Introduction: Victorian Investments

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.