The Prime Minister begins with borrowed money. A lot of the great 19th century novels begin with borrowed money � La Peau de Chagrin and Crime and Punishment come immediately to mind. In La Peau de Chagrin, Raphael is first seen losing all his money gambling - but he is gambling because he has come to the end of his rope. He can't think of any other way to pay off his creditors. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is not only mad enough to think that God is dead, but has just that little extra micron of lunacy that convinces him he can fight Mammon � which he does by hacking up an old money lender. But as every reader knows, Mammon, in the form of borrowed money, always wins.

What is it about borrowed money that encodes a narrative pattern so at home in the 19th century? Well, think about how Marx describes money in terms of dead capital and living capital. The dead and living metaphor isn�t his � it is a commonplace of the time. To animate capital � to use your money - was to make it earn interest. But money, as we all know, is actually dead. It is a coin, or a bill. In the French Revolution it was the terrible assignat. So to animate money is to animate a dead thing, or, even more frightening, a dead troupe � and of course we know how rich that trope is with gothic anxiety. That way lies Frankenstein and Dracula. After all, these novels are appearing in a society that is witnessing the long, prolonged death of feudal culture. And that death, though keenly felt, is not clearly understood. When the fundamental concepts native to peasant Europe are suddenly either in disrepute or void, you get a historic moment in which the metaphors betray a basic confusion of the founding binary opposition of life and death. This confusion had, before, only been dreamt of � now the dream seemed to walk abroad, not a pleasant thought. Once the dead things come alive, they have to do what the live things do, only with a more thought out purpose. They have to reproduce themselves, in other words. So we get the common complaint that the dead feed off the living, and in Dracula we get the combination of feeding and reproduction � it becomes one act. This is a nightmare model of power, but it is a different nightmare depending on the level of power one actually holds (or believes one holds) in society. So for the landed aristocracy, which, contrary to the schematic of classroom historians, did survive the French Revolution, and in fact managed the great latifundia of Pomeria and Galicia in Central Europe, and intermarried with the haut bourgeoisie in England and France, and ground down the wealth of peasants in Southern Italy, this particular nightmare was identical to the Industrial Revolution. The conservative romantics, from Chauteaubriand to Ruskin, saw in the factory only the shadow of death, and in the factory worker the products of death, automatons all.

But Trollope, though influenced by that current, was more deeply tied to another sector of privilege � the merchant/professional class. These people, while heirs to the folkloric archetypes of feudal Europe, were halfway committed to the new economic order. So yes, they wanted to maintain that structure which put the outsider, the slave, the criminal, under the ban of social death. But they had also a sneaking liking � and more, a need � for the energy of the upstart, the tycoon, the mover and shaker mysteriously arisen from out of the depths. Frankenstein could, after all, really be the new Prometheus � a myth viewed with particular fondness by both Balzac, Napoleon and Marx.

So naturally the figuration of the second, social death � death-in-life and life-in-death � will have a different aesthetic footing and effect for this set; a set from which most of the great European novelists came.

Another thing to notice is that borrowed money ticks. There�s a race (as in running a race, not races of mankind race) element here � a race against the clock. Because the law of borrowed money is you have to pay it back, and you have to pay back the money owed for having it (which mounts, the longer you have it) and you have to live at the same time. So, metaphorically, the man who borrows money is on a run. Raskolnikov couldn�t solve that problem with an axe. Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (the most interest- battered character in all literature, all dick and empty pockets) couldn�t solve it with his intricate maneuvers, his superabundance of paper. Interestingly, Jules Verne extracted the element of the race and made it the template for a certain type of novel, the novel as contest � Around the world in 80 days, etc. (and remember, that novel begins with a bet).