“The Visionary Scene Was Lost in Air” 1

The Revolution of 1688 is distinctive for its introduction of public credit to the English economy. As P. G. M. Dickson describes in The Financial Revolution in England, when King William III faced the urgent question of increasing national wealth to enable developments in agriculture and commerce, and—critically—to finance war with France, he developed a system of long-term government borrowing. The South Sea Bubble provides a moment in cultural history when an epistemic reconceptualization of the market in finance was necessitated in the wake of crisis. John Gay’s pre-1720 poetry adheres to an understanding of the pre-credit economy, despite being written after the beginning of state finance and public credit. Locke describes the abstraction that must be accepted for money to function within a financial system; the token must retain a consistent value, and it must be a universal equivalent.