Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, an essay collection edited by Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, makes a useful contribution to the “new economic criticism.” In nineteenth-century studies, liberal capitalist economics has long been an object of critique, largely hostile. More recently, it has gained greater tolerance, if not actively defensive or counteroffensive treatment. Culture and Money is mostly mild and nonpolemical in tone, an approach that has its merits, although I myself doubt that the time for fighting words is over. The volume is strong in nineteenth-century historical scholarship but is less so in engagement with current critical debates. Citations tend to reflect the lag time between paper presentations at the 2011 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference and book publication in 2016. An instance of lag: the substance of the chapter by Aeron Hunt—on conflicted conceptions of management succession in the “family firm” given ideas of “self-help” during the period—has already seen publication in Hunt's own 2014 book.

Bivona and Tromp seek coordination across the diverse eight chapters via title keywords and a two-part volume structure. The “money” of the title has little carry-through in the sense of focus on the “money form.” “Economics” is more apt as a title keyword. The “abstracting” of the title remains elusive in meaning, likewise when used to name the book's two parts, “Broad Abstractions” and “Particular Abstractions.” Per the title, the volume aspires to broad cultural rather than narrowly literary scope, though the editors and six of the eight authors are English professors; the other two are a faculty of law member and an art historian. Also per the title, the time scope encompasses both romantic and Victorian periods, thus the entire nineteenth century. This is a century in the “long” sense, since the volume also explores the Enlightenment roots of nineteenth-century economics. The geographic scope is wide, too, very wide. A chapter by Roy Kreitner centers on United States monetary politics. Two, those by Suzanne Daly and Jennifer Hayward, center on imperialism, whether British or British in interaction with Spanish and Portuguese. These treat cross-influences between Britain and British India of policy thinking about poverty, and a prominent Scotsman's participation in South American liberation struggles that also helped expand British commercial power on that continent. Two more chapters, by Kathryn Pratt Russell and Marlene Tromp, are border-crossing: they treat respectively Walter Scott and the imperial-worldwide textile trade, and British politics over foreign investment, which at times raised alarms about injury to home interests.

I might almost identify in this global perspective a keynote for the book beyond anything marked in the title. But instead, I think, the keynote is more truly to be located in what I will call a “counter-presentist” approach. By way of illustration, Kreitner and Cordelia Smith reconstruct histories that have dropped from view because out of synch with things presently taken for granted—that it is proper for independent U.S. Federal Reserve experts to regulate the currency, and for the British National Lottery to support the arts. Kreitner reminds us of a controversy-packed 1870s transition from widespread acceptance to widespread rejection of legislative power to control money's value. Smith harks back to sharply shifting developments from early nineteenth-century abolition of the state lottery as morally pernicious to the rise of Art Union lotteries that could look doubtfully legal, to ultimate re-legitimation and relegalization of gambling “in a good cause.” The reader of these two chapters might observe some diminution of democratic, legislature-based governance, some promotion of gambling culture—food for critical thought, though Kreitner and Smith are not much concerned with that. Along similar lines, Daniel Bivona retraces Darwin's debt to political economic theory as a check against anachronism. One commentator has opined that Darwin might one day be seen as the intellectual founder of economics (77, citing Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy [2011]). Really? There should be little need to set the record straight here, as Darwin himself acknowledges the profound influence of Malthus. But maybe the reminder is needed. In English-based nineteenth-century studies, and indeed in English literary-cultural studies more broadly, knowledge of the Smith-Malthus-Ricardo-Mill school of political economy remains limited, in my view with anti-capitalist bias playing a role. Bivona has the command of theoretical particulars to engage closely with Smith and Darwin on self-interest, competition, cooperation, interdependency, division of labor, the invisible hand, and natural selection, though he is too sketchy to be persuasive when it comes to Malthus, Ricardo, and free trade debates. He leaves out too much of account, namely, the strongly reformist, “improving” commitments of the whole Smith tradition. This leads him at his chapter's end to overemphasize the dismal aspects of the “dismal science” (1) (Bivona himself uses this disparaging stock phrase). Bivona makes a gesture of reclaiming Smith and Darwin for optimism, but not much more than a gesture. I have differences with Bivona. Still, I value the reminder he gives of an intellectual history too important for us to lose sight of.