The Pleasures of Benthamism Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy

by Blake, Kathleen

• ISBN13: 9780199563265
• ISBN10: 0199563268
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book offers a fresh look at the often-censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. Treating Bentham, Smith, Malthus, Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, Trollope, Eliot, Gaskell, and Tagore, it sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and widens awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of 'new economiccriticism,' it also treats Utilitarianism. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The prevailing idea of Victorian literature is as contender against the repressive mentality of Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind, the 'carceral' social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon, and the 'dismal science.' But'utility' has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and social reform, favourable to freedom, 'leveling' for gender and class, while, to a surprising extent, advancing its liberalism through 'liberal imperialism.'

Author Biography

Kathleen Blake is Professor of English at the University of Washington, author of Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll and Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-Postponement. She is editor of Approaches to Teaching George Eliot's Middlemarch and contributor to The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, and has published articles on a range of Victorian writers.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy: The Case of Bleak House2. Pleasures of Benthamism---Utility, or, 'People mutht be amuthed': Bentham and Hard Times3. Pains---'Work while it is called Today': Utility, Political Economy, Carlyle, and Trollope 130 Utility, Political Economy, Carlyle, and Trollope4. Pains---Capital versus the Gift in The Mill on the Floss5. 'On Liberty' and Laisser Faire6. Time and the Textile Industry: Gaskell and Tagore7. Utilitarian Political Economy and Empire: Mill as Liberal ImperialistConclusionReferences