Response

I am extremely grateful to Andrew King for organizing this forum and to Margot Finn, Regenia Gagnier, and Alexis Weedon for their generous, careful, and intelligent assessments of The Body Economic. I am tempted to fill up my quota of these pages by thanking them not only for their generally positive estimations of the book but also for their equally gracious criticisms, which have given me many new insights into the work and its place in current scholarship. Thanks to Regenia Gagnier for her savvy analysis of the limits of discourse analysis, with which I largely agree, and for her well-taken recommendation to practice an interdisciplinarity that attends to contemporary debates in other disciplines. I'm grateful, as well, to Alexis Weedon for her enormously informative explanation of the economics of publishing and reading in the 1860s and seventies and for her suggestion that more time be spent exploring the relation between writers' experience of changes in the overall literary market and the forms of their works. Thanks as well to Margot Finn's equally astute suggestions for overcoming the limitations of the book's methodology by investigating the writers' domestic lives, broadening not only the number but also the kinds of historical 'texts' included, and thinking more systematically about the causality of intellectual history. I do, to be sure, have a few disagreements with some of the criticisms offered, but in general Regenia Gagnier, Alexis Weedon, and Margot Finn have fairly identified the study's major shortcomings. I wish I'd read them before finishing the book, if only to explain why I would not have been able to adopt many of their proposed remedies.

Much of the amicable disagreement here might seem methodological at first glance, but in fact it focuses on the different aims of our work rather than merely on the means of achieving it. Alexis Weedon refers to what the book accomplishes 'on its own terms', or within its own set of purposes, but the three discussants have rather different accounts of just what those terms are. Weedon and Finn call it 'intellectual history', and their comments address the efficacy of that mode of historical understanding. Margot Finn points out that intellectual history often divorces the life and adventures of the mind from those of the body, and she astutely notes the irony of my enactment of that separation in a book on the body economic. As she remarks, the intellectual history of political economy I practice in this book generally confines itself not only to the printed theory that has survived but also to canonical iterations of that theory, whereas the mental, physical, and emotional impact of economic thought and new economic expectations came through numerous channels and was experienced by contemporaries (including the authors dealt with in this book) as a huge mass of conflicting and competing writings, practices, images, sayings, performances, etc. Finn's own work has done much to acquaint us with the variety of representations of economic life that we might consult from both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If my purpose were to explain the economic thinking of the Romantics, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, Thomas Robert Malthus, James and John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, J.R. McCulloch, and the numerous other authors I tackle, why not draw on such material? Moreover, should I not look beyond the rarified formulations of their theories to the life experience that surely informed them? In a somewhat similar vein, Alexis Weedon wonders how specific changes in the economics of authorship (rather than more abstract ideas about themselves as producers) affected the forms of the writers' works. In short, Finn and Weedon make a point with which I (despite appearances to the contrary) generally agree: that intellectual history should expand beyond the history of ideas to the history of people in specific circumstances thinking, communicating, and creating. Indeed, my previous book, Nobody's Story, looks in detail at how the writing lives of five women – their historically specific ways of making a living – shaped both their fictions and the very idea of fiction.

The Body Economic, nevertheless, does conform to the history of ideas mode...