Gordon Bigelow begins his book by contrasting classical with neoclassical economics. The former had Evangelical inclinations; poverty and wealth were connected with sin and virtue, respectively. The main practical policies advocated by classical economists were free trade and the end of what we would now (in the United States) call “welfare.” This system of thought gradually lost ground from the mid-nineteenth century onward, to be replaced by its neoclassical counterpart, as articulated in the work of William Jevons. Bigelow observes that neoclassical economics is built around the figure of the consumer, who expresses himself (or, more likely, herself) by buying things and services. The consumer has desires, represented by commodities. To chart the purchase of commodities is ultimately to grasp the popular will.

Bigelow's central claim is that neoclassical economics had “romantic roots” (5). We can find these roots, he argues, not only in Tory thinkers like Thomas de Quincey (who wrote at length on David Ricardo), not only in the Dublin school, including Richard Whately, archbishop of Dublin, but also in Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. It is in these intriguingly varied sources that the crucial sources of the modern consumer (considered as an imaginative creation) can be discovered. To put this point less neutrally, virtually everyone who tried to protest against the heartlessness of the classical system found his or her thoughts eventually co-opted by Jevons's kind of theory, which could suborn or absorb for its own purposes almost any critique of its classical predecessor.

Bigelow's literary chapters are, on the whole, unsatisfying. The one on Bleak House is packed with interesting small insights that lack cumulative force. The author wants Dickens's Chancery to be like a market, but Chancery seems designed to impede circulation rather than speed it up or even it out. Bigelow is stretching things here, as he also is in a later comparison between Esther Summerson and the Bank of England (both are old ladies and paragons of domestic virtue). In the Gaskell chapter, Mary Barton is said to draw “on the emergent terms of neoclassical economics—character and authentic desire—in order to critique popular conceptions of classical political economy” (158). This is refreshingly straightforward, though perhaps too general to be as useful as it is supposed to be. Will Jevons, then, turn out to be a kind of novelist in disguise? Will his concept of “authentic desire” really match Gaskell’s? One looks ahead to find out, but the Gaskell chapter is the last. The trajectory of the argument (here and elsewhere) thus seems incomplete.

The less literary, more economic sections of the book often seem better. For instance, Bigelow is lively and clear in discussing the economic disasters of 1847, especially as they played themselves out in debates on Ireland. Shafto Adair's 1847 The Winter of 1846–7 in Antrim (whose title suggests a bracing, almost novelistic specificity) is particularly well represented. Adair's arguments for sensitivity to local conditions and national history, as opposed to reliance on supposedly universal laws of the market, seem to anticipate our own debates about economic modernization, though Bigelow (rightly) does not press the point. Instead, he concentrates on the intricacies of the 1847 debate as such, juxtaposing Adair's line of discussion to that in Charles Trevelyan's well-known 1848 Edinburgh Review article on Ireland. Even if this section of Bigelow's study proves to be more about labor than about consumption, it dramatizes nicely not only an agricultural or a financial crisis, but a point at which classical theory just was not working, and people had to start confronting that conspicuous incapacity.

Bigelow's book is promising in conception and quite uneven in practice. The author is ambitious, often writes well, and has stimulating thoughts, but he is also good at making things hard for himself where he need not have. Above all, might Bigelow not have chosen more appropriate texts, at least on the literary side, to illustrate the way the consumer was imagined? It would have been instructive to explore the relations between de Quincey's economic writings and the voluminous material on opium eating (consumption at its most heroic, on several levels) or to come to terms with that most frenetic of Dickensian consumers, Scrooge himself (after he gave up hoarding and was possessed by Christmas glee). As already intimated, more work on Jevons's own rhetoric would also have been helpful, given his importance as a founding father of neoclassical theory and thus the culminating thinker toward whom the book points. Perhaps the figure of the consumer really does emerge from the “romantic” sources pegged by Bigelow. This seems intuitively right, but Fiction, Famine does not follow through satisfactorily on its own insights.