The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel

Introduction
There was a time, back in the last century, when most literary critics despised nineteenth-century British political economy. Our disdainful view of it had many sources--the American New Critics, the Leavisites, the Marxists, the early Victorian literati--but it seldom came from any serious encounters with texts by political economists. We preferred to get them secondhand, already packaged as the direct ideological justification of a particularly rapacious capitalism. After all, we had a stake in perpetuating our own image as their humanistic antagonists, the professionals dedicated to the unique, nonfungible properties of things and the autotelic, noninstrumental nature of people. We were the Kantians (or Coleridgeans), they were the Benthamites, and we lacked John Stuart Mill's reasons for attempting a dialectical synthesis.
It is difficult to say just why all of this began to change during the last three decades. The stress that deconstruction placed on displacement in the literary text--the unstable connection between signifiers and signified and the relational nature of all meaning--brought the economic logic of substitution much closer than it had been to the dynamics of textual analysis. Marxist ideology critique also began focusing more intently on the subtle ways in which poets, playwrights, and novelists, despite their overt proclamations, wrote within the dominant ideologies of their times. Reformulations of the concept of ideology also helped: it was seen to be less a set of explicit beliefs than a set of practices, which we repeat even while protesting against them, and which enfold almost inescapable underlying patterns of perception. The Foucauldian replacement of ideology critique with discourse analysis, moreover, allowed us not only to think beyond disciplinary borders to the organizing epistemes of a period but also to scrutinize the processes by which various discourses formed and differentiated themselves. The Foucauldian style of analysis had a particularly strong impact on nineteenth-century studies because that century was singled out as the period when the human sciences took their current form, bringing every aspect of human life into discourse. The discovery that literature played a part in the expansion of Man as a disciplinary object was then complemented by Bourdieu's sociological analyses of how different textual practices are constituted in diacritical opposition to others, so that the very nature of literature lies not in its independent substance but in its distinction from--and at times homologous duplication of--intellectual practices like economics. These theoretical innovations were paralleled by new kinds of criticism devoted to the economics of literature, both studies of formal relations between literary and economic writing and studies of the historical development of literature as an economic activity.1
Moreover, just as literary critics were exploring these topics, historians, political theorists, and even economists were revising and reinvigorating the history of economic theory. Instead of appearing to spring directly out of the ideological needs of industrial capitalism, the discipline we call "political economy" (that practiced by the "classical" economists, led by Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, and David Ricardo) has now been reconnected to the complex of late eighteenth-century intellectual endeavors gathered under the term "moral philosophy" (ethics, political philosophy, natural theology, conjectural history, and aesthetics) and has consequently acquired a pedigree that seems respectable to literary critics. We are also beginning to understand its central place among the developing human sciences of the nineteenth century, and its kinship especially with psychology and anthropology brings it closer to the orbit of nineteenth-century literature.
These investigations have produced a lively new subfield of nineteenth-century British studies, combining literary and intellectual history. Works by Boyd Hilton, Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, Mary Poovey, Regenia Gagnier, Christopher Herbert, Philip Connell, Howard Caygill, and Maureen McLane2 have demonstrated that political economists and their literary antagonists had a great deal in common, which they were frequently unwilling to recognize. The present study is indebted to these earlier works, and it tries to combine their best aspects. For example, I've followed the lead of recent intellectual historians by taking political economy seriously as a discipline and not implying that it was merely a form of early industrial capitalist apologetics.