shocked his widow, Agnes, after a long and loving marriage—just as Featherstone’s had his expectant family—with the news that her husband had an illegitimate daughter, by then forty years old and living in Australia, to whom he had secretly been sending money for years.34 Such antidomestic investment inevitably drew negative public attention. As early as 1861, the Daily News was complaining about “strange bequests” but noting that John Stuart Mill had written about the “readiness which jurors exhibited to convict of lunacy men whose ways and opinions depart[ed] in any degree from the beaten tracks of custom.”35 In other words, the strange bequest would always be noted, but what made a bequest “strange” were the social customs it violated and what those customs meant individually and socially to the Victorians.
This might not seem a stunning revelation, but we have so naturalized the expectation that our wealth should benefit our immediate families, our domestic space, that a social phenomenon at stake here has escaped our attention. These very unquestioned expectations have often rendered it invisible. If we explore these examples in depth, they suggest that just as anxiety about foreign investment began to peak culturally, domestic investment in the shape of wills became a major fictional construct, one designed to enact “right” outcomes in the event of failed investments or to purge the evidence of the failure. The fictional wills, in addition to the accounting they provide of dramatic legal examples, serve as an index of real people’s anxieties about where the nation’s money was going, and they may have served as one means of calling that money home. The obsession with wills in Victorian narrative, an obsession Richard C. Burke points up in his discussion of last wills in Trollope’s fiction,36 has historically been accounted for as merely mirroring the impact of wills on the lives of real individuals.
I would argue, however, that there is more at play. In these complex social documents, the articulations of domestic investment were national, as well as familial, and bad fictional wills began to bend and shape the consciousness of the public narrative of familial values, primogeniture, and the gender and social codes that mapped its landscapes. Frank locates this relationship in the debates over the individual’s rights in willing, explaining that the conservative position on property embodied precisely the relationship I have described: that “the land represents the nation (in the same way possessions represent familial identity) and as such is meant to be preserved for it’s [sic] own sake.”37 Certainly, most laws supported such values.
As early as 1837, the Victorian Wills Act (1 Vict. c. 26, xviii) provided “that every will made by a man or woman shall be revoked by his or her marriage except a will made in exercise of a power of appointment when the real or personal estate thereby appointed would not in default of such appointment pass to his or her heir, customary heir, executor, or administrator or the person entitled as his or her next of kin under the statute of distributions.”38 Frank notes that, while regularizing the legal structure under which property and wealth were transmitted, the range of legal findings across the nineteenth century and into the next granted “freedom from the testator’s potential caprices or mercurial moods [but also] completed the will’s transformation from the ‘speaking likeness’ of the testator’s personal character to a uniform and utilitarian legal text of his social identity.”39 This was reinforced by the Mortmain Acts, which were increasingly utilized by the middle classes and more fully developed during the nineteenth century, particularly in their nineteenth-century incarnations (the much-used “9 Geo II c. 36 commonly but inaccurately called the Statute of Mortmain” and the Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act of 1888).40 Indeed, by 1855, section 22 of the Charitable Trusts Amendment Act stipulated that “[a]ny trustee or other person may . . . transfer any stock or pay any money to the Official Trustees of Funds in trust for any charity” but “not, of course, investments in foreign stocks or bonds.”41 “Of course”—because individual wills have a larger life in the metaphors of the social fabric. When one left one’s immediate family the bulk of his or her wealth, the testator was praised. When Catherine Elizabeth Boscawen’s will was described in the Englishwoman’s Review and Home Newspaper and a catalogue of her legatees was given, the journal reassuringly remarked that her “eldest son [was] amply provided for.”42 These were the wills that matched the social will and produced domestic investment that was both individually domestic, within the family circle, and socially domestic, for the good of the nation.
The vexing will of Mr. T. Brown dedicated a significant portion of a wealthy man’s monies to professorships in Oriental languages and gave a £30,000 legacy for a “hospital or sanatorium for animals” with a “view to the promotion of their own happiness and the advancement of knowledge.”43 So distressing was this will that a bill was introduced in Parliament against it by the charity commissioners with the hopes of altering its very specific terms. Earl Granville remarked that the will “almost invite[d] opposition,” to which the House rousingly declared, “Hear, hear!” Lord Cairns responded that the “question was not whether Mr. Brown had made the wisest will in the world, or whether their Lordships could make a better will for him. Perhaps it would have been wiser if that gentleman had left his large property to the members of his family,” but that the testator had been clear in his intentions and they were thus obliged to honor them. The administrators of the University of Dublin were not permitted to carry out their plan to distribute the money differently, though the great debate on the matter indicates the kind of rupture in social norms an antidomestic will represents. Particularly ruffling were the companion animals that benefited by the will, as they could not properly be read as a “domestic” investment, however homely they were.
The expectation that one might wish to leave money abroad for “charity” increased as the economy became more global, and along with that increase came a similar increase in the codes for such testation. So troubled was this kind of investment that foreign testation also became increasingly subject to a legal tug-of-war—evidence of cultural anxiety. In 1867, the British and Foreign Bible Society actually printed instructions in their annual report defining how to make a bequest to the society, as they had been “deprived of several valuable Legacies.”44 This anxiety on the part of the British and Foreign Bible Society was matched only by the anxiety that money might be left away from the family (and the nationally domestic space) to benefit other nations. One fiercely contested will disinherited an heir-at-law in favor of a Bible society that would distribute Bibles in “China or India.”45 Another will in 1870 dedicated a bequest for “strictly educational purposes” in India.46 While agencies and religious organizations benefiting from charitable bequests outside the domestic family circle and national space devoted themselves to the broader “Christian family,” these kinds of bequests came in for the most bitter satire in publications such as Punch, particularly as forms that disinherited the “natural” legatees.
Punch, for example, acerbically describes the will of a “Sir Pultus Potboiler,” who granted a variety of charitable organizations his wealth but left his “orphan daughter (a cripple) to the kind care of the Relieving Officer.” In another, “Firebrass Netherby Millstone” left his millions to the likes of the Society for the Propagation of Epidemic Diseases, the Society for the Encouragement of Corporeal Punishment, and the Society for Putting Down the Poor, giving his only sister “£100 in Turkish Bonds, £100 in Mexican do., £100 in Spanish do.”—all worthless shares—and “to his only son, Thomas (who married without the testator’s consent), he leaves the sum of one shilling sterling.” The only figure in this satire who leaves reasonable bequests, generously providing for his nieces and nephews, really has nothing to leave. Major Timothy O’Dear of Cork had been “thrice bankrupt, and . . . departed this life in a condition of complete insolvency.”47
The case of Sarah and Mary Ann Bruce provides one striking example of a contested will that plays out this anxiety about foreign and domestic investment. Though daughters of an indigo planter in India, the sisters had been largely brought up in London, and they came into a sizable £100,000 fortune upon his death in 1827. Neither ever married, and Sarah, the eldest and beneficiary of £60,000 of the fortune, managed the business. The two lived together harmoniously until 1850, when they moved apart over a dispute. Sarah, who had come into £40,000 upon her father’s death, took up residence in Brighton, where she grew close to her first cousin’s daughter, Mrs. Irving, and Irving’s two daughters—Bruce’s closest living blood relatives apart from her own sister. In 1873, the two Bruce sisters were reconciled and executed a joint will. Sarah had previously contacted the India Office and expressed her desire to leave her fortune to a charitable cause benefiting Indian girls, and according to the court documents, she later “persuaded” Mary Ann to follow her lead. Together, their fortune would found an institution for half-caste female orphan children in Calcutta. In October 1874, however, Mary Ann executed a new will, which benefited Mrs. Irving and her family. At Mary Ann’s death, the case immediately went to court: the Irvings appealing to have the new will recognized, the state arguing that Mary Ann had not been of sound mind when the new will was penned. The sides settled outside of court—in a dramatic interruption of the proceedings with an offer for a plea bargain—and Mary Ann’s fortune was split between the founding of the Indian institution and the Irving family. While the women’s wealth still generously contributed to the founding of the girls’ orphanage (making an investment in the well-being of Indian girls), what is striking about the case is the willingness of the court to domesticate the money and the language of the papers that suggested that it was the antidomesticity of the will that was in dispute.
The government openly argued in internal memos that the Irvings’ case was weak. Indeed, as A. G. MacPherson (later a judge of the High Court of Calcutta) explained, the witnesses who had already come forward in the case did not favorably present evidence for the Irvings. As MacPherson put it in a legal memo, “the Witness Gardiner,” a medical doctor present at the execution of the second and contested will, “said a good deal which told very much against the Plaintiff’s [Irvings’] case.” Indeed, he went further: “Up to the present time, nothing has occurred to make me doubt that the Secretary of State had a good case”—in other words, that the state could have shepherded all the money to the Indian charity—“and [that he] would have succeeded.”48 Still, the state agreed to a striking compromise with the Irvings in which half of Mary Ann Bruce’s wealth was rechanneled to the domestic: nationally and familially. Moreover, the Irvings even initiated two other complicated and costly proceedings, on the rather absurd grounds that the much wealthier Sarah was indebted to her younger sister, Mary Ann, in hopes of gaining additional sums from Sarah’s estate—money that had already been unquestionably bequeathed to the Indian charity. Even though these proceedings were ceased (on the advice of the Irvings’ council, as he had not “legal proof” for the claims), the state financed over £800 of the Irvings’ attorney’s fees in the actions.
Remarkable in this circumstance was the fact that despite the weakness of the Irvings’ case, MacPherson willingly acceded to granting a stunning 50 percent of Mary Ann Bruce’s wealth to the Irvings, to the domestic investment over the antidomestic. While this still left a significant sum to the charity that Sarah Bruce had held so dear, the loss of £20,000 was not trivial in the building and financing of the project. Striking, too, was the fact that MacPherson described the reportage on the testimony in court as “substantially correct,” with one significant exception; he noted that the reporting on the Gardiner testimony was “incorrect and incomplete” in that it failed to indicate the damage it made to the Irvings’ case. Moreover, the papers foregrounded the fact that both Sarah and Mary Ann Bruce had been illegitimate children. Although they were disturbingly antidomestic themselves, the transmission of their complete fortune out of the nation-state was intolerable, even against the weakest claims, and was constituted to “provide for . . . friends and relatives.”49
Such charity as that in which the Bruce sisters participated became a vexing condition for testamentary documents, because it became a likely location for foreign investment. Increasingly, the courts found that “unless it appeared on the face of the will that the charity was foreign, it should be presumed to be a domestic one,”50 a rule that protected wealth against legacy duties. Legal debates increasingly identified principles with regard to bequests to foreign charities. The first principle identified is “whether the proposed object would be a good charity in England; and if it is not so the gift is void.”51 Moreover, the courts found that “land in England [could not] be devoted by will to foreign charities.”52
Ritu Birla, in her study of economics, empire, and India, argues that “[i]n England, the particular definition of charity as a gift benefitting the public, and so the very category of the public trust, was clarified by a series of statues beginning in midcentury with the Charitable Trusts Act of 1853,” which saw increasing revisions and statutes through 1894.53 She notes that in 1888, “the Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act repealed the Georgian Mortmain Act of 1736, a measure that had been directed specifically at the explosion of ‘mischief’ of ‘improvident alienations or dispositions made by languishing or dying persons . . . to uses called charitable uses.’”54 Such “improvident alienations” were both domestic and national and became a “public mischief” that violated “common utility.” Of particular concern in these acts was the alienation of property to another state. As Birla argues, “[s]uch deathbed alienations” were believed to be “designed to transfer property away from lawful heirs. The interest in clearly defining charitable uses, and so public benefit, thus began as a control mechanism for the legitimate transfer of property across generations, and the legitimate reproduction of wealth—questions that would plague case law in India.”55 While Birla’s interest is in how the laws bifurcated public and private life in a way that Hindu and Muslim traditions did not, she notes, “The regulation of charitable and religious endowments in India began with developments in case law in the 1870s,”56 precisely the period in which I note increased anxiety about foreign bequests and squarely in the period in which the Bruces’ estate could be parsed to make the domestic investment that simply was not supported by the evidence at hand.
By 1877 the anxiety about such antidomestic investment had reached nearly a fever pitch (one we can see in much U.S. rhetoric today), and Reynold’s Newspaper could explicitly remark of foreign charity, “Nearly £500,000 have been raised for the famishing people of India. Is nothing to be done for the famishing Britisher at home?”57 Antidomestic wills proved equally disturbing, and they provide us one locus for evaluating the increasingly more fervent “control mechanisms” (in Birla’s words) to manage the distribution of English monies outside of the family and the state. The afterlife of wills is one we can continue to study to this day. Even though testamentary documentation from the nineteenth century is incomplete and often comes to us most fully when a case was contested in the courts, future research might examine more fully the exploratory claims I have made here about the increasing anxiety about antidomestic investment across the last half of the century. Available to us are the hundreds of documents in the British Library and National Archive as a means to understand in what ways, precisely, the control of the testator might have been repressed in the “national interest” and, in this way, to better understand how the Victorians’ sense of wills and testaments might have been shaped by larger economic structures and anxieties that plagued the period.
NOTES
1. Thomas Piketty, Capital, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 401.
2. Even when particular heirs are not considered high value by the testator, for example, the bequest might still favor the family, valuing the long future of the bloodline. Indeed, so socially significant was such familial investment that antilapse statutes designed to prevent unexpected factors (such as the death of a legatee prior to the execution of a will) from permitting wealth to “lapse” into intestacy became increasingly explicit in the nineteenth century and ensured that wealth remained in tight familial circles. See 1 Vict. c. 26, xxxii and xxxiii (1837); and Richard Trott Fisher, An Act for the Amendment of the Law with Respect to Wills (1 Vict. c. 26) with Remarks Explanatory of Several Clauses, the Object of Their Enactment, and the Alteration in the Law Thereby Effected (London: Saunders and Benning, 1837), 19–20. I discuss these statutes at greater length below.
3. Of course, wills are also powerful lenses into familial relations, social contexts, the construction of subjectivity through material goods, anxieties about death and the persistence of identity, and many other aspects of Victorian life.
4. Structurally, we might think of the way that it could be seen as “unpatriotic” or “un-American” to criticize the “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq in the wake of September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and of the way in which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation techniques were considered justified—both of which overbroadly rendered what it means to support your nation and its values and too narrowly rendered what it means to criticize an act of war or torture.
5. For a fuller discussion of economic xenophobia, see Marlene Tromp, “The Pollution of the East: Economic Contamination and Xenophobia in Little Dorrit and The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” in Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, ed. Marlene Tromp, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 27–55.
6. Tromp, “Pollution of the East.”
7. “Loans to Foreign States,” Reports from Committees (London: House of Commons, 1875), 4:xlx. See Tromp, “Pollution of the East.”
8. Alexander Innes Shand, “Speculative Investment,” Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine 120 (September 1876): 298.
9. Ibid., 301 (emphasis added).
10. Ranald C. Michie, “Gamblers, Fools, Victims, or Wizards? The British Investor in the Public Mind, 1850–1930,” in Men, Women, and Money, ed. David R. Green, Alastair Owens, Josephine Maltby, and Janette Rutterford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 157.
11. Ibid., 160–61.
12. Shand, “Speculative Investment,” 301.
13. “Low Rate of Money,” Accountant, October 9, 1875, 10.
14. In the same year, a letter to the editor of the Accountant more strongly stated this fear, charging that we must “open the eyes of the nation to the necessity of bringing about some radical changes in our present mode of trading and financing” and noting that England’s future might be made bright only when the state’s investors realized that “the whole of [their] losses under the heading of money lent to foreign states and undertakings which were never intended to pay . . . will have to be written off some day and then perhaps English people will learn that there is some connection between high interest and low security.” Expert Comptable [chartered accountant], “Is a Crisis at Hand,” letter to the editor, Accountant, July 10, 1875, 5.
15. “Bank Returns and Money Market,” Economist, October 21, 1871, 1274.
16. Benjamin R. Chabot and Christopher J. Kurz, “That’s Where the Money Was: Foreign Bias and English Investment Abroad, 1866–1907,” Economic Journal 120 (September 2010): 1056.
17. This incident, at the heart of these two decades, embodies many of the concerns raised in this essay. Overend, Gurney and Co. was a discount house that bought and sold promissory notes and bills of exchange, the latter of which were primarily used in international trading and linked the house to most foreign trade in the country. While the house had been on shaky financial ground for years, making bad loans on little security, Walter Bagehot still described the response of British interests, the government, and the Bank of England as “sound, cautious, and admirable” ([Walter Bagehot], “The Panic,” Economist [London], May 19, 1866, 581–83, available at The Economist Historical Archive, 1843–2006 [uploaded December 20, 2011], 582, http://gdc.gale.com/products/the-economist-historical-archive-1843-2007/). Though Bagehot acknowledged that the managers had “evidently misused” money, he believed that the British system had triumphed in reasserting order, and he went on to remark that the “worst bitterness of the panic [was] already spent and past” a little more than a week after Overend’s collapse. Further, this event was described by Bagehot as a “credit panic,” a fear of not being able to access loan money. Given Overend, Gurney and Co.’s primary work in foreign markets, the failure to access credit for investment speaks to the central theme I address here. Finally, to speak of economic “panics” underscores the role of affect and anxiety in the movements of markets, even when questions of reality or rationality are put aside.
18. Piketty, Capital, 2.
19. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin, 1994). In the text, subsequent references to this edition will be noted in parentheses.
20. Melissa J. Ganz, “Binding the Will: George Eliot and the Practice of Promising,” ELH 75, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 579.
21. Cathrine O. Frank, Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture, 1837–1925 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
22. [“Validity of Litigated Wills”], Morning Chronicle, January 19, 1850, 4.
23. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (New York: Penguin, 2003), 149. In the text, subsequent references to this edition will be noted in parentheses.
24. Heidi Kaufman’s “Jewish Space and the English Foreigner in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda” (in Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, ed. Marlene Tromp, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013], 249–66) fleshes out the insider/outsider status of Jews in Victorian Britain, demonstrating how Jews triggered xenophobia anxiety, even when they were admired citizens.
25. Ellen Wood, East Lynne (New York: Broadview, 2000), 134. In the text, subsequent references to this edition will be noted in parentheses.
26. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (New York: Penguin, 1998), 54.
27. Charles I. Nelson and Jeanne M. Starck, “Formalities and Formalism: A Critical Look at the Execution of Wills,” Pepperdine Law Review 6 (1979): 331.
28. Frank, Law, 88.
29. “Last Will and Testament of Dame Georgiana Quentin, 11 Great Cumberland Street, Middlesex,” National Archives [of Great Britain], February 26, 1853, catalogue reference PROB 11/216 (emphasis added).
30. “Will of Philemon Pippen, Gentleman of No 11 Charlotte Street, Bath, Somerset,” National Archives of Great Britain, April 28, 1856, catalogue reference PROB 11/2231.
31. Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 229.
32. Ibid., 249 (emphasis added).
33. “Court of Probate,” Law Times Reports, February 3, 1865, 681.
34. Jalland, Death, 227.
35. “The House of Lords Was Engaged . . .” Daily News, June 26, 1867, 2.
36. Richard C. Burke, “Accommodation and Transcendence: Last Wills in Trollope’s Novels,” Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 291–307.
37. Frank, Law, 19.
38. “Revocation of Wills by Marriage by Birth of Child by Both at Common Law and under English and American Statutes,” New York Law Review 1, no. 3 (March 1895).
39. Frank, Law, 219.
40. Leonard Syer Bristowe and Walter Ivimey Cook, The Laws of Charity and Mortmain (London: Reeves and Turner, 1889), 26.
41. Ibid., 544–45 (emphasis added).
42. “Wills and Bequests,” Englishwoman’s Review and Home Newspaper, October 8, 1859, 123.
43. “Brown’s Charity Bill,” Daily News [London], June 26, 1867, 2.
44. Sixty-Third Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: Benjamin Pardon, 1867), ii–iii.
45. “Law Intelligence,” Newcastle Courant, November 14, 1851, 6.
46. “The Presbyterian Church,” Belfast News-Letter, February 10, 1870, 3.
47. “Wills and Bequests,” Punch, August 20, 1881, 81.
48. A. G. MacPherson, Judicial Department, Minute Paper, “The Action Irving v. The Marquise of Huntington,” June 28, 1881, British Library, J&P 922/81.
49. Probate and Divorce Division, The Standard, June 27, 1881. [clipping], British Library, J&P 922/1881.
50. “Law Intelligence,” Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, November 12, 1875, 2.
51. Amherst D. Tyssen, D.C.L, The Law of Charitable Bequests (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1888), 288.
52. Ibid., 291.
53. Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 69.
54. Ibid. (emphasis added). The Mortmain Act of 1736 was designed to “restrain the disposition of lands whereby the same become unalienable”: “Whereas Gifts or Alienations of Lands Tenements or Hereditaments in Mortmain are prohibited or restrained by Magna Charta and divers other wholesome Laws as prejudicial to and against the common Utility nevertheless this public Mischief has of late greatly increased by many large and improvident Alienations or Dispositions made by languishing or dying Persons or by other Persons to Uses called charitable Uses to take place after their Deaths to the Disherison of their lawful Heirs For Remedy whereof be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons” the Mortmain laws. 9 George II c. 36.
55. Ibid., 69.
56. Ibid., 72.
57. “Christmas Appeal,” Reynold’s Newspaper, December 23, 1877, 4.