Culture and Economics

Abstract

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.