Arthur Clennam's business sense

[kev67]

I don't know much about the financial side of running businesses, especially Victorian businesses, but there were some things I found strange about Arthur Clennam investing all of Doyce and Clennam's funds in Merdle's scheme:

• Would anyone sensible invest all their business's funds in one particular fund, however safe it may seem?
• Did Doyce and Clenham have some sort of current account? Clennam refers to creditors. Presumably these would include firms who supplied them with the raw materials for their factory, and firms who transported their goods to their customers. Surely the firm of Doyce and Clennam would have some ready money in an account to pay these costs.
• Doyce and Clennam had some employees. I was not sure what happened to them when Doyce went to Russia or wherever it was. I thought they would continue to work on whatever product lines they worked on before. They would need to be paid, so again Doyce and Clennam would need some sort of business account.
• What was this Merdle fund? I assume it was some sort of Ponzi scheme, not a bank?
• When the Merdle fund went belly up, all his investors lost their money, but might they also be liable for money than they had invested?
• Pancks said he had thoroughly checked out the scheme before deciding to invest his entire thousand pounds. How did he check them? What information would he have had access to?

[kev67]

Apparently, Dickens was thinking of the Royal British Bank. which failed in 1856. It was a stock option bank. According to The Economist, it was "an extraordinary example of the little trouble the public take to think for themselves". Unfortunately that article is behind a pay wall. The Royal British Bank funded Welsh gold mines. I don't think that was what Mr Merdle was doing. I suspect he was doing what Bernie Madoff was doing, using new investor's money to pay the dividends of his existing investors. Dickens also referred in the preface of Little Dorritt to an Irish bank that failed. This was the Tipperary Bank. Looking at the link, John Sadleir, the head of the Tipperary Bank was more like Mr Merdle. He committed suicide just before his bank failed, only by taking Prussic Acid, which is the same method of suicide as Augustus Melmotte used in The Way We Live Now.

[kev67]

Another good article on John Sadleir, the model for Mr Merdle.

I can see why Irish farmers would put their savings in a bank like the Tipperary Bank, but I am still surprised a finance manager like Arthur Clennam would. You would think he would spread his risk. John Sadleir was very devious though. I do not know what publicly available information there was for investors to check. It looks like banks did not have limited liability then; so not only did investors lose their investment, they were liable for the bank's debts.

[kev67]

I would like to read this, but I am not going to pay £20 for it.

[kev67]

One thing I do not understand: if Arthur Clennam was dragged off o debtors' prison because Mr Merdle's joint stock bank failed with unlimited liabilities, why wasn't Pancks dragged off to prison too? He invested his £1000 in the same bank (which seems rather silly to me).