scholarly journals Speculation and Its Discontents: Economic Criticism, Literary History, and the Unpredictable Pleasures of Victorian Fiction. A Review-Essay. Tamara S. Wagner. Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1119-9. Price: US$44.95 Kathleen Blake. Pleasure of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. ISBN: 978-9-19-956326-5. Price: £56.00/US$95.00

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Steinlight
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Financial Speculation ◽  
Economic Criticism

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.

Culture and Economics

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-484
Author(s):  
Regenia Gagnier
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Economic Man ◽  
The Past ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Victorian Literature And Culture

In a recent review essay in this journal (25.2), Timothy Morton considered a number of works of literary criticism on the centrality of commodification in Victorian literature and culture. This essay will look at the intersection of work in which economists and literary critics have interrogated Victorian economics and their afterlife: models of production and reproduction (classical political economy and Malthusian population theory), consumption (the calculation of pleasure, happiness, and taste), labor (as a theory of value), value (in relation to price), “Economic Man” (as productive pursuer of gain or, after the 1870s, rational chooser among scarcity), and so forth. This work, which has brought into dialogue economists, literary and cultural critics, and historians and philosophers of science, has flourished in the past decade, and this essay will focus on aspects of it relevant to the study of Victorian Britain.

Worlds Enough

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As this book reveals, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, this book demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. The book analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. It concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, the book suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

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