Money's Worth

In 1819 Robert Peel posed what might have been the most frequently repeated rhetorical question of the nineteenth century, when he asked, in the midst of a parliamentary debate over the resumption of cash payments by the Bank of England: ‘What is a pound?’. ¹ After citing the confusion that this question had caused for John Locke and Isaac Newton in an earlier era of monetary controversy, Peel reached the apparently straightforward conclusion that a pound was ‘a definite quantity of gold bullion … with an impression on it denoting it to be of a certain weight and of a certain fineness’. He added that requiring the bank to exchange gold for its paper currency would restore to Britain its ‘ancient and permanent standard of value’ (cited in Smart 1910: 678–79). Although few Victorians doubted that a pound signified ‘a definite quantity of gold bullion’, they kept repeating Peel’s question because it enabled them to ask a series of related questions about how gold worked, or failed to work, in British culture. This chapter recounts their persistent efforts to figure out what their money was worth in light of Britain’s changing status within the global economy; and traces evidence of their love–hate relationship with money in the realms of morality and social class.