Reading the Market: Abstraction, Personification and the Financial Column of Town Topics Magazine

Abstract

This article examines the role of the market report as a performative technology that does not merely reflect the emerging world of financial capitalism in late nineteenth-century America but actively shapes it. It takes as its case study the financial pages of Town Topics, the preeminent society gossip magazine in the 1880s and 1890s. Although at first sight the financial section seems far removed from the salacious gossip that the main section of the magazine traded in, there are close connections between the two. An analysis of the rhetoric of the financial pages of Town Topics uncovers a mixture of abstraction and personification in their depictions of market activity. In the same way that the society gossip column in effect created the very possibility of “society” as both exclusive and public property, the genre of the financial page helped create the idea of “the market” as both a human-scale drama and an abstraction that was beyond the control of any individual, or even government.