Bleak House, Political Economy, Victorian Studies

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Blake
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Know How ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Critical Heritage

Dickens is not known as a political economist. He is the critic of workhouse abuses (made topical by Benthamite Poor Law reform) in Oliver Twist and the caricaturist of the father of Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind in Hard Times. Students of Victorian literature familiarly take Hard Times as F. R. Leavis does as a condemnation of “The World of Bentham,” of utilitarianism, philosophic radicalism, political economy. It is what we expect when Dickens, The Critical Heritage gives us John Stuart Mill complaining about Bleak House and that “creature” Dickens for a portrait of Mrs. Jellyby that he finds antifeminist (to Harriet Taylor, March 20, 1854, qtd. in Collins, 297–98). But consider: in Bleak House there is a passage where Mr. Skimpole declares his family to be “all wrong in point of political economy” (454). His “Beauty daughter” marries young, takes a husband who is another child; they are improvident, have two children, bring them home to Skimpole's, as he expects his other daughters to do as well, though they none of them know how they will get on. Skimpole is exposed in the course of the novel as one of its worst characters. For a bribe and to save himself from infection he turns the smallpox-stricken Jo out into the night. He cadges loans from those who can't afford to make them. He encourages Richard in his fatal false hopes of a Chancery settlement for a payback to himself for helping the lawyer Mr. Vholes to a client. Esther Summerson ultimately condemns him, and Mr. Jarndyce breaks with him. If Skimpole is all wrong in point of political economy, can there be something all right with political economy for Dickens?

Political Economy

2014 ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Blake
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Political Economist ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Economic Criticism ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
David Ricardo ◽  
Liberal Imperialism

Victorian studies has long attended to money matters in literature, while on the subject of money it has long wrung its hands. We see now a ‘new economic criticism’ that is more tolerant or even capitalist-friendly. Appreciation of Adam Smith, founding expositor of political economy, is growing. More reluctance and distaste remain as concerns Thomas Malthus. Bias and neglect continue concerning Jeremy Bentham, their utilitarian ally. J. S. Mill as political economist is becoming better known, as is David Ricardo, with more needed on their utilitarian ties. Expanded attention to economic theory in relation to concrete practice will expand understanding of the ‘political’ in political economy, part and parcel of liberalism while also, paradoxically, of ‘liberal imperialism’. Reviewing political-economic principles that set themes of new economic criticism, this essay connects theory to historical specifics and assesses what has and can be done to place Victorian literature in this grand-scale context.

Unfelt

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Dynamics

This book offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects, including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, the book explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period's understanding of sensibility. Each of the four sections of the book—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, the book's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the period's writing and thought. Drawing inspiration from contemporary affect theory, the book charts how feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other, identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful: the potential, the incipient, the emergent, and the virtual.

Rythmus and the critique of political economy

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas H Ford
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
The Novel

In his late unfinished work on aesthetic theory, Adam Smith develops the concept of rythmus to explore such arts as music, dance and poetry. Smith argues that rythmus communicates emotion in a very specific way. For Smith, narrative arts, such as drama or the novel, predominately seek to recreate or represent in the minds of their readership or audience the emotions of the characters that are portrayed. But what we experience through rythmus, by contrast, is an original, and not a sympathetic, feeling. Rythmus is the communicative medium of a paradoxical mode of collective feeling in which each person feels his or her own emotions, and yet all feel the same thing; in which social being is at once non-fungible and shared.

CULTURAL STUDIES, VICTORIAN STUDIES, AND FORMALISM

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 537-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Loesberg
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Aesthetic Form

VICTORIAN STUDIES, in its longstanding resistance to the formalist study of Victorian literature, has to an extent been re-enacting the anxiety of mid-Victorian poets and novelists about being entrapped in a world of art. That anxiety notoriously defined the Victorian resistance to their Romantic forebears (think of Tennyson’s and Arnold’s well-documented, ambiguous attitudes toward Wordsworth and Keats or even Dickens’s satire of Leigh Hunt as Skimpole in Bleak House). And, predictably enough, it led to the backlash of the late-century aestheticism. If one positions the anti-formalism of the various genres of historicism and cultural studies now current in the study of Victorian literature as current versions of that Victorian anxiety at being hermetically enclosed in beautiful but empty forms, then surely an aestheticist and formalist backlash is more than overdue. And, rather than taking an analytical or neutrally critical response to this flux and reflux, I intend to espouse just such a backlash. If backlash implies partialness, the potential partiality of formalism is, I think, one of its less recognized values. Indeed, I will argue, a return to a consideration of aesthetic form may, in its recognition of its own limits, return a genuine interdisciplinarity to Victorian studies, if one intends by interdisciplinary studies not the work of literary scholars treating non-literary texts, but the participation of scholars from different disciplines with different and possibly conflicting grounding questions, concerns and modes of analysis in the study of the same subject matter.

Adam Smith and Rousseau

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Edinburgh Review

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau’s work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment, and inequality. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Rousseau scholars to provide an exploration of the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history, and literature.

Comparative Political Economy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Menz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Comparative Political Economy ◽  
Technological Parameters ◽  
Private Debt

This new and comprehensive volume invites the reader on a tour of the exciting subfield of comparative political economy. The book provides an in-depth account of the theoretical debates surrounding different models of capitalism. Tracing the origins of the field back to Adam Smith and the French Physiocrats, the development of the study of models of political-economic governance is laid out and reviewed. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) sets itself apart from International Political Economy (IPE), focusing on domestic economic and political institutions that compose in combination diverse models of political economy. Drawing on evidence from the US, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and Japan, the volume affords detailed coverage of the systems of industrial relations, finance, welfare states, and the economic role of the state. There is also a chapter that charts the politics of public and private debt. Much of the focus in CPE has rested on ideas, interests, and institutions, but the subfield ought to take the role of culture more seriously. This book offers suggestions for doing so. It is intended as an introduction to the field for postgraduate students, yet it also offers new insights and fresh inspiration for established scholars. The Varieties of Capitalism approach seems to have reached an impasse, but it could be rejuvenated by exploring the composite elements of different models and what makes them hang together. Rapidly changing technological parameters, new and more recent environmental challenges, demographic change, and immigration will all affect the governance of the various political economy models throughout the OECD. The final section of the book analyses how these impending challenges will reconfigure and threaten to destabilize established national systems of capitalism.

The Novel of Sensibility in the 1780s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Franklin
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies the novels of sensibility in the 1780s. The philosophy of John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson had influenced the first wave of epistolary novels of sensibility beginning in the 1740s. These explored the interaction between emotion and reason in producing moral actions. Response to stimuli was minutely examined, especially the relationship between the psychological and physiological manifestations of feelings. Later in the century, and, in particular during the late 1780s when the novel enjoyed a surge in popularity, the capacity for fine feeling became increasingly valued for its own sake rather than moralized. Ultimately, sensibility should be seen as a long-lasting literary movement rather than an ephemeral fashion. It put paternal authority and conventional modes of masculinity under question.

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