On value: Victorian political economy and the Victorian novel

Questions of value are fundamental to Nineteenth-Century novels and to Nineteenth-Century economic theory. While Victorian political economy considers only a fairly narrow stratum of society: the section involved in the marketplace, the novel tells various truths about lives as they were lived. Where political economy is almost entirely male and has to do with "the public sphere," the novel, although typically domestic in focus, treats of men as well as women and industry as well as industry's effects on private individuals. Its world is much larger, and in this sense, its fictions far more attentive to facts than economic theory's theories. This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century economic theory writes fiction while the nineteenth-century novel writes fact, but that the novel often conceals what economic theory doesn't need to. Economic theory can therefore be useful in reading some of the ruptures in Victorian novels which otherwise might slip by unnoticed. A reading of economic theory outlines a shift in both the sorts of things that are valued and the stability of value. It also indicates that late-Victorian culture came to accept much of what early- and mid-Victorian culture found deeply problematic about the new Industrial world, specifically the idea of the appropriateness of self-interested behavior. The late-century was far more comfortable with the fact that the portion of the population doing the bulk of the consuming was not doing the bulk of the producing---and here I refer to class rather than gender.; Shifting conceptions of value are outlined through a reading of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now alongside Classical economist Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Smith and Jeremy Bentham add to a reading of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in terms of conceptions of labor and social hierarchy. John Stuart Mill's economics is read with the "Condition of England Novels" on the subject of equity and distribution; Neoclassical economist William Stanley Jevons is read with Charles Dickens' Bleak House and Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton to investigate the changing ideological need for the mystification of the separation of spheres.