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In Hock: Pazvning in America from Independence through the Great Depression. By Wendy Woloson. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. 233. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Jane KamenskyWe are all in hock now, Wendy Woloson points out in the final chapter of this deeply researched and lucidly written study of pawnbrokerage in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Having feasted for decades on credit-card debt - "pawning's mirror opposite" (182) - many Americans now find themselves in famine, pawning consumer goods bought dear with plastic for a little cash loaned at equally high interest rates. Long on the downswing, pawning is making a comeback: The number of pawnshops in the United States has nearly doubled since 1988. Surely the time is ripe for Woloson's probing history of the pawnshop seen from both sides of the counter and many other angles of vision as well. Using an enormous variety of evidence, including business records, personal documents, trade cards, satiric prints, sheet music, dime novels, penny papers, and much more, In Hock redeems pawnbrokerage from stereotypes that have haunted the trade since its inception. Woloson reveals instead a vibrant and complex facet of the emerging industrial economy in cities ranging from Boston to Birmingham to Leadville, Colorado. At its best, Woloson's study makes a worthy companion to Stephen Mihm's A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2007), Seth Rockman's Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2010; reviewed earlier in this issue), and other recent books probing the murky interstices of early American capitalism.Woloson opens In Hock with a visit to her neighborhood pawnshop, the bright and cheerful McGarry's, a family business serving Philadelphians for two generations. "The place is neat and clean," she writes, "the atmosphere relaxed and friendly. The radio is tuned to NPR" (1). Pawnbrokers aren't who we think they are, in other words. Bankers, rescuers, and retailers by turns, they're a far cry from the seedy lowlifes of popular imagination. Primetime stereotypes don't get the pawners right, either, Woloson discovered. She herself pawned a gold necklace for $40.00 - another $6.00 due in five months if she wants to redeem it - all in the service of explaining to her reader the basic terms of the strange trade that is her subject.The reductive stereotypes Woloson wants so badly to dispel are the subject of her second chapter. The caricature of the pawnbroker as a rapacious and marginal figure and his customers as impoverished victims is an old one, arriving in British North America in the mid eighteenth century, before pawnbrokerage itself took root. Stories and images printed in London and reprinted in the colonies beginning in the 1 760s made pawnbrokers "anathema to the emerging capitalist system" (22). Cast as greedy, irrational foreigners (often Jews), pawnbrokers were merchants gone through the looking glass: They took goods and gave money with strings attached, doubly impeding their customers' pursuits of happiness. Woloson marshals mountains of evidence on this point, and her readings of these cultural texts are nuanced and persuasive. But starting the book with a lengthy explication of the stereotypes she wishes to dispel works against her agenda. She devotes nearly a quarter of In Hock to documenting what the pawnbroker was not.Far more revealing are the tour de force middle chapters of In Hock, which offer a painstaking social history of pawning from the perspectives of brokers, clients, and police. In America as in Europe, pawnbrokers followed immigrants to cities, where new kinds of lending arose to meet the needs of newly arrived populations. …

This essay breaks the critical impasse regarding Henry James’s ambivalence toward “the Jew” in his late works, by rethinking this figure through the logic of cosmopolitan detachment, diasporic mobility, and the gift economy. It traces how social and economic exchange enacted by liminal characters produces dynamic, contingent forms of value (economic, aesthetic, social, moral), and exposes concealed links between sacred and secular economies. Specifically, James redeems the avaricious Jewish pawnbroker who, both central and marginal, best captures the position of the modern cosmopolitan writer at the nexus of capitalist and gift exchange.

In a 1782 letter, Robert Morris broke the bad news to Richard Butler, a colonel in the Continental army, that he couldn't loan him any money. "Mortifying as it is," Morris confided, because of the scarcity of cash "the Jew Brokers and others have informed me in the course of my inquiries that Sub Rosa they frequently get 5 per Cent per month from good Substantial men for the use of Money with pledges lodged for the repayment." He added that, "before the establishment of the Bank [of North America] they frequently got ten per Cent and upwards."1Yet Morris's "Substantial men" were not the only ones who found themselves in financial straits. The less economically able-whose capital rested in material possessions rather than large-scale commercial enterprises-also obtained loans by pawning goods, offering up more modest forms of capital as loan collateral. Part of the informal economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pawning was something people resorted to when they needed cash but didn't have it, when tax bills came due or accounts had to be settled by something other than paper currency. Neighbors often offered a horse, plow, or similar piece of capital as collateral in exchange for a short-term loan. Innkeepers, who had ready cash and access to a diverse and mobile clientele traveling with all manner of personal belongings, also became de facto pawnbrokers in the eighteenth century.2While the ability to secure small, short-term cash loans by pawning personal goods was an important economic survival strategy for early Americans, it was a practice that has been largely overlooked by scholars, who have typically aimed their sights on the more visible (and legitimized) economic activities of merchants, retailers, and farmers. But pawning, which began as one among many kinds of informal (and often undocumented) transactions in the early American economy, became, by the nineteenth century, an essential way for the middling sort to obtain short-term loans.3It is tempting to describe pawning as a "marginal" activity. Certainly the pawnbroker appeared to be a marginal figure operating on the fringes of urban areas. And his customers, unconnected to the credit economies of the merchant elite and constantly living on the financial margins, needed someone like the pawnbroker. Pawning, in fact, was anything but marginal. It constituted an essential way to obtain ready cash for everyone but the privileged few, and was therefore a mainstream economic activity. The small, short-term cash loans provided by the pawnbroker supplemented laborers' insufficient wages, buttressing the industrial capitalist system within which they operated. Yet a specious distinction separating the "marginal" from the "mainstream," drawn in their own interests by the early republic's privileged and wealthy (the ones who did not want to acknowledge the inequities of the early American capitalist economy) then held sway, and continues to shape scholarly analysis.An appreciation of the shifting nature of pawning and pawnbroking in America from the late eighteenth century to the antebellum era requires an understanding of the workings of the process and the roles played by the main actors: the pawners and the pawnbrokers who participated in the transactions, and their critics, whose increasing anxiety about pawning reflected broader anxieties about the emergent capitalist system and its effects on their notions of traditional American society.The first reference to pawnbrokers in America complained that they enabled people to waste money. The Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens, regarding Dutch settlers in 1657, documented concerns brought to the magistrates of the New Netherland colony "against the many tapsters and tavernkeepers" who profited from money that drinkers should have instead been spending on their families. Moreover, when their customers' cash was gone, the offending proprietors accepted furniture, clothing, and other goods in pawn, enabling their clientele to "obtain the means of continuing their usual drinking bouts. …

This essay examines the role of pedagogy and memory in the 1965 film adaptation of The Pawnbroker, a story of a survivor unable to mourn. I show that, in contrast to most pawnbroking films, this one transforms the pawnshop into a classroom in which the survivor attempts to give lessons in literacy, history, and values to his assistant, a Puerto Rican. Despite the pawnbroker's efforts, the lessons ultimately fail to give the assistant the cultural legitimacy that he seeks. I also suggest a number of ways The Pawnbroker works to establish its own legitimacy. First, a critical voice explicitly challenges the Europe-to-America model of transmission. Second, the film's representation of Holocaust memory emerges from an innovative synthesis of the visual ¯ashback and verbal inarticulateness. Third, The Pawnbroker self-consciously plays off the most in¯uential postwar European example of filmic memory, Hiroshima, mon amour, and points to an alternative model of coming to terms with the memory of trauma.

The well-heeled widow, Mrs Dorothea Casaubon, has respectable relatives and friends who are eager to guard her from the upstart pretensions of the bohemian Will Ladislaw. Her sister Celia quotes the local phrase-maker: "Mrs Cadwallader said you might as well marry an Italian with white mice!" (Eliot 532). Dorothea ruefully ponders this label, and still remembers it months later, when other derogatory labels are being added. " Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker was a phrase which had entered emphatically into the dialogues ... at Lowick, Tipton and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of placard on poor Will ' s back than the ' Italian with white mice " (829). The annotatore of the Riverside, Penguin, Norton, and Clarendon editions of Middlemarch are all silent on this rather intriguing comparison for Will Ladislaw; and since several generations of students of Middlemarch have sought information in vain, I accept the task of explanation. I feel particularly qualified, both as a long-time admirer of the much maligned hero of Middlemarch, and as one who reared hundreds of white mice in her youth, including one who travelled with me (usually in my shirt) from Kenya to England and back. Italians have been frequently associated with white mice in Victorian England, both in fiction and history. 1111 start with the fiction. Elizabeth Gaskell's tale of Manchester life, Mary Barton (1848), features an Italian child with a pet white mouse, who together reinforce that novel ? s thesis that the most generous protectors of the poor are the other poor. Mary Barton, the working-class heroine, has much else on her mind as she hurries through the streets near her home: her impetuous course was arrested by a light touch on her arm, and turning hastily, she saw a little Italian boy, with his humble show box,?a white mouse, or some such thing. (284)