Christopher Daley: These days we are used to hearing about the power of banks, GDP percentages, hedge funds, shareholders, stock market reports, house prices, the business cycle, deficits, debts, surpluses – but has it always been this way? Has money and finance always been such a prominent focal point for the popular consciousness? And if so, how has the representation of money changed and what does this tell us about our society?

To try to explore some of these questions, I went to speak with Professor Nicky Marsh from the University of Southampton, who has published widely on the interactions between finance, literature and popular culture. I started by asking how she became interested in this line of research.

Nicky Marsh: It was actually visual culture that looped me into it, although it has taken me a long time to get back to that. So when I think about the moment, I had been working on questions of publics, counterpublics and politics and gender for a long time and I had been working on, in my teaching, British culture in the 1980s and the changes that took place in the 1980s, and I was thinking about the next project, and I was thinking about Gilbert and George and there’s a quote from Gilbert and George where they say, “everything’s just always about money”, and I can remember the moment really, really clearly and thinking, “yes that’s true – I’ll just do that”. And so there was initially two strands that I tried to keep going; one is a political commitment to research. Why do we do research? We do research because it illuminates things in the world that we don’t understand and that need to be illuminated. So then I’m interested in the processes of financialisation; financialisation of the everyday, neo-liberalism, governmentality, of how these politics have made their way into mainstream life. And the second thing I’m interested in is the question of the representation of money, so what actually is money itself as a form, as a phenomena? How do we think about it as an abstract thing, how do we think about it as a material thing? They’re the two strands which I pulled from the Gilbert and George quote.

CD: So that, of course, led into the monograph that was produced in 2007, just at the moment of the financial crisis erupting, and it was entitled Money, Finance and Speculation in Recent British Fiction and you analysed here a wide variety of literary texts ranging from Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger through to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones novels in the late 1990s. Could you just give us a brief potted history of how British fiction’s representation of money and finance has changed since the second world war, up to the present day?

NM: Sure, so if I think about it in terms of finance in particular, and in terms of the financial class, the way in which that’s represented: the fifties to the seventies were very quiet periods, the questions of financialisation weren’t central, I think because the model of the economy that we were working with was largely Keynesian. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Phillips machine? So a Phillips machine was designed by a maverick economist to imagine the British economy, and we can imagine the British economy as a hydraulic machine where we could pull the levers of monetary control and we could influence consumer spending, taxes, investments and exports. So I think in that period the very way in which the economy was imagined as a finite national thing that government's could control in relationship with capital meant that there wasn't the same interest in speculation, it just wasn't possible, there wasn't a culture for it. And then we know that things began to change in the early seventies, and then in 1979 in Britain we have the Conservative government coming in, and I think it's really then that things begin to appear and this question of financialisation appears in literary texts as a main theme,