Open Access“Glorious uncertainty”: Business and Adultery in Charlotte Riddell’s Too Much Alone
Author(s) -
Silvana Colella
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
romanticism and victorianism on the net
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1916-1441
DOI - 10.7202/1013272ar
Subject(s) - adultery , narrative , feeling , capitalism , representation (politics) , intersection (aeronautics) , point (geometry) , relation (database) , sociology , history , literature , economics , law , political science , psychology , social psychology , art , engineering , computer science , politics , mathematics , geometry , database , aerospace engineering
In the 1860s and 1870s Charlotte Riddell was well-known as the 'novelist of the City of London'. Too Much Alone (1860), her first narrative forray into the world of commerce and finance, is both a business novel and a novel of adultery. Focusing on how the text configures the emotional regimes of capitalism, this essay examines Riddell's representation of irregular desires and capricious feelings in relation to what she sees as endemic in commercial society; not fraud, but insecurity and uncertainty, whther 'glorious' or dreary. The experience of uncertainty, I argue, provides the point of intersection between the two narrative strands of business and adultery. Explicitly addressed to business people, the novel offers a lesson in sentimental education, a type of training in the ability to tolerate the uncertain, repackaged as an intense emotional experience