Slides from a talk written for the Permissive Archive conference hosted by the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.

1. Visible Prices: Archiving the Intersection of Literature
and Economics
Paige Morgan
The Permissive Archive Conference
Centre for Editing Lives and Letters
9 November 2012

2. What is a price?
A statement of value, usually expressed in
numeric terms
A statement of the cost of an interaction
between two or more individuals

3. What is a price when found in a
document?
A number
A point of intertextuality between the
document and the external world
An item of information whose rate of
recognition decays quickly
An accurate or an inaccurate fact

4. How are prices in literature meant to
be read and understood?
What needs to be done to make
them legible?

5. Visible Prices Interface (Alpha): Main

6. Visible Prices Interface (Alpha): Main

7. Visible Prices Interface (Alpha): Detail

8. Visible Prices Interface (Alpha): Table View

9. Visible Prices Interface (Alpha): Map View

10. Visible Prices Interface (Alpha): Map View Detail

11. Visible Prices contains data from:
Literary texts, i.e. novels, poetry, plays
Private unpublished personal narratives, i.e.
journals, letters, and commonplace books
Printed pamphlets and tracts
Accounting ledgers, receipt books, and private
reports
Newspapers, magazines, and trade journals
Advertisements

12. Richardson’s Pamela
(by the prices)
4 guineas: Amount given to Pamela by Mr. B as wage after his mother, Lady B's death
5 guineas: Amount given by Mr. B to Mrs. Jervis as annual bonus on her salary as housekeeper
4 guineas: Amount which Mrs. Jervis says Pamela has earned by flowering a waistcoat for Mr.
B.
50 pounds: The annual income given to Pamela's parents by Mr. B for caretaking his Kentish
estate
5o pounds: The salary for a chaplaincy in Lincolnshire
20 guineas: The amount given by Mr. B to Pamela’s parents to buy themselves new clothes
appropriate for celebrating Pamela’s marriage
200 pounds: Income paid annually to Pamela as Mr. B’s wife
500 pounds: Amount raised by Sally Godfrey from friends to fund her flight from England to
Jamaica
1000 pounds: the amount that Mr. B says he would give his sister if she would acknowledge
Pamela (possibly rhetorical rather than actual)
5 guineas: Amount given by Mr. B to the crew of a ship carrying Sally Godfrey and two female
companions, as inducement "to be good to the ladies."

13. 5 guineas would also buy...
A small paper edition of the Complete Works of Robert Boyle
Two years’ tuition at a boy’s school in Yorkshire on the track for university
study or business; and one year’s tuition on the track for an army or navy
career
One man’s large-sized suit in London, plus approximately twenty-five days of
dining out on meat and wine in London; or twelve days of dining out in
London with twelve viewings of an automata show featuring Merlin the
magician
One year’s maintenance for a child at the Foundling Hospital, plus six doses
of a patent medicine guaranteed to cure deafness

14. What happens when we read for prices?
Contextual clarity ... and risk of authorial credibility?
• “...mid-[19th]-century novelists subjected economic
matters ... the monetary value of gold -- to the alchemy of a
moral lesson by emphasizing the connotative capacity of
language -- that is, the elevation of figuration and suggestion
over denotation and reference.”
--Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, p. 383
• How widespread is the cavalier attitude that Poovey
describes?

15. What happens when we read for prices?
A network of intentional collisions and archival noise:
• “While libraries that contain more than one million items
are not unusual, print libraries never possessed a million
books of use to any one reader.”
--Gregory Crane, “What Do You Do With A Million Books?”
• When you turn up the volume loud enough on a stereo
speaker, sound becomes visible.

16. What happens when we build an
archive for prices?
How do you record economic tension?
Informal declarations of price value
Different language used by men and women to discuss
price
Is the combination of text fragments an anthology,
or a single text, or both?
Is such an archive better suited as a starting point
or an ending point?

17. Thank you
http://www.paigemorgan.net/visibleprices/
@paigecmorgan // paigecmorgan@gmail.com