Unlike Tom Jones or Roderick Random

Unlike Tom Jones or Roderick Random, both foundlings who are found out, the banknote’s wanderings do not take him home to the landed estate that inspires eighteenth-century writers’ fantasies of permanent residences and absolute private properties. The banknote moves on, into the pockets of persons in high life. Yet, as his momentary return to the little apothecary [an incident in Bridges’s novel] suggests, the banknote’s travels can make circulation seem more tidily circular. As late as 1820, this project retained its appeal: in Buy a Broom: An Interesting Moral Tale for Children, the talking broom that passes through a succession of owners also returns to the hands of its maker, although only long enough to be refurbished and resold. Like Asmodeus, the limping devil who knows how to maximize the city’s visibility, such circulating protagonists give readers the wherewithal to conceptualize society as a whole. They assuage fears that the social is of unlimited and hence inapprehensible extension. (98)