This chapter shows how the best-selling novelist Walter Scott turned the era’s rhetoric of excess to his own commercial ends. Scott’s novels were frequently and directly compared with those published by the Minerva Press in the previous two decades; Scott’s defenders marked the 1814 publication of Waverley as the death knell of Minerva, while his detractors habitually remarked upon the parallels between his numerous, voluminous novels and those produced in equally large quantities by the Press. In readings of Scott’s early novels and his self-conscious paratexts, the chapter shows how his novels explore an antiquarian system of valuation in which even the most uninteresting document becomes valuable to posterity as soon as it’s rare. Scott uses this logic to offer a unique defence of the ‘innumerable’ popular novels that flowed from his pen and from the Minerva’s printing presses: their great numbers, he suggests, increase their chance of long-term survival. As both Scott and the Minerva Press authors who wrote alongside him argue in various ways, prolificity may ultimately lead to literary prestige rather than undermine it.

This interlude pivots from the neofeudal to the neoliberal, terms that are sometimes used synonymously in contemporary political theory. It addresses two popular film adaptations of Austen and Scotts novels: Clueless and Rob Roy. Released during the mid-1990s, an era of hyperactive economic speculation, both films dramatize the perils of a quantifiable form of social relations made possible by mass financialization. However, while the films critique financialized honor, this time it is an aesthetic derived from Austen, and not Scott, that deftly undercuts honor codes premised on credit and debt.

In the early nineteenth century, honor and disrepute were increasingly synonymous with terms like credit and debt. In Austen’s Emma, credit becomes a primary figure for the broader speculations about the inhabitants of Highbury. Long affiliated with a Whiggish ideology of commerce and its supposed levelling effects, credit, in Austen’s representation, turns out to be an elitist phenomenon, something made available only to those who already have honor, members of a “neofeudal” vanguard such as George Knightley, who can distribute credit at their discretion. However, Scott’s Rob Roy seems to rebuff Austen’s approach to credit and honor. Featuring a young protagonist who throws himself into the 1715 Jacobite uprising, rescues errant bills of credit from his father’s stock-brokerage, redeems family honor, and tries to impress his love interest, the novel at first appears to be an ideal neofeudal text, blending chivalric romance with modern commerce. But Rob Roy himself challenges the merger of these two paradigms. By decoupling honor from credit and disrupting the financialization of social value, the highlander becomes an unlikely scourge of incipient global finance capitalism.