Gordon Bigelow

We think of economic theory as a scientific speciality accessible only to experts, but Victorian writers commented on economic subjects with great interest. Gordon Bigelow focuses on novelists Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell and compares their work with commentaries on the Irish famine (1845–1852). Bigelow argues that at this moment of crisis the rise of economics depended substantially on concepts developed in literature. These works all criticized the systematized approach to economic life that the prevailing political economy proposed. Gradually the romantic views of human subjectivity, described in the novels, provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer. Bigelow's argument stands out by showing how the discussion of capitalism in these works had significant influence not just on public opinion, but on the rise of economic theory itself.

Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland

John O. Jordan

Bleak House provides students and teachers occasion to discuss Victorian social concerns involving law, crime, family, education, and money and to learn about every stratum of English society, from the aristocracy to the homeless. The essays in this volume offer instructors an array of practical strategies for use in the classroom: some describe courses organised exclusively around Bleak House; others offer ideas for teaching a single scene or topic in the novel.

Gordon Bigelow

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