p>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 / Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852
MONETARY SENSATIONS
The poorest and most unlucky dog in the world either has or had some small portion of money. No matter how small, how hardly, or how precariously earned, he has seen, from time to time, a glimpse of the colour of his own cash, and rejoiced accordingly as that colour was brown, white, or yellow. It follows, therefore, that even the poorest and most unlucky dog in the world has experienced monetary sensations. It may appear paradoxical, but it is no less true, that it is the very rich, born to riches, the heirs to great properties, or no end of consolidated stock, who have never enjoyed or feared the sensation to which we allude. To them, money is a thing of course; it pours in upon them with the regularity of the succeeding seasons. Rent-day comes of itself, and there is the money; dividend-day is as sure as Christmas, and there lie the receipts. These are the people who know nothing of the commodity with which they are so well endowed, or, at most, their knowledge is but skin-deep. They take and spend, just as they sit or walk. Both seem natural processes; they have performed them since they were born. Their money is a bit of themselves—an extra and uncommonly convenient limb with which they are endowed. It is only when some sudden catastrophe bursts upon and cuts off the supplies, that this class of ladies and gentlemen experience, like the shock of a thousand freezing shower-baths, their first 'monetary sensation.'
But the men and women who work either with head or hands—who fight their way—who plan to gain and plan to spend, so that the latter shall counterbalance the former—who lie sleepless in their beds, intent on how to make both ends meet—who are lucky and unlucky—who travel the ups and the downs of life, here grasping fortunes, there turning out the linings of penniless pockets: these are the people whose whole lives are one long succession of monetary sensations. Among them mainly is cultivated the art of looking at two sides of a shilling. They know how to value half-crowns and sovereigns in calling up the long arrear of hard-worked hours, which are, as it were, the small-change of quarters' salaries and weeks' wages. How many strokes of the steady-going pen are encircled in those bright yellow disks—how many thumps of the ponderous hammer has it taken to produce this handful of silver. Or on a larger scale—as the successful speculator sweeps to himself the mass of notes and bills, all as good as gold, for which he has set every penny of his worldly means upon the stake, and feels with a thrill which makes him clutch the precious paper, that had things not turned out as, thank Heaven! they have, that then, and then!–He has had a tolerably vigorous monetary sensation.
But the whole of the money-getting classes, and, to some extent, the classes who merely spend what others got and gave them, can look very well back upon a series of monetary sensations which have marked epochs in their lives. Our remembrances of that kind are, of course, most deeply engraved, and most clearly recollected, in the cases in which we are working for ourselves, and have ourselves achieved steps and triumphed over difficulties in life—each step and triumph marked by a lengthening of the purse. But there are early monetary impressions common to almost all the juvenile world, rich and poor—to the children of the duke or of the mechanic, to the boy who has obtained the price of a pony or a watch, and the boy who has been made a present of what will buy him a twopenny story-book, or a twopenny bun. Boys and girls commonly have poses—to adopt a phrase not known south of the Tweed, where it must be explained, that to have a pose, is to possess a little private and secret, or quasi-secret, hoard of treasure. This pose frequently imparts the first monetary sensation. It instils the first distinct idea of the value of money; it gives the first notion of the accumulation of precious things; and the little proprietor or proprietrix comes to rattle the box with the narrow slit as a sort of sly enjoyment. To break into a pose would be quite profane and irreverent. Pose-boxes do not open, and so far read a philosophic lesson to the proprietors. Always save, always add, always hold as a sort of sacred deposit, the mysteriously precious pose-boxes. Occasionally, again, a child gets a present of a sovereign, or an old-fashioned guinea, which it would be dreadful sacrilege to change. Every one will remember how Sophy and Livy Primrose 'never went without money themselves, as my wife always let them have a guinea each to keep in their pockets, but with strict injunctions never to change it.' There are hundreds of thousands of Sophies and Livies possessed of the same sacred store, or having given it to their parents 'to keep,' over whose minds the remembrance of the secret hoard every now and then sends flashing across the mind of the child a sense of importance, or richness, or a general self-complacency which varies with the individuality. Boys and girls in the next stages of their growth care little and think little about money, except as a means of obtaining some trifling passing indulgence. The childish reverence for the pose has passed. The unopenable box has been long since opened, and the unchangeable guinea long since changed. We allude here, of course, to the children of the well-to-do. With the children of the poor, the case is different. They never lose the faculty of monetary sensation. Money is too valuable to them, because as soon as the mere childish period is past, and sometimes before it, money to the young poor is always translatable into good food and new clothes. There is nothing more sadly frequent in the squalid lanes and alleys of London, than to see a little creature, boy or girl, toddle with a chance-penny, not into the toy-shop or the sweet-shop, but into the cook-shop, and there spend the treasure in food, taking care, with melancholy precocity, to have the full weight, and only a due proportion of gristle or fat. Further on in life, when a poor boy earns a chance-sixpence or a shilling, there is so much added to the store laying up for the new jacket, the new cap, or the new boots; or, not unfrequently, there is so much gained for the family exigencies of Saturday night. Here there are monetary sensations in abundance. The life of such people is full of them. The annuitant or the proprietor who listlessly, and without one additional throb of his pulse, drops hundreds into his purse, has not the ghost of an idea of the thrill of pleasure—invoking, perhaps, a score of delightful associations—with which the boy who holds his horse receives the sixpence, which is tossed him as the capitalist in his normal condition rides coolly and unmovedly away. To experience monetary sensations, you must earn the money first, and have a score of urgent purposes disputing for its application.
But perhaps one of the most vivid monetary sensations which a man experiences, is when he is paid the first instalment of the price of his labours. In an instant, he seems to rise and take a footing in the world. He has struck the first blow in his Battle of Life, and prostrated his antagonist, for whom, however, as soon as he has taken him captive, he conceives a particular affection. The glow of assured independence is a proud and manly feeling. The money is not given. That is the overmastering sensation. It is fairly earned. The recipient swells with honest pride as he thinks he is now a man working his way, and strides off a couple of inches higher than he came. This elevation of sentiment of course gradually dies away. The monetary sensation of the first-earned payment is not supported, but it is not forgotten, and insensibly, perhaps, to the recipient, it has at once heightened and deepened the moral qualities and tendencies of his spiritual being. From time to time, as remuneration ascends, a shade, as it were, of the first impression is recalled, particularly when the recipient perceives that at last—that great change in a young man's life—his 'settlement' may be accomplished. Here is another sensational era in his monetary experiences—the realisation of the grand fact that the struggle, always promising, is at length successful, and that he is now enlisted in the regular army of society. The elder Stephenson, when an occasional wage of a shilling per day was raised to a permanent two, flung up his hat, and exclaimed: 'Thank God! I'm a made man for life!' Here was a fine monetary sensation.
But there are also monetary sensations of quite a different species from those to which we have alluded. The sun shines on both sides of the hedge, and blank and dreary, if not dismaying and crushing, is the first trial of monetary difficulty. People, long struggling, get blunted to the res angustæ, precisely as people fast prospering do to the steady tide of wealth. The man who leaps heart-struck from his seat, as for the first time he contemplates a quarter's rent due and unprovided for, or the foolish fellow who groans in spirit over a protested bill returned upon the hand which he 'set' to it, merely for the convenience of acquaintance, and who has never thought of stamped paper since—such are two of the negative monetary associations which checker life; of course, their number is legion. The man who found his fairy gold transmuted into oak leaves, experienced a decided monetary sensation; but not more so than fell to the lot of many a speculator, who had bought to his last available penny in the Mississippi or the