The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel, and: From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (review)

Catherine Gallagher's provocative and important new book begins by observing that "there was a time, back in the last century, when most literary critics despised nineteenth-century British political economy" (1). A number of recent books have reopened the study of political economy and reconsidered the relationship between political economy and literature in the nineteenth century. Gallagher places her own work within this conversation, citing books by Donald Winch, Philip Connell, Regenia Gagnier, and others. But when Gallagher looks at political economy, what she sees is strikingly, intriguingly different from what these critics and historians of economic thought have generally found.

British political economy has a two-stage history: the classical phase, from Adam Smith to J. S. Mill, and the neoclassical, dating roughly from William Stanley Jevons's Theory of Political Economy (1871). Jevons's innovation was the theory of marginal utility, which argues that the value of commodities originates in the perceiving apparatus of the consumer, as he or she calculates the usefulness of goods and services. Jevons points out that the degree of usefulness diminishes with each unit consumed; thus the value of goods depends on this "margin" of utility as the consumer approaches satisfaction. The value of commodities here is independent of the labor required to make them, and this is a break from the classical tradition, a break so radical that Jevons's epoch is usually called the marginal revolution. But instead of revolution, Gallagher sees a substantial continuity. She takes this view because of the emphasis she places on the work of Thomas Malthus. Malthus is the center of her tradition, not Adam Smith, and it is this shift of focus that organizes Gallagher's heterodox view.

What makes Malthus's work significant for Gallagher is his emphasis on the laboring body: the pain of work and the desire for sustenance and for sex. Malthus's view of the distribution of resources followed from this primary focus on the body. After highlighting this aspect of Malthus's work, Gallagher brings out sympathetic elements in the work of other political economists. Looking backward to Smith, she quotes him on the "toil and trouble" of work, which is finally "the real price of everything" (23). Looking ahead to Ricardo, she notes that the cost of workers' sustenance forms a natural baseline in Ricardo's theories of value and distribution. Thus for her the labor theory of value is grounded in "biological need" (22). "In the Ricardian theory," she writes, "human vitality pulses through every exchange" (23).

When Gallagher turns to Jevons then, she details his interest in physiological theories of the mind, especially Alexander Bain's work on the senses and Richard Jennings's Natural Elements of Political Economy (1855). For Jevons, human motivation is rooted primarily in the senses, and thus the decisions made by consumers—the decisions which, in his view, establish the real value of things—are grounded in physical life. Here is Gallagher's continuity. She writes: "Jevons's denial that value is stable and intrinsic to commodities, and that its source was simply the amount of labor expended, was not a retreat from physiological universals to subjectivist consumerism but an incorporation of a different set of biological facts" (127). For her, political economy is tied to the life sciences, and its view of market society changes as the disciplines of biology, physiology, and psychology emerge.

It's here that one wishes Gallagher would engage more fully with the critical and historical perspectives she is disputing. It's especially hard to understand Gallagher's reluctance, in the passage above, to see Jevons's work as "subjectivist." The theory of marginal utility is widely described as "subjective," not by literary...