¹ In Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Marieke de Goede makes a persuasive case for the contingency of financial forms that have since become naturalized. In the 1870s William Stanley Jevons, the British economist who led the marginalist revolution in economics, expounded the hypothesis that periodic stock market crises were an effect of changing agricultural fortunes that were in turn directly influenced by sunspots; see Peart, Sandra J., “Sunspots and Expectations: W. S. Jevons's Theory of Economic Fluctuations,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 13 (1991), 243–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Cleveland Abbe (“Ol’ Probabilities”) is credited with the first attempt in the US to establish a meteorological reporting and forecasting bureau in 1868; see Erik Raft, “Economic History of Weather Forecasting,” EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/craft.weather.forcasting.history; and Cox, John, Storm Watchers: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin's Kite to El Niño (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2002)Google Scholar. On the history of the stock ticker, see Hochfelder, David, “‘Where the Common People Could Speculate’: The Ticker, Bucket Shops, and the Origins of Popular Participation in Financial Markets, 1880–1920,” Journal of American History, 93 (2006), 335–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The first real attempt in the US to provide a quasi-scientific approach to business-cycle forecasting was Benner's, SamuelBenner's Prophecies of the Future Ups and Downs in Prices (Cincinnati: self-published, 1876)Google Scholar, which asserted, with only a faith that science would eventually provide the explanation for this “prophecy” from an “Ohio farmer,” that there were “cycles of 11 years in the prices of corn and hogs, 27 years in the price of pig-iron, and 54 years in general business” (121). In Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Alex Preda outlines how in the early decades of the twentieth century the emerging profession of market analysis endeavoured to create a tradition for the “science” of market forecasting by harking back to Benner and others. The full history of economic forecasting is yet to be written, but an initial contribution is Friedman, Walter, “The Harvard Economic Service and the Problem of Forecasting,” History of Political Economy, 41 (2009), 57–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ See for example Callon, Michel, ed., The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)Google Scholar; and MacKenzie, Donald, Muniesa, Fabian and Siu, Lucia, eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁵ Mackenzie, Donald, An Engine Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ The science and technology studies (STS) approach to performativity, epitomized by Callon and MacKenzie, has thus come under fire recently. On the one hand, political economists such as Karel Williams and Philip Mirowski have argued that the STS approach merely leads to attempts to produce more accurate, technical models that confirm the myth of Homo economicus, rather than a broader investigation of the social and political dominance of particular narratives about financialization that are embedded in the technical models. See, for example, Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Kah, “Markets Made Flesh: Callon, Performativity and the FCC Spectrum Auctions,” in MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu, 190–224. Others, such as Geoffrey Hodgson, have taken issue with the postmodernist constructivism of MacKenzie and Callon in which life resembles art, while also challenging the notion of the causal inevitability of this view of economic theory: as the recent financial crisis demonstrates, the world has spectacularly failed to resemble the model of the efficient market hypothesis. Hodgson, Geoffrey, Review Symposium, Socio-economic Review, 8 (2010), 399–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁸ Butler, Judith, “Performative Agency,” Journal of Cultural Economy, 3 (2010), 147–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ In Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), William Cronon sketches out how the standardization of grain, along with the telegraph's ability to transmit real-time prices nationally, enabled a national futures market in agricultural produce to emerge, transforming the solidity and local idiosyncrasy of individual farmers’ crops into an abstraction, like the universal equivalent of money itself (chapter 3). In “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905,” American Historical Review, 111 (2006), 307–35, Jonathan Ira Levy tells a similar story of how the produce exchanges dealing in futures were attacked for having “neither form, nor substance, nor reality.” House Committee on Agriculture, Fictitious Dealings in Agricultural Products: Hearings on H. R. 392, 2699, and 3870, 52nd Cong., 3rd sess., 1892, 169, quoted in Levy, 309.

¹⁰ Preda, 165.

¹¹ Although the circulation of Town Topics was comparatively high, it is unclear the extent to which the financial pages were being read; like the serious articles in Playboy, it is possible that the money columns were there merely as respectable window dressing for the real business of the magazine, in this case society gossip. However, the fact that the magazine established its own investment advice bureau suggests that the Wall Street reporting was seen as a vital part of the magazine's business by its owners.

¹² On the early history of market reports see Neal, Larry, “The Rise of a Financial Press: London and Amsterdam, 1681–1810,” Business History, 30 (1988), 163–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCusker, John J. and Gravesteijn, Cora, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹³ Poovey, Mary, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For accounts of nineteenth-century business and financial journalism see Forsyth, David P., The Business Press in America, 1750–1865 (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1964)Google Scholar; Parsons, Wayne, The Power of the Financial Press: Journalism and Economic Opinion in Britain and America (Aldershot: Elgar, 1989)Google Scholar; and Hewitt, Elizabeth, “Romances of Real Life; or, the Nineteenth-Century Business Magazine,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 20 (2010), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ New York Herald, 28 Feb. 1838, quoted in Crouthamel, James, Bennett's New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 80Google Scholar. It is intriguing to note that Bennett's very first discursive money article in the Herald put forward a conspiracy-minded explanation for the fluctuations in prices.

¹⁵ In “Romances of Real Life,” Hewitt shows how Bankers’ Magazine from the 1840s endeavoured to portray the aesthetic sublime of modern commerce to a nonspecialist business audience. In contrast the later rhetorical uses of personification in Town Topics, she shows how “the personal and domestic sketches so typical of the Romance of Real Life genre are not offered in Bankers’ Magazine to humanize the story of money, but to dramatize the ways monetary relations must be told without feeling or sympathy” (14).

¹⁶ Wall Street Journal, 8 July 1889, 1. On the ideological, performative work performed by impersonal, statistical reporting such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, see de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith, chapter 4.

¹⁷ For an outline of a history of these fraudulent practices see Balleisen, Edward J., “Private Cops on the Fraud Beat: The Limits of American Business Self-Regulation, 1895–1932,” Business History Review, 83 (2009), 113–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ On the rhetorical struggle in the second half of the nineteenth century to redraw the boundaries between the vice of gambling and respectable speculation see Fabian, Ann, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; de Goede, chapter 3; David Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate”; and Levy, “Contemplating Delivery.”

¹⁹ Poovey, Mary, “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment,” Victorian Studies, 45 (2002), 17–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Logan, Andy, The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966), 14–15Google Scholar. Unless otherwise indicated, information about Mann in subsequent paragraphs is from Logan's biography.

²¹ On the history of society journalism, see Logan; and Homberger, Eric, Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New York: Yale University Press, 2002), 204–19Google Scholar.

²² “Saunterings,” Town Topics, 17 Dec. 1891, also quoted in Homberger, 210.

²³ “Mann Would Reform the Four Hundred,” New York Times, 1 Aug. 1905, 7.

²⁴ Post, Edwin Jr., Truly Emily Post (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1961), 143Google Scholar. In Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913), parvenu Undine Spragg is instructed in the ways of society by Mrs. Heeny, the society manicurist and masseuse, who brings clippings from Town Talk, Wharton's thinly disguised version of Town Topics (the same title also appears in The House of Mirth (1905)).

²⁵ Homberger, 202–19. For a more wide-ranging account of the self-conscious formation of the New York bourgeoisie as a distinct class, see Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ For discussions of Frank Norris's novels that combine melodramatic elements with a portrayal of an “economic sublime” see Horwitz, Howard, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, chapter 5; Tandt, Christophe Den, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar, chapter 7; and Zimmerman, David, Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar, chapter 3.

²⁷ Clear data on the level of popular participation in stock markets in this period is thin on the ground. For a good summary of the varying evidence see Ott, Julia C., “‘The Free and Open People's Market’: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933,” Journal of American History, 96 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 2.

²⁸ The story of Thomas W. Lawson, a stock promoter who turned into one of the most vociferous muckraking protestors against the abuses of the system, is told in Zimmerman, chapter 2.

²⁹ US Senate Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the debates in this period surrounding the idea of popular shareholding see Ott, Julia C., When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors' Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ In Wall Street: A Cultural History (London: Faber, 2005), Steve Fraser provides a historical survey of the usually negative cultural responses to the stock market.

³¹ In addition to Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street, see Cowing, Cedric B., Populists, Plungers, and Progressives: A Social History of Stock and Commodity Speculation, 1890–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate”; and Levy, “Contemplating Delivery.”

³² For details of the restricted membership of the NYSE see Sobel, Robert, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market (New York: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

³³ See Hochfelder; Preda, Framing Finance, chapter 4; and Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street.

³⁴ Town Topics, 3 Feb. 1887, 20.

³⁵ Town Topics, 20 Jan. 1887, 15.

³⁶ Town Topics, 3 Feb. 1887, 19.

³⁷ Town Topics, 2 Jan. 1890, 20.

³⁸ Town Topics, 2 Jan. 1890, 16.

³⁹ Town Topics, 9 Feb. 1893, 15.

⁴⁰ Town Topics, 20 Jan. 1887, 15.

⁴¹ Town Topics, 13 Jan. 1887, 1. Edith Wharton takes the trope of the rise and fall of a woman's stock to the extreme in The House of Mirth (1905).

⁴² Town Topics, 6 Jan. 1887, 1.

⁴³ Town Topics, 27 Jan. 1887, 1.

⁴⁴ Town Topics, 27 Jan. 1889, 15.

⁴⁵ Town Topics, 17 Feb. 1887, 13.

⁴⁶ Town Topics, 3 Feb. 1887, 20. In the legal struggle over bucket shops’ access to price information over the ticker, the NYSE was understandably accused of operating a cartel, setting minimum rates for commission and restricting which stocks could be listed; see Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate.”

⁴⁷ Town Topics, 17 Feb. 1887, 12. In Panic!, Zimmerman argues in his interpretation of Frank Norris's The Pit (1903) that mesmerism was a recurrent trope in accounts of the market in this period. The novel's stock-manipulating hero Curtis Jadwin attempts to wrest control of the invisible hand of the market with the force of his magnetic personality and economic might, but in the end he is mesmerized by the economic sublime of the market itself.

⁴⁸ “The Golden Calf: High-Class Bunco Steering,” Town Topics, 24 Feb. 1887, 14. The most shocking thing of all, the article concludes, is that Clews ropes women into speculating in the market by employing particularly enticing promoters.

⁴⁹ Town Topics, 13 Mar. 1890, 17.

⁵⁰ Town Topics, 13 Jan. 1887, 15.

⁵¹ Town Topics, 14 Jan. 1892, 16.

⁵² Town Topics, 24 Feb. 1887, 17.

⁵³ Town Topics, 13 Jan. 1887, 15.

⁵⁴ Town Topics, 17 Jan. 1907, 22.

⁵⁵ See Logan, The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons, chapters 2–3, 8–10.