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Affordable credit remains out of reach for many low-income households. Industry supporters have long argued that small loans serve borrowers overlooked by other financial institutions. Still, reformers have not let them cast off the predatory loan shark moniker. The core issue is little debated: poor people face a near-permanent shortage of money. The motivations to restrict the working poor’s access to high-cost credit have varied dramatically. Research reports and studies arrive at differing conclusions. Passionate spirits motivated a protective ethic. The entangled relationship between capitalism, poverty and the state’s response is complex. Since the private markets will continue to innovate, and the demand for loans will likely remain, applying some lessons from history can inform policymakers seeking economic fairness for the poor and vulnerable.

Jurgen, a comedy of justice, by James Branch Cabell is one of the most classical pieces of American fantastic literature and has inspired many writers, especially Terry Pratchett, that follows the idea of parodying medieval-inspired countries with a touch of magic, displayed mostly for laughs. Jurgen tells the story of a pawnbroker/poet that one day makes the Devil a favour and the Devil, grateful, grants him for a period of one year the possibility of returning to his youthful self to enjoy life and have love adventures. In the fantasy-medieval land where he lives, the Arthurian legend is real, and he will encounter the great characters such as Guinevere or Anaitis, the Lady of the Lake and have love affairs with every single one of them. But, at the end of this period, he returns home with some material for his poetry and to the normal life of a miserable married man.

Early in George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda, Daniel's life is set on a decisive new path by his fleeting attraction to an object in a shop window. He is turning into a side street off Holburn Road when:his attention was caught by some fine old clasps in chased silver displayed in the window at his right hand. His first thought was that [his aunt] Lady Mallinger, who had a strictly Protestant taste for such Catholic spoils, might like to have these missal-clasps turned into a bracelet; then his eyes travelled over the other contents of the window, and he saw that the shop was that kind of pawnbroker's where the lead is given to jewellery, lace, and all equivocal objects introduced asbric-a-brac. A placard in one corner announced –Watches and Jewellery exchanged and repaired. (344; bk. 4, ch. 6)Daniel then moves across the street to avoid the shopkeeper, and it is only from this new vantage point that he notices the name “Ezra Cohen” above the window – the name he's been seeking while wandering Jewish neighborhoods in London in the hopes of reuniting his protégée Mirah with her family. He will return to the pawnshop later and become acquainted with the Cohens, eventually finding through them his mentor and Mirah's actual brother, Mordecai. Although some discussion of the silver clasps ensues, they are neither purchased nor used in the space of the novel. Still, this seemingly inconsequential trinket proves to have a long history, one that raises questions about the lingering remains of the past, the equivocality of the object, and the dispossessions that hauntDaniel Deronda.

"Not by bread only"? Common right, parish relief and endowed charity in a forest economy, 1600-1800, Steve Hindle the economy of makeshifts and the poor law - a game of chance? Margaret Hanly "Agents in their own concerns"? Charity and the economy of makeshifts in 18th-century Britain, Sarah Lloyd crime, criminal networks and the survival strategies of the poor in early 18th-century London, Heather Shore pawnbroking and the survival strategies of the urban poor in 1770s York, Alannah Tomkins kinship, poor relief and the welfare process in early modern England, Sam Barrett making the most of opportunity - the economy of makeshifts in the early modern north, Steve King.

Following the 2007/2008 Global Financial Crisis, recent times have seen the continuing rise of high interest, so-called fringe economy financial services, including payday lenders, cheque cashing services and pawnbrokers. In this chapter, Brookes and Harvey critically examine the mobile app of the world’s largest pawnbroker, Cash Converters, exposing the subtle but powerful multi-semiotic techniques through which this fringe economy service provider promotes its high interest services to the credit poor. All told, their analysis emphasises the utility of a critical multimodal approach for exposing how the discourse surrounding fringe economy services targets the needy and vulnerable.

Service workers like social workers are valuable to society ( LeCroy and Stinson, 2004 ), even noble and heroic ( Ashforth et al., 2007 ), yet, perversely, they are often socially stigmatized, seen as “dirty” by their communities because they deal with “tainted” people ( Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999 ). Other service workers also suffer stigmatization because their role is associated with effluent (e.g., refuse collector), they have a servile relationship with others (e.g., housekeeper), or adopt tasks that are perceived as amoral (e.g., pawnbroker) or intrusive (e.g., telemarketer). We propose that feelings of stigma lead to poor well-being and present a conceptual model which introduces the concept of “stigmatized labour” as a type of role stress. We postulate that excessive stigmatized labour (the cognitive and behavioural practices adopted by service workers to protect themselves from feelings of stigma) leads to burnout as service workers’ limited resources are exhausted to deal with the stress ( Hobfoll, 2001 ).

Continental pawnbroking institutions, Monts-de-Piété, were introduced in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s but did not establish a permanent status. Irish social reformers believed that a Mont-de-Piété system would reduce the cost of borrowing for the poor and also fund a social welfare network, thus negating the need for an Irish Poor Law. This article explores the introduction of the Mont-de-Piété charitable pawnbroker in Ireland and outlines some reasons for its failure. It uses the market incumbents, private pawnbrokers, as a base group in a comparative study and asks why the Monts-de-Piété were the unsuccessful ones of the two. The article finds that the public nature and monopoly status of Monts-de-Piété on the Continent realised economies of scale and gave preferential interest rates on capital, as well as enabling the Mont-de-Piété loan book to be cross-subsidised. These conditions were not replicated in Ireland, hence the failure of the Monts-de-Piété there.

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. …

The pawn industry in the United States grew substantially in recent years; however, there is limited research on the regulatory environment for these predominately small businesses. Our study focuses on the readability of state regulations for pawnshops. We select credit unions as a comparison group since they also service non-bank customers. Our analysis reveals that the majority of states’ pawnbroker regulations are at the college reading level while the regulations for credit unions are at the college graduate reading level. There are also geographical differences in the readability of pawnshop regulations with the regulations in the northeast region being easier to read than in the west region. However, there is no evidence that the regulations readability level corresponds to the number of pawnbrokers in a state or to more broad-based measures of state-level business friendliness.

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. …

What is to be gained by drawing literary comparisons between the African Diaspora experience of slavery and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust? Can such comparisons be made without distorting the historical record? This article critiques the juxtaposition of tragedy found in The Pawnbroker—both the novel and the film version—and offers a reading of Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl as a polemical response to The Pawnbroker. Two Holocaust-related novels by the West Indian writer Caryl Phillips are then examined as models of how a literary text can enact a “facing” of black and Jewish experience through the postmodern technique of narrative fragmentation and juxtaposition.

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.

It is fair to say that pawnbrokers have not always enjoyed a very good reputation. In an action of slander brought by a pawnbroker, Holt CJ admitted that, ‘The trade of a broker is an honest lawful trade, though it lies under suspicions.’ The views of one late seventeenth-century writer were not untypical: An unconscionable pawn-broker, I say, is Pluto's Factor, Old Nick's Warehouse-keeper, and English Jew that lives and grows fat on Fraud and Oppression, as Toads on Filth and Venome; whose Practice out-vies Usury, as much as Incest simple Fornication; and to call him a Tradesman, must be by the same Figure that Pickpockets stile their Legerdemain an Art and Mystery. His Shop, like Hellgates, is always open, where he sits at the Receipt of Custom, like Cacus in his Den, ready to devour. Much of the criticism emphasised the supposed immorality of pawnbrokers. But there were more specific allegations too. Pawnbrokers were variously accused of dealing in stolen goods, deliberately understating the value of pawned goods, wearing clothes that were pledged, selling off pledges before they could be redeemed, and charging beyond the maximum permitted rate of interest. These abuses did not come about because of an absence of legal regulation. By the mid eighteenth century, as well as the prohibitions on interest, pawnbroking transactions were also governed by detailed statutory rules.

According to Raskolnikov's "Napoleonic idea", exceptional individuals are entitled to commit crimes for the benefit of society. His murder of the old pawnbroker serves as an experiment which is to show whether he himselfis an exceptional individual or not. The self-referential character of this experiment gives it a paradoxical twist and this, in turn; makes it impossible for Raskolnikov to understand the motive of his crime and feel real repentance about it.

Ulu Grosbard brings an impeccable precision and delicacy to his work with some of the America’s finest film actors—Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman, and Meryl Streep. And although Grosbard’s film career has been confined, thus far, to five films—The Subject Was Roses (1968), Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me? (1971), Straight Time (1978), True Confessions (1981), and Falling in Love (1984)—that circumscribed field is profuse with radiant moments of acting. The frame within which Grosbard works is poetic realism, the most celebrated, home-grown school of American drama. It is deeply character-driven, rich in psychological tensions, and refulgent with a sense of time and place. Clearly, we are in the territory of The Actors Studio, where Grosbard has attended sessions since the 1960s. The Studio is also the native habitat of the directors with whom Grosbard inaugurated his film career as assistant director: Elia Kazan (Splendor in the Grass, 1961), Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, 1962), and Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, 1965).

The gynaecologist Wendy Savage was driving down London’s Euston Road in 1992 when she spotted protestors fighting to save the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. Founded in 1890 by the East End pawnbroker’s daughter who became Britain’s first woman to gain a medical qualification, the hospital treated only women and children until its closure in 2000, when services were transferred to the nearby University College Hospital. Professor Savage founded the “EGA for women” campaign. Its achievements include getting the Queen Anne-style building listed and, to …

To begin with the biographies of four women. The first was born in 1888, the daughter of a farm labourer in Cheshire. She was good at school and, unlike her own mother and generations of women before her, she was actually given a systematic education, though there was no question of her staying on beyond the age of 13. Then she followed her mother into service, at Eaton Hall, the nearby great house of the Duke of Westminster. She stayed there until she married a farm labourer, then had two children, a girl and a boy. Both were difficult births which permanently impaired her health. Her husband died in the ’flu epidemic which followed the First World War. To support her children, before there was a welfare state, she left them with her sister-in-law in Chester, while she returned to service, as housekeeper to a pawnbroker in Birkenhead. She remarried, an intermittently unemployed boilermaker, battled to keep house in the bug-ridden terraces of Merseyside in the 1930s and late in life had another child, who died in infancy. Always busy, always resilient; respectable, always poor, she died in a council flat in Birkenhead in the 1950s.

The accompanying picture of a pawnbroker's shop and sign was taken in Boston in 1946. The sign of the three balls is a common sight in the poorer sections of many American cities, and its meaning is always the same: the balls signify that within the shop loans may be obtained on the pledge of personal property. This type of loan is centuries old: it existed in ancient Greece at the time of Pericles and in ancient Rome at the time of Augustus. Professional money-lenders, either Jews or Lombards, reappeared in the Middle Ages, and their activities elicited the opposition of the Church and the hatred of the populace. Attempts to get rid of the Jewish or Lombard pawnbrokers were repeatedly made, but the result was always the same: the need of consumers for credit accommodation was so great that the money-lenders were usually recalled after a short while.