Speculative ethics: Victorian finance and experimental moral landscapes in the mid-century novels of Oliphant, Trollope, Thackeray, and Dickens

This dissertation offers four unusual readings of British novels from the middle of the nineteenth century. The four seem to have analytically unruly pieces - snags, as it were, around which criticism swirls and from which it cannot quite get unstuck. Barchester Towers has forever been excoriated or excused for its copious narrative asides; Vanity Fair, that quintessential loose baggy monster, is remiss in setting an unwavering stance toward its heroine, Miss Marjoribanks has been done in by its universally and unremittingly mocking tone; and Little Dorrit confuses readers with the strange intrusion of an interpolated narrative in the middle of the action. This thesis argues that these idiosyncrasies are in fact symptoms of the experimental way in which Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens were contemplating the evolution of the ethical world around them. Although these novels are realistic in mode, they are completely experimental in their moral and ethical universes - and it is this experimentalism that has been completely overlooked by past scholars. In Miss Marjoribanks , Margaret Oliphant reacts to the standardization of mechanized production by transposing the factory process onto a model of small-town social life in order to see the inner workings of this system. Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers seizes on the way limited liability investments have elevated the value of the scarce and frequently inaccurate category of knowledge called "information" to fill his novelistic world with a surfeit of this commodity. William Makepeace Thackeray uses Vanity Fair to reinvent the eighteenth century picaresque genre by mapping the rising and falling fortunes that are characteristic of this mode onto fluctuations of investment value, in both literally and figuratively. Finally, Little Dorrit upends the entire notion of value and shows us a world where morals have lost their qualitative aspects and are solely the province of the kind of quantitative evaluation Charles Dickens found so abhorrent about the emergent social science of economics.