Science for All, and Sense for Some: The Late-Romantic Convergence of Aesthetics and Economics in Peacock and De Quincey

Abstract

This article studies two representative late-Romantic texts in which discourses of aesthetics and economics are opposed and ultimately brought into convergence, arguing that these texts aim to document and to contribute to widespread contemporary attempts to ensure the continued viability of Romantic-era social hierarchies by reinforcing the aesthetic ideology supporting the commercial state. The article provides a brief overview of the fractured state of public discourse in post-Waterloo Britain, demonstrating that the volatile political situation in the 1820s and 1830s rendered the growing divide between aesthetics and economics particularly problematic in that it obscured their interdependence in safeguarding the established political order. The argument then turns to Thomas Love Peacock's Crotchet Castle (1831), which allegorises the debates between literature and political economy at the time, as well as the ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bridge their disconnection. In reading Thomas De Quincey's ‘Ricardo Made Easy’ (1843) and The Logic of Political Economy (1844) through Peacock, the originality of De Quincey's attempted aestheticisation of economics fully appears, as do the reasons for his eventual failure.