The Economic Life of the Author

Should we study the economic lives of authors? For those who wish to study literature in the abstract the answer maybe no. But as Richard Altick, N.N. Feltes, Lee Erickson amongst others have shown social and economic context predicate literary form. The periodical essay, the anthology, the three volume novel are forms which succeeded because at certain periods in the nineteenth century there was a strong market for them. Book historians have been at the forefront of researchingthe context of production. John Sutherland on Victorian novelists' output and sales, Simon Eliot on quantitative patterns and trends in nineteenth-century publishing, Jonathan Rose on the history of reading amongst the working classes, and it is from this perspective that I can enter a debate with Catherine Gallagher's current work.¹

Gallagher's book does not come from this empirical bibliographic tradition, though it acknowledges it; instead it combines literary and intellectual history. Through studying the writings of political economists from Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and Adam Smith, Gallagher shows how their ideas penetrated 'nineteenth-century thinking about culture in ways that have substantially become invisible to us' (5). She selects authors who engaged with political economics such as S.T. Coleridge, T. De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, and demonstrates how their understanding affected their attitude to plot and character within their fiction, to other forms of textual production, and more broadly their view of the use-value of authorship. Smith's classification of men of letters with the 'unproductive' vocations seemed to Coleridge and others to denigrate intellectual and authorial labour. They responded feeling 'compelled to describe their labours, while expanding the concept of productivity in ways that countered the economists' apparent reduction' (27). Depicting the labour of the author 'Victorian writers generally tended to measure their own virtue by their capacity to produce, especially when the task seemed unpleasant' says Gallagher citing William Makepeace Thackeray's Pendennis, to which one mentally adds a range of lesser known authors from Mrs Oliphant to George Gissing (83).

Gallagher argues that political economy's organic premises were structured as plots and that Dickens and Eliot – amongst others – incorporated them into extended narrative forms. She defines two different types: 'Bioeconomic plots trace the interconnections among human life, its sustenance, and modes of production and exchange; they track the reciprocal effects of economic activity and life forms generally. Somaeconomic plots describe more intensively the feelings that are the sensual and affective causes and consequences of economic exertion' (35). The two sorts are not mutually exclusive, some novels have elements of both. I find this particularly interesting in her reading of Eliot, where she moves on to the gradual erosion of classical economics by Alfred Marshall and the marginalists Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger and Léon Walras. In the 1870s they moved political economy away from historical and class assumptions. The 'value debate', as G.B. Shaw called it, was concerned with how desire for the product affected the exchange value of the goods.² Jevons pointed out that value and price were not inherent in the time and cost of production but relative to the fluctuations of market equilibrium. To optimize production economists needed to know the point at which the consumer switched to buying another product having satisfied his desire for the original. This was of great interest to manufacturers because over-production swamped the market and forced prices down. Gallagher applies this to a reading of Eliot's last novel:

… Daniel Deronda depicts agonies of exchange, states of intense subjective suffering. I'm not referring here simply to the obvious humiliations of self-sale: for example, Gwendolen's mortification that Grandcourt's check for £500 arrives with the engagement ring, that she knows she is marrying for money, that she does not love her husband and he knows it – in short, all of the obvious ways in which 'Harleth' rhymes with 'harlot'. I'm referring as well to the fact that Eliot repeatedly creates scenarios in which a 'consumer', for example Grandcourt, has no real appetite for what he purchases. Such a husband, who will 'complain...