"Naked Truth is the Best Eloquence": Martineau, Dickens, and the Moral Science of Realism

Courtemanche, Eleanor

doi:10.1353/elh.2006.0014

Cited by 20 publications

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“…21 It is, therefore, necessary to instil in readers the conviction that it is crucial to 'resign themselves to the inevitability of the capitalist system and work with it rather than against it'. 22 In contrast, Shirley offers an apparently satisfactory solution to social and economic problems. Once the rules of political economy are allowed to operate without hindrance and the obstacles to free trade are removed, conflicts are settled, unemployment is reduced and universal prosperity ensues.…”

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‘Work abounded, wages rose’: Political Economy in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy

Setecka¹

2020

Brontë Studies

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This article discusses Charlotte Bront€ e's Shirley as a response to 'The Hill and the Valley', one of Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy. Whereas 'The Hill and the Valley' is informed by a belief that following the rules of political economy can solve all social problems of the day, Shirley, for all its similarities to Martineau's novella, reflects different, less unambiguously affirmative attitudes to capitalism and political economy. Even the novel's happy ending, which brings prosperity and settles social conflicts in Yorkshire, has too much of a fairy tale quality to convince the reader of the beneficial influence of the free market economy.

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‘Work abounded, wages rose’: Political Economy in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy

Setecka¹

2020

Brontë Studies

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The Ecological Plot: A Brief History of Multispecies Storytelling, from Malthus toMiddlemarch

Miller¹

2020

Victorian Literature and Culture

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This essay returns to the early nineteenth-century prehistory of ecology to argue that the anthropocentrism of Victorian social novels should be understood as a deliberate, pragmatic response to the ethical dilemmas of ecological entanglement—dilemmas visible by the late eighteenth century. Interspecies entanglement and its discontents provided the cornerstone of Malthus's infamous arguments about overpopulation in the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Inspired by Malthus's proto-ecological vision of endless interconnection, Harriet Martineau adopted it as the plot structure of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), some of the earliest and most influential examples of industrial fiction. Later social novelists borrowed Martineau's narrative technique of disclosing community by tracing material interdependence, but they excluded relations that crossed the species barrier. Those exclusions arose not from arrogance or ignorance of humanity's dependence on other species but from the decision to bracket often unanswerable questions arising from interspecies collectivity to foreground the practical importance of attending to the urgent needs of human beings.

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General Happiness or Human Bliss: Jane Marcet's Political Economy in James Morier's Persia

Haddad

2011

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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"Naked Truth is the Best Eloquence": Martineau, Dickens, and the Moral Science of Realism

Cited by 20 publications

References 13 publications

‘Work abounded, wages rose’: Political Economy in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy

‘Work abounded, wages rose’: Political Economy in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy

The Ecological Plot: A Brief History of Multispecies Storytelling, from Malthus toMiddlemarch

General Happiness or Human Bliss: Jane Marcet's Political Economy in James Morier's Persia

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