Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:58:18.050Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bleak House, Political Economy, Victorian Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Kathleen Blake
Kathleen Blake
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Dickens is not known as a political economist. He is the critic of workhouse abuses (made topical by Benthamite Poor Law reform) in Oliver Twist and the caricaturist of the father of Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind in Hard Times. Students of Victorian literature familiarly take Hard Times as F. R. Leavis does as a condemnation of “The World of Bentham,” of utilitarianism, philosophic radicalism, political economy. It is what we expect when Dickens, The Critical Heritage gives us John Stuart Mill complaining about Bleak House and that “creature” Dickens for a portrait of Mrs. Jellyby that he finds antifeminist (to Harriet Taylor, March 20, 1854, qtd. in Collins, 297–98). But consider: in Bleak House there is a passage where Mr. Skimpole declares his family to be “all wrong in point of political economy” (454). His “Beauty daughter” marries young, takes a husband who is another child; they are improvident, have two children, bring them home to Skimpole's, as he expects his other daughters to do as well, though they none of them know how they will get on. Skimpole is exposed in the course of the novel as one of its worst characters. For a bribe and to save himself from infection he turns the smallpox-stricken Jo out into the night. He cadges loans from those who can't afford to make them. He encourages Richard in his fatal false hopes of a Chancery settlement for a payback to himself for helping the lawyer Mr. Vholes to a client. Esther Summerson ultimately condemns him, and Mr. Jarndyce breaks with him. If Skimpole is all wrong in point of political economy, can there be something all right with political economy for Dickens?

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Altick, Richard. “The Utilitarian Spirit.” Victorian People and Ideas. New York: Norton, 1973. 114–45.Google Scholar
Alton, Ann Hiebert. “Education in Victorian Fact and Fiction: Kay-Shuttleworth and Dickens' Hard Times.” Dickens Quarterly 9 (1992): 67–80.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction, A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Nina. “Alluring Vacancies in the Victorian Character.” Kenyon Review 8 (Summer 1986): 36–48Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. Works of Jeremy Bentham. Ed. Bowring, John. Edinburgh: Tait, 1838–1843.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. Constitutional Code. Vol. 9. 1830.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. “Emancipate Your Colonies!” Vol. 4. Pr. 1793.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. “Equity Dispatch Court Proposal, Containing a Plan for the Speedy and Unexpensive Termination of the Suits Now Depending in Equity Courts.” Vol. 3. 1830.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Vol. 1. Pr. 1780, pub. 1789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. Memoirs and Correspondence. Vol. 10.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. Not Paul But Jesus. 1823 under name Gamaliel Smith. Cited Williford.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. “Panopticon, or the Inspection House.” Vol. 4. Pr. 1791.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Vol. 7. 1827.Google Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy. “Sextus.” Wr. 1817. Cited Williford.Google Scholar
Blainey, Ann. Immortal Boy, A Portrait of Leigh Hunt. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985.Google Scholar
Brown, James M.Dickens: Novelist of the Marketplace. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982.Google Scholar
Budd, Donna. “Language Couples in Bleak House.” Nineteenth Century Literature 49 (1994): 196–220.Google Scholar
Coles, Nicholas. “The Politics of Hard Times: Dickens the Novelist versus Dickens the Reformer.” Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 145–77.Google Scholar
Collins, Phillip. Dickens and Education. London: Macmillan, 1963.Google Scholar
Collins, Phillip., ed. Dickens, The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971.Google Scholar
Danahay, Martin A. “Housekeeping and Hegemony in Bleak House.” Studies in the Novel 23 (1991): 416–31.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Introd. Morton Zabel. Riverside ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Household Words, A Weekly Journal 1850–1859. Table of contents, list of contributors and their contributions based on Household Words Office Book. Morris Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Princeton Univ. Library. Compiled Ann Lohri. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1973.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ed. Cox, Arthur J., introd. Angus Wilson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.Google Scholar
Fielding, K. J. and Smith, Anne. “Hard Times and the Factory Controversy: Dickens vs. Harriet Martineau. Dickens Centennial Essays. Ed. Nisbit, Ada and Nevius, Blake. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. 22–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison. (1975). Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: Vintage, 1979.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1985.Google Scholar
Gilmour, Robin. “The Gradgrind School: Political Economy in the Classroom.” Victorian Studies 11 (1967): 207–24.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Michael. Carlyle and Dickens. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1972.Google Scholar
Graver, Suzanne. “Writing in a ‘Womanly Way’ and the Double Vision of Bleak House.” Dickens Quarterly 4 (1987): 3–15.Google Scholar
Halévy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. Trans. Morris, Mary. Boston: Beacon, 1960.Google Scholar
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The De-Moralization of Society, From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. New York: Knopf, 1995.Google Scholar
Holdsworth, William. Charles Dickens As Legal Historian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1928.Google Scholar
Holloway, John. “Hard Times: A History and A Criticism.” Dickens and the Twentieth Century. Ed. Gross, John and Pearson, Gabriel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. 159–74.Google Scholar
House, Humphrey. The Dickens World. London: Oxford UP, 1941.Google Scholar
Jahn, Karen. “Fit to Survive: Christian Ethics in Bleak House,” Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 367–80.Google Scholar
Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph. Rev. abr. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.Google Scholar
Kucich, John. Repression in Victorian Fiction, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.Google Scholar
Leavis, F.R. “Hard Times, The World of Bentham.” 1947. In Dickens the Novelist with Q. D.Leavis, and in The Great Tradition. New York: New York UP, 1973. 227–48.Google Scholar
Levine, George. “Victorian Studies.” Redrawing the Boundaries, The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen and Gunn, Giles. New York: MLA, 1992. 130–53.Google Scholar
Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principles of Population. 1798. Sel. and introd. Donald Winch. Based on 1803 ed. as ed. James, Patricia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Preface to the 1st German ed. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Trans. Moore, Samuel and Aveling, Edward. Ed. and introd. C. J. Arthur. Abr. student ed. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. Collected Works. Ed. Robson, John M. and Stillinger, Jack. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965–90:Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. Vol. 1. 1873.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. “On Liberty.” Vol. 18. 1859.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy and Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. Vols. 2, 3. 1848 and rev. in later ed.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. “The Subjection of Women.” Vol. 21. 1869.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D. A.The Novel and the Police. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newsom, Robert. “Pickwick in the Utilitarian Sense.” Dickens Studies Annual. Vol. 23. New York: AMS, 1994. 49–71.Google Scholar
Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property, Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peltason, Timothy. “Esther's Will.” ELH 59 (1992): 671–91.Google Scholar
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments, The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.Google Scholar
Ricardo, David. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. 1817. Works and Correspondence. Ed. Sraffa, Piero with M. H. Dobb. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Vol. 1. 1951.Google Scholar
Sawicki, Joseph. “‘The mere truth won't do it’: Esther as Narrator in Bleak House.” Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (1987): 209–24.Google Scholar
Shatto, Susan. Companion to Bleak House. London: Unwin, Hyman, 1988.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Ed. Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S.. Text. ed. W. B. Todd. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, Vol. 1. 1976.Google Scholar
Smith, Grahame. Dickens, Money, and Society. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.Google Scholar
Stone, Marjorie. “Dickens, Bentham, and the Fictions of the Law, A Victorian Controversy and Its Consequences.” Victorian Studies 29 (1985): 125–54.Google Scholar
Welsh, Alexander. “Burke and Bentham on the Narrative Potential of Circumstantial Evidence.” New Literary History 21 (1990): 607–27.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780–1950. 1958. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. “Dickens and Social Ideas.” Dickens 1970. Ed. Slater, Michael. London: Chapman & Hall, 1970. 77–98.Google Scholar
Williford, Miriam. “Bentham on the Rights of Women.” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 167–76.Google Scholar
Zwerdling, Alex. “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.” PMLA 88 (1973): 429–39.Google Scholar