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Project

"When Political Economy was Popular": The Reception of Political Economy in Bri tain, 1817-1847

Ever since C.P. Snow first coined the phrase, it has been widely accepted that the history of public and academic discourse is one of a widening divide between “two cultures,” generally designated as literature and science. This view is especially pervasive in accounts of the first half of the 19th century, a period in which artists and writers increasingly defined themselves against scientists and vice versa. Even though much recent work has served to counter this orthodoxy in demonstrating that there existed an intense culture of mutually beneficial exchange between men of letters and men of science (Holmes), there remains a lingering presumption that this revaluation does not apply to the then-emergent science of economics. In the course of my doctoral research, however, I uncovered a series of little-studied texts that give the lie to this assumption (de Groote): Thomas De Quincey, an author traditionally classed as a literary essayist, produced several tracts on political economy. Moreover, I soon found that his texts enter into a dialogue with several British writers like him; men and women of letters situated between late Romanticism and early Victorianism who set out to write on economics (Henderson): these include Friedrich Engels (Outline of a Critique of PE), Jane Marcet (Conversations on PE), Harriet Martineau (Illustrations of PE), John Ruskin (PE of Art), and Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present). The self-stated ambition of these authors is to develop textual forms conducive to freeing classical economics from its academic exclusivity and to open its insights to popular access and public debate. Far from a marginal or eccentric body of writing, these texts were widely circulated, inspiring a lively written conversation: even such foremost economists as Ricardo, Malthus, J.S. Mill, and, later on, W.S. Jevons and Alfred Marshall, read, review and discuss them at length.

The aim of this project is to restore to centrality this hitherto largely neglected corpus, and to develop from it a history of the cross-fertilisation, competition and separation between economics and literature. In short, my research question is how do (wo)men of letters receive political economy in the first half of the 19th century?

Date:1 Oct 2014 →  30 Sep 2015
Keywords:Victorian literature, Romanticism, political economy
Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies