This talk brings together two contexts prominent in Charles Dickens’s work where the economic circulation of things and people is suspended: the pawnbroker’s shop and the debtors’ prison. Reading these two settings together, I suggest, allows us to recognise a homology in the way things (in the case of the former) and people (in the case of the latter) are withdrawn from circulation, with their existence equated to money in both cases. In a strange modification of Marx’s circuit of capitalist profit, the commodity character of both people and things is highlighted precisely when they cease to circulate. At the same time, in texts such as ‘The Pawnbroker’s Shop’ (1835) and Little Dorrit (1855-7), affective and symbolic economies continue to operate in the place of inactive or hindered economic ones, as people and objects come to stand in for or refer to each other even as they are prevented from working or being used. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s understanding of symbol and allegory, I argue that these two contexts in Dickens’s writing should be read as allegorically referring to one another.  I position these readings in relation to my wider project, which argues that the specific spaces in which money operates (or fails to operate) in the nineteenth century shape its cultural and affective entanglements more deeply and thoroughly than has been previously recognised.

Ben Moore is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam. His research areas include nineteenth-century literature, cities, money, modernity, childhood and the figure of the human. He is the author of Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2024) and Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895 (Palgrave, 2023). His work has appeared in journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/modernity, Modern Language Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as in various handbooks and edited collections. He is Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal and Secretary of the Dickens Society.