The Other

The chapter reviews the depiction of financial figures of the Other in British, European, and US periodicals. It covers the treatment of the Irish and the Scots as well as the Jews. In Britain it covers the depiction of Disraeli and the Rothschild family, as well as important Jewish financiers. In Britain, the treatment of the Rothschilds moves from anti-Jewish caricatures in the early 1820s to the depiction of the Rothschilds as established men of finance in Vanity Fair from the 1870s onwards. In Europe distrust/resentment of the financial elite was consistent, and specifically the depiction of the Rothschilds as corrupt international financiers. Whereas the treatment in Britain changed over the century, it did not in Europe. German caricatures from the 1840s onwards presaged the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1870s onwards. This movement spawned the vitriolic caricatures of the Musee des Horreurs in France in the 1890s. In the US by contrast, Robber Barons were satirised (not all of whom who were Jews). Whilst other ‘races’, e.g., the Jews and the Irish, receive negative depictions of their financial activities during the century, the picture that emerges of the Scots in relation to financial matters is uniformly positive.