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

by Catherine Gallagher

The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises.



The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.

Genres: Theory, Literary Criticism

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 21, 2005

About the author

Catherine Gallagher is an American historicist literary critic and Victorianist, and Professor Emerita of English at UC Berkeley. She has authored influential works including Nobody’s Story, The Body Economic, and Telling It Like It Wasn’t. Gallagher has received the Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Jacques Barzun Prize, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2020.

Reviews

[Bethany Dark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this dense, thorough, and original work of criticism, Gallagher meticulously unravels the complex relationship between political economy and literary thought in the nineteenth-century and beyond. With in-depth explorations of Malthus, Coleridge, Ricardo, Eliot, J.S. Mill, Dickens, Darwin, and more, the sheer breadth of research demonstrated throughout the work is staggering. Each figure is treated with nuance and detached impartiality, and the resulting picture is one of a fascinating and under-explored strand of intellectual debate.

This is undoubtably a taxing read - for scholars of literature and economics alike - given the breadth of sources and concepts covered. That said, Gallagher does an excellent job of summarising and quoting key thinkers throughout, making this book largely accessible and a great springboard for further study. I am grateful I came across it, and I am sure it will be an immense help as I write my undergrad dissertation!