ABSTRACT
Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics, poetic satire on the system of paper money and the economic theories of the likes of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were written during the economic upheavals of the winter of 1825–6. However, they remained in manuscript until 1837, when several were published in the London journal The Guide (between April and June 1837). The collection was first published in toto that summer in Paper Money Lyrics, and Other Poems, an edition of just one hundred copies. 1 Paper money, to give the OEU’s definition, is a ‘currency, which by the law of the country represents money and is a legal tender’. The Bank of England’s suspension of cash payments in 1797 had resulted in an increase in paper money and led to both inflationary pressure and the tendency to see occasional runs on the bank. Peacock’s work is part of the contemporary antipathy, not uncommon amongst oppositionalists, to paper currency Radicals as diverse as Cobbett and Shelley railed against paper money and for a return to a gold currency. In his 1837 preface, Peacock declares ironically that the Lyrics ‘will be applicable to every time and place, in which public credulity shall have given temporary support to the safe and economical currency, which consists of a series of paper promises, made with the deliberate purpose, that the promise shall always be a payment, and the payment shall always be a promise’. 2 Parody of contemporary poets (Coleridge, Moore, Southey and Scott amongst them) forms part of his offensive on promissory paper and upon ‘that arch class of quacks, who call themselves political economists’. 3
