The trial of abundance: Consumption and morality in the Anglo-American novel, 1871--1907

This dissertation examines the treatment of consumer ethics in novels and economic texts from the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. I argue that the novels I take up are novels of consumer ethics, novels of purpose that recognize personal economic consumption as a crucial site for moral deliberation and action in the context of a rapidly burgeoning consumer society. The sequence of novels I treat follows a line of Anglo-American thought that begins with the religious crises of George Eliot and John Ruskin and works for the next half-century to articulate an ethics of consumption for a secular, commercialized world. The authors I study are aware that questions about the moral complexities of consumption are intertangled with political questions about the distribution of wealth across society. Their novels and economic writings are important texts in the history of today's efforts to effect political and social change through personal economic consumption.;George Eliot's Middlemarch and Ruskin's Political Economy of Art both wrestle with the idea that authentic aesthetic pleasure might justify self-indulgent spending even as the poor suffer deprivation. Henry James's The Princess Casamassima handles this proposition with less anxiety, and bases its treatment of consumer ethics in an understanding of human consciousness also articulated by Walter Pater and by the economist William Stanley Jevons. Mary Arnold Ward's Marcella and Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree both examine the management of large fortunes; their ethical recommendations and political visions correlate substantially with those of the economist Alfred Marshall. Marshall's work, with its emphasis on altruistic motivation and ethical obligation in the economic context, carries into the twentieth century key features of Ruskin's impassioned beliefs about consumer ethics.