It's a truth universally acknowledged that overuse of Pride and Prejudice's opening line has debased its currency as a cliche irredeemably. But that Jane Austen's face should not do the same to the value of the tenner, which it will grace from 2017, is a welcome and safe gamble in a gesture to the sisterhood from the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.
With prison reformer Elizabeth Fry displaced from the fiver by Winston Churchill, sterling no longer had a member of the gentler sex on its banknotes (Queen Elizabeth doesn’t count in this context). But British feminists have now prevailed on the Bank of England’s new governor, Mark Carney – no PR slouch – to restore a semblance of gender balance to the notes. So farewell, Charles Darwin.
Carney assures us that the bank wants “people to have confidence in our commitment to diversity”. Yeah! What he really wants, what the iconography of currency design is about, is assuring punters that the bank “will pay bearer on demand”, that the tenner will hold its value. It’s about selling enduring value, and solidity, and some sense of national identity. And what better way, in truth, than using a writer whose oeuvre has stood the test of time and has the lasting quality of gold? And who epitomises England? Never mind that she’s a woman.
All smoke and mirrors. After all, from 1928 to the late 1970s Cathleen ni Houlihan, leaning on her harp, promising monetary probity, was in reality none other than the delightful American wife of portrait painter Sir John Lavery. No authentic colleen, she.
More’s the pity though, that, baulking at the task of selecting historical figures of continent-wide appeal, the creators of the euro eschewed faces altogether, dehumanising the currency. In their place, bridges, arches and monuments, solid but soulless, all entirely stylised. But, at last, sense. A new “Europa series” of banknotes is being launched, featuring the Phoenician dame who so enamoured Zeus that he stole her away disguised as a bull. What that says iconographically, we’re not quite sure.
