This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1837.
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Panic of 1837
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Transcription
Now through the middle of the 1830s as entrepreneurs had borrowed more and more money, whether they were entrepreneurs in the sense of cotton planters or factory owners or merchants in Illinois or Indiana, all around the country they had borrowed huge amounts of money, expanded their operations, and taken on a lot of debt. Everything was fine as long as the revenue was flowing in. They were able to make their interest payments and maybe even pay a little bit of the principal. But they were also producing much more stuff. In particular, this is true with the cotton plantations. The cotton sector in the South doubled its output between 1830 and 1837. And by early 1836, the cotton price was creeping slowly downward. And people in Britain started to get nervous, specifically people who ran textile factories and even more the people who lent money to those factories. As the amount of cloth and clothes bought by consumers, produced by those factories, but bought by consumers around the world. As that starts to slow down in comparison to the amount of clothes and textiles that are getting pumped out, those factory start to lay off workers. As they lay off workers, the lenders get even more nervous. And eventually they cut off credit. They also cut off credit to the cotton buyers in Liverpool who by the American cotton crop each year. And when they do that, the merchants back in New Orleans lose their credit as well. And when they lose their credit, then they stop being able to make their payments to the local banks. The local banks go to the planters to try to call in the loans to the planters. But the planters aren't getting any money. So the entire financial sector shuts down. Pretty soon this isn't just something in the cotton economy. It's all around the country. The economy has entered a full blown liquidity crisis in which everybody who has lent money wants their money back. So they can pay back the people who have lent them money. But because everybody's in the same situation, nobody is able to pay their money back. The economy shuts down. And we are in what is known as the Panic of 1837. In an advanced complex economy, the liquidity crisis can lead very quickly to deflation, unemployment, massive unemployment, and an even deeper crisis that spirals into worse and worse effects as time goes on. As mass unemployment, for instance, can lead to social and political unrest pretty quickly. This is the situation in which policy makers in Washington, bank officials, cotton merchants, factory owners find themselves in 1837. So how do they get out of it? Well, there's three theories about how to get out of a liquidity crisis. One is to build up enough of a set of financial regulators and institutions that have the capacity put brakes on runaway crises that you never even get to that point in the first place. In other words to maintain confidence. This confidence that eventually the economy will be restarted enables borrowers to wait a little longer to get their money back from their creditors, instead of producing this sort of avalanche effect. Now unfortunately, this was not possible in 1837 because the Bank of United States had been destroyed. But that's the role that the Federal Reserve and other so-called lenders of last resort play in the world economy today. All right. So what's the second possibility? The second possibility is to let the crisis play out, to liquidate bad debts as, for instance, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon will say during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Liquidate everything he says. The problem with that is that it produces great suffering, extreme economic suffering. And it's not possible in any case to liquidate all the debts. If, for instance, you have no reliable currency, if nobody will accept the credit of the government or the credit of individual borrowers which was the case again by 1837. Finally a third option might be to prime the pump. This is what happens when a government essentially borrows money to put people back to work. When it puts people back to work, infrastructure projects, things like that which were accomplished during the New Deal are a popular way to do that. When it puts people back to work, the government gets spending started again in the economy. And when spending starts to flow again, then borrowers can start to pay back their debts. This was not an option that Martin Van Buren was interested in taking. But there was one more actor in 1837 who decided he was going to try to accomplish really a couple of these roles at once. So we'll turn to that next. The one actor in the economy, perhaps, if we're looking at all of the different interlocking financial sectors of the Atlantic economy, from Amsterdam to London to New York to New Orleans, the one person who really could do what comes next is Nicholas Biddle. And what he tries to do, he's now the director of a private bank in Philadelphia very large one, is to issue what's essentially his own currency to get the economy started again, a set of IOUs he calls post notes which he and his deputies give in exchange for cotton. The idea is these will start to circulate in the economy like money. And in the year or so when the economy's doing better, he will sell the cotton and repay the IOUs and make a nice profit. And things seem great in late 1837, in 1838. People are encouraged by the fact that these post notes are circulating in the economy. And guess what they do? Planters make a huge amount of cotton. They make so much, in fact, that the cotton market which was recovering crashes again. The price drops. Biddle goes bankrupt. He dies in 1842, disgraced, bankrupt still. And the economy particularly in the South sinks into worse doldrums. It'll recover in the North a little bit faster. But in the South the level of indebtedness is so great that it produces a major policy problem. The banks that had issued the bonds which are backed by the states, the individual states, go bankrupt. And now the creditors of the banks, the bondholders in the financial markets of the world who bought what were essentially securitized slaves, they want their money back. So they come looking to the states of Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama and so on and ask for repayment. The citizens of those states, most of whom are not slave holders, do not feel that this is just. They feel that this is an example of what we would in the present day call privatizing the gains, because it's the planters and the bankers who made the money, and socializing the risk, spreading the risk out, extending the cost to all of the citizens of the political unit, in this case, the individual states. So they elect new legislatures. And these legislatures repudiate the bonds. They default on the state debts. And what happens is that for the next 20 and, in some cases, 100 years, those states, Mississippi, Alabama, et cetera are going to be unable to borrow on the world financial market. And they get a very, very bad reputation in general that extends beyond the question of their financial reputation. It turns many elites in the North and in London and other places against the planters of the South. And they start to think that even though this process of an expanding cotton based slavery is yielding tremendous revenue, maybe it's actually producing a set of elites, the planters of the South who cannot be trusted. All of these dynamics are part of the development of the conflicts that eventually become the American Civil War. And they start in the financial crisis of the 1830s.
Events
- June 16 – Charles Dickens is introduced to the actor William Macready by John Forster backstage at a rehearsal of Othello.[1]
- July – The English "peasant poet" John Clare first enters an asylum for the insane, at High Beach in Essex.
- September – In Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (Philadelphia), William Evans Burton publishes an early example of the detective story, "The Secret Cell", featuring a London police officer and his wife.[2]
- October – The United States Magazine and Democratic Review is first published.[3]
- October 4 – Andreas Munch's first play, Kong Sverres Ungdom, opens the Christiania Theatre's new building in Norway.[4]
- unknown date – The publishers Little, Brown and Company open their doors in Boston, Massachusetts.[5]
New books
Fiction
- W. Harrison Ainsworth – Crichton
- Honoré de Balzac
- César Birotteau
- Lost Illusions, Part I: The Two Poets
- Richard Harris Barham – The Ingoldsby Legends (serialization begins in Bentley's Miscellany)
- Robert Montgomery Bird – Nick of the Woods
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton – Ernest Maltravers
- Sara Coleridge – Phantasmion
- Hendrik Conscience – In 't Wonderjaar 1566
- Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist (serialization begins in Bentley's Miscellany, February)[6]
- The Pickwick Papers (serialization completed in November; first book publication)
- Benjamin Disraeli
- Lady Mary Fox – An Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland[7]
- Phillipe-Ignace François Aubert du Gaspé – L'Influence d'un livre
- Jeremias Gotthelf – Bauernspiegel
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – Twice-Told Tales
- Julia Kavanagh – Adele
- Letitia Elizabeth Landon (writing as L.E.L.) – Ethel Churchill, or The Two Brides
- Catharine Maria Sedgwick – Live and Let Live
- Victor Séjour – Le Mulâtre (earliest known work of African American fiction, published in Revue des Colonies, March)
- Mary Shelley – Falkner
- Frances Trollope – The Vicar of Wrexhill
Children and young people
- Hans Christian Andersen
- Fairy Tales Told for Children. First Collection. Third Booklet (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Tredie Hefte) comprising "The Little Mermaid" ("Den lille havfrue") and "The Emperor's New Clothes" ("Kejserens nye klæder")
- Only a Fiddler
- Georgiana Chatterton – Aunt Dorothy's Tales
- Frederick Marryat – Snarleyyow or the Dog Fiend
- George Ayliffe Poole – The Exile's Return; or a Cat's Journey from Glasgow to Edinburgh
- Robert Southey – "The Story of the Three Bears" (in The Doctor)
Drama
- Joanna Baillie – The Separation[8]
- Manuel Bretón de los Herreros – Muérete y verás
- Robert Browning – Strafford
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton – The Duchess de la Vallière[9]
- Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch – Los Amantes de Teruel
- Henrik Hertz – Svend Dyrings Huus
- James Sheridan Knowles
- Alfred de Musset – Un caprice
- Jules-Édouard Alboize de Pujol – L'Idiote
Poetry
- José de Espronceda – El estudiante de Salamanca
- Louisa Jane Hall – Miriam, a Dramatic Sketch (written 1826)
- Alphonse de Lamartine – Chute d'un ange
- Alexander Pushkin – The Bronze Horseman (Медный всадник)
- See also 1837 in poetry
Non-fiction
- Charles Babbage – Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation
- Charles Ball – Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man
- Bernard Bolzano – Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science)
- Thomas Carlyle – The French Revolution: A History
- Washington Irving – The Adventures of Captain Bonneville
- Harriet Martineau – Society in America
- William H. Prescott – The History of Ferdinand and Isabella
- Ferenc Pulszky – Aus dem Tagebuch eines in Grossbritannien reisenden Ungarns (From the Diary of a Hungarian Travelling in Britain)
- Martin Tupper – Proverbial Philosophy
- Andrew Ure – A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines
- Adelbert von Chamisso – Über die Hawaiische Sprache (On the Hawaiian Language)
Births
- January 16 – Ellen Russell Emerson, American author and ethnologist (died 1907)
- January 23 – Agnes Maule Machar, Canadian novelist (died 1927)
- February 13 – Emily S. Bouton, American author, editor, and educator (died 1927)
- February 24 – Rosalía de Castro, Spanish Galician poet and writer (died 1885)
- March 1
- Ion Creangă, Romanian raconteur (died 1889)
- William Dean Howells, American realist novelist (died 1920)
- March 6 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet (died 1907)
- April 1 – Jorge Isaacs (Ferrer), Colombian writer, politician and explorer (died 1895)
- April 5 – Algernon Charles Swinburne, English poet (died 1909)
- April 7 – Lou Singletary Bedford, American author and editor (unknown year of death)
- June 9 – Anne Thackeray Ritchie, English novelist and essayist (died 1919)
- June 28 – Petre P. Carp, Romanian politician, polemicist, and translator (died 1919)
- July 13 – Mary Allen West, American writer, editor, and philanthropist (died 1892)
- August 24 – Bertha Jane Grundy, English novelist (died 1912)
- October 15 – Leo Königsberger, German historian of science (died 1921)
- October 21 – Mary Alice Seymour, American music critic and editor (died 1897)
- December 4 – Angie F. Newman, American poet, author, and editor (died 1910)
- December 10 – Edward Eggleston, American novelist and historian (died 1902)
- December 11 – Esther Saville Allen, American author (died 1913)
- December 17 – Celia Logan, American actress and playwright (died 1904)
- unknown dates
- Teodor Boldur-Lățescu, Romanian journalist and publisher (died 1891)
- Florence Caddy (née Tompson), English non-fiction writer (died 1923)
- Anna Augusta Truitt, American essayist, philanthropist, and reformer (died 1920)[10]
Deaths
- January 29 – Alexander Pushkin, Russian poet (killed in duel, born 1799)
- February 7 – Mary Robinson (Maid of Buttermere), English literary muse (born 1778)
- February 12 – Ludwig Börne, German Jewish political writer and satirist (born 1786)
- February 19 – Georg Büchner German dramatist, poet and author (typhus, born 1813).[11]
- March 9 – Alexandru Hrisoverghi, Moldavian writer and translator (tabes dorsalis, born 1811)
- March 15 – Lukijan Mušicki, Serbian poet (born 1777)
- June 12 – Carl Friedrich Ernst Frommann, German bookseller (born 1765)
- June 14 – Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet (cholera, born 1798)
- September 21 – Georg Ludolf Dissen, German philologist (born 1784)
- October 19 – Hendrik Doeff, Dutch travel writer (born 1764)
References
- ^ "The Lamplighter – by Charles Dickens (1838)". Archived from the original on 2014-11-07. Retrieved 2014-12-17.
- ^ Sims, Michael, ed. (2011). The Dead Witness: a Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 1–38. ISBN 9781408818633.
- ^ "Making of America". Cornell University Library. Retrieved 2013-03-14.
- ^ Aarnes, Sigurd Aa. "Andreas Munch". In Helle, Knut (ed.). Norsk biografisk leksikon (in Norwegian). Oslo: Kunnskapsforlaget. Retrieved 2013-08-08.
- ^ "A Brief History of Little, Brown and Company". New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2012. Archived from the original on 2016-05-13. Retrieved 2013-03-14.
- ^ "Icons, a portrait of England 1820–1840". Archived from the original on 22 September 2007. Retrieved 2007-09-12.
- ^ Pierce, Peter (2009). The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052188165X.
- ^ Charles Eyre Pascoe (1879). The Dramatic List: A Record of the Principal Performances of Living Actors and Actresses of the British Stage. Hardwicke and Bogue. p. 122. ISBN 978-0-8274-2202-5.
- ^ Charles Eyre Pascoe (1879). The Dramatic List: A Record of the Principal Performances of Living Actors and Actresses of the British Stage. Hardwicke and Bogue. p. 341. ISBN 978-0-8274-2202-5.
- ^ Frances Elizabeth Willard; Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (2005). Great American Women of the 19th Century: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Humanity Books. p. 724. ISBN 978-1-59102-211-4.
- ^ Julian Hilton (15 April 1982). Georg Büchner. Macmillan International Higher Education. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-349-16737-1.
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