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

As someone who has spent many hours reading nineteenth-century political economy and Victorian novels, I found much to admire in Catherine Gallagher's new work. The Body Economic uncovers a series of themes, models of value, and organizational dynamics that link the writing of prominent political economists to literary works of the period, especially novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Central to Gallagher's argument are two themes that recur in nineteenth-century political economic texts: bioeconomics, which refers to "the interconnections among populations, the food supply, modes of production and exchange, and their impact on life forms generally" (3); and somaeconomics, which describes "the theorization of economic behavior in terms of the emotional and sensual feelings that are both causes and consequences of economic exertions" (3). In Gallagher's admirable account of the tensions that informed political economy, bioeconomics, with its emphasis on life and death, derived from the pioneering work of Thomas Robert Malthus and persisted in the work of Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick; somaeconomics, which stressed pleasure and pain, was initially associated with Jeremy Bentham and continued in the writings of W. Stanley Jevons. Despite the tensions between these two themes, Gallagher argues that they worked together to place the human being, and the body in particular, at the center of economic inquiry. In doing so, bioeconomics and somaeconomics helped make political economy a form of organicism, which competed with other organic theories to explain how biological and social life were related to each other.

The Body Economic generally groups nineteenth-century literary writing into three phases. In the first, Romantic poets and essayists sparred with Malthus and each other to accommodate what they observed about sensual experience and creativity to the inescapable determinism of population growth. In the second phase, represented here by Dickens's Hard Times (1854), writers grappled with some of the new physical realities thrust upon their attention in the 1830s and 1840s: urban overcrowding and inadequate sanitation, the poor health of the laboring population, and the growing discrepancy between aggregate measures of national well-being and the daily misery experienced by individual workers. The third phase, which Gallagher illuminates through Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) and Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), saw writers struggling to reunite questions about value to actual bodies, both by addressing embodiment, disembodiment, and abstraction (Our Mutual Friend) and by finding ways to theorize the value of literary writing in terms not solely derived from the market (Daniel Deronda). Gallagher is less interested in discriminating among these literary phases or in simply mapping the themes of bioeconomics and somaeconomics onto literary texts than in showing how literature and political economy struggled together to counteract—or at least comment upon—the tendency of Britain's credit economy to abstract value from actual human lives.

Many of Gallagher's local observations and textual analyses are stunningly perceptive and original. Her assessments of the pervasive influence of Malthus's ideas, for example, are consistently illuminating. She demonstrates that the very concept of culture was spun out of later theorists' efforts to integrate "the Malthusian dilemma" into a developmental narrative (157); and, in one of the most provocative sections of the book, she shows how many of the preoccupations we associate with modernism were derived from "the Malthusian obsession with fertility metamorphosed into a theory of the symbolic" (172). Her argument that Romantic poets' tendency to emphasize the suffering associated with their own creative labor and its productivity owes much to the Malthusian depiction of work is intriguing, as is her contention that Dickens drew upon "a foundational tenet of the political economists" when he depicted the circus players as workers in Hard Times (78). Gallagher's treatments of the four novels she examines in detail are also complex and rewarding. Her analysis of Daniel Deronda, which turns on the resemblance between Jevons's...