ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 tackles the question of the economic domain’s construction as a separate sphere in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. I focus on a central axis in both novels: credit-based efforts to gain social capital by the novels' protagonists. Both Thackeray and Trollope pointed with displeasure to contract’s entanglement in status relations, particularly gender, class and nationality. Their idealized alternatives, an all-around intersubjective intimacy in Thackeray, and a rational market in Trollope, were two polar conceptual options for the social order located at the two ends of high Victorianism. Relational liberal solutions often lay in between those options.
