The Natural Origins of Economics by Margaret Schabas (review)

victorian review • Volume 33 Number 1 134 was more creative than mechanical, but these value judgements aside, this is a fascinating discussion of howTenniel (and, indeed,Victorian illustrators in general) worked, Morris even discussing those new reproductive processes like photoengraving thatTenniel avoided. Parts III and IV deal with the Alice and Punch illustrations, respectively, and these sections will no doubt appeal to the majority of readers. Both facets of Tenniel’s work have been previously discussed (Alice more than the Punch cartoons), but Morris manages to tease out new significance for these images. Reassessing the relationship between Carroll andTenniel, he argues that neither was the controlling influence but that they complemented each other, and this is borne out in the shared themes and preoccupations that appear in both text and image, such as the tropes of the pantomime tradition, the grotesque and the gothic. For the Punch illustrations, the focus is on key themes that featured in the 2,300 or so cartoons that Tenniel designed, including political and historical events, from the American Civil War to the image of the working (and striking) man, Morris drawing attention to the divergent influences and contradictions that informTenniel’s illustrations. Artist ofWonderland is that rare breed of book that really does have something to offer to both the general reader and the scholar. Its many sections and subtitles can be a little distracting, but they serve to guide the reader through the material.This comprehensive and authoritative analysis of Tenniel is packed full of information and makes astute connections between Tenniel’s designs and those of other contemporary illustrators.The appendix, a guide toTenniel’s unidentified Punch work, will be extremely beneficial to researchers.The book is not always as theoretically sharp or as detached as it could be, but it is engaging. It is also beautifully produced, the vignettes that decorate many of the pages imitating theVictorian illustrated book itself. If quiz contestants do not know who illustrated Alice, then Artist ofWonderland answers the question in a surprising number of fresh and insightful ways. J u lia Thom as Cardiff University,UK • The Natural Origins of Economics by Margaret Schabas; pp. xi + 231. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. $40.00 cloth. The story of the development of modern economics has been told many times, but differences persist among historians of economics, even on fundamental questions. Consider, for example, the transition from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century classical political economy ofAdam 135 Reviews Smith and David Ricardo to the marginalist or neoclassical school that began withWilliam Stanley Jevons, Karl Menger, and LeonWalras in the 1870s. Some interpret this transition as an evolutionary refinement, while others view it as a sharp break. Despite such disagreements, the main points at issue have been long established. Margaret Schabas, in The Natural Origins of Economics, makes a rare and impressive contribution: she offers a truly original interpretation of the development of economics. She argues that early Enlightenment thinkers understood economic phenomena to be elements of an orderly and unified natural world composed of physical objects and natural creatures motivated solely by animal spirits, but that by the end of the nineteenth century, the same economic phenomena came to be understood as constituting a distinct sphere—the economy—that was governed by human agency based on reason. Schabas labels this process of change the “denaturalization” of economics. The first chapter outlines her basic argument and distinguishes Schabas’s approach from a number of similar histories. (Although it arrives at a similar conclusion, Karl Polanyi’s argument that the economy emerged as a distinct sphere in the nineteenth century is not included; I think this is unfortunate.) The second chapter addresses the development of science before the appearance of economics, focusing on Aristotle’s claim that nature does nothing in vain and on the secularization of science under the influence of the Enlightenment. After these preliminaries, the book turns to the evidence directly supporting the central thesis.The first step, carried out in the third through sixth chapters, is to establish the natural character of earlier economic thought.The second step, concentrated in the seventh and eighth chapters, is to show the movement...