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Etonnamment peu d’etudes critiques ont porte sur l’influence de Jonathan Swift sur la litterature victorienne. Cet article est fonde sur l’idee que Swift est l’un des intertextes importants, quoique sous-estimes, des œuvres de George Eliot, notamment dans son dernier ouvrage, Les Impressions de Theophraste Untel. Certaines references explicites ou allusions indirectes dans son œuvre de fiction, ainsi que certaines mentions dans ses notes de travail, ses journaux et sa correspondance, montrent qu’Eliot connaissait et appreciait l’œuvre de Swift, en particulier Le conte du tonneau et les Voyages de Gulliver. Se pencher sur Swift permet d’expliquer certains aspects originaux de son ecriture, tels que son penchant anti-scientifique ou sa tendance a la satire. Des travaux recents ont etudie la presence des animaux chez Eliot a partir des notions darwiniennes ; cependant, une analyse de l’influence du quatrieme livre des Voyages de Gulliver sur son ecriture permet de mieux comprendre ses representations des animaux, en general, mais aussi son utilisation de la satire et de la fable, en particulier dans Les Impressions de Theophraste Untel.

In their collection of essays,The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics(1999), Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee identified and named a movement in economic literary studies and sought to place it alongside a cultural turn in economics. In their introduction, they offer possible reasons for the proliferation of scholarship in literature, culture, and economics. One is that “the critical pendulum has decidedly swung back toward historicist methods” and away from formalist approaches (3); another is that the 1980s thrust “interest rates, stock market speculation, takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and so on, into the public attention as never before since the 1930s” (4). Today, the proverbial pendulum has swung back toward formalism, and it is now surprising to encounter their comparison of the 1980s to the 1930s because we have become so accustomed to claim that comparison to the 1930s for our own post-2008 economy.

The fifteenth-century Florentineworld that George Eliot studied and recreated inRomola(Cornhill Magazine, July 1862–August 1863) was characterized by the idea of love between males and the practice of sex between males. Same sex desire took various forms from the love of the older teacher for his pupil to the illegal but common practice of penetrating adolescent boys, for which many fifteenth-century Florentine men were prosecuted, particularly under the regime of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola (1494–98). The monasteries themselves constituted an intense, all-male community of voluntary celibacy. These various sexual behaviors co-existed with more visible heterosexual institutions and practices, from the often politicized arranged marriages of the wealthy elite to the casual coupling of the peasant classes.

In 1860, John Hollingshead, writing in All the Year Round, complained about the inadequate if not incompetent auditing practices of joint-stock companies. Only when company managers and shareholders are compelled to "call in professional accountants, and resort to an 'independent investigation,"' he argued, do they learn that "real auditing is a necessary part of a business organization, and that it becomes all the more costly the longer it has been neglected" (325). Victorian auditing scandals, as well as the crashes, frauds, and swindles that characterized the nineteenth century's burgeoning culture of investment, can sound uncannily familiar, affecting the way we read both the past and the present. It is tempting if not inevitable, for example, to see the dot-com bubble of the 1990s in the Railway Mania of the 1840s, or to view the Enron "debacle" as a contemporary equivalent of Overend and Gurney's collapse in 1866. In such crises, similarities between our own economy and that of the Victorians become apparent-not least because they reveal the extent to which, in both cultures, the stock market is the financial "heart" of the nation. Moving beyond simple correspondences, this special issue explores the processes through which investing, particularly investing in the stock market, became a more pervasive part of Victorian financial life. It examines the institutions and technologies that mediated between companies and those who invested in them and that, increasingly, conducted the emotions that investors were beginning to have about the performance of their "stocks and shares." Studying these distinctively Victorian ways of facilitating investment affords us a means to understand Victorian culture better as well as to trace the genealogies of current monetary assumptions and practices. Not only do we see the Victorian period through our own cultural lens, then, but we also see in nineteenth-century Britain some of the formative occasions in the subsequent history of finance. Thus the cultural moment of the

Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2