In this book Professor Blake attempts to bring closer together two literary corpuses: the Victorian novel on the one hand and both classical utilitarianism and classical political economy on the other. As she claims in the first chapter of the book, many previous commentators have either treated these two corpuses as completely separate or have famously referred to them as representing two opposite world-views. Leavis, for example, in the middle of the twentieth century, and many scholars after him, referred to Dickens's Hard Times as a criticism of the ‘Benthamite world’ allegedly represented by the strict and repressive Mr Gradgrind. It should be noted that Blake, following Leavis, includes a lot under the title of the ‘Benthamite world’, including ‘the Utilitarian doctrine of Jeremy Bentham and the capitalist economics of Adam Smith and such followers as Thomas Malthus and J. S. Mill’ (p. 1). Michel Foucault's interpretation of Bentham's Panopticon as monstrously authoritarian features prominently in her account as well. Blake rejects this interpretation and also suggests that carefully reading Victorian literature and political economy side by side leads to acknowledging the commonalities bridging them.

Blake manoeuvres between two poles in bridging the two corpuses. First, she shows just how much prominent Victorian novels share the Benthamite conceptual framework and sometimes even deliver similar conclusions. Second, by referring to classical economic and utilitarian texts themselves, she claims to ‘reveal’ their author's true intentions, thus avoiding, she suggests, severe misinterpretations.

The first two chapters of her study address central ideas of classical utilitarianism and classical political economy, and their treatment in Dickens's two great novels, Bleak House and Hard Times. Bleak House addresses, for example, attitudes towards the court of law, the system of common law, traditional inheritance, landlords and the church. Contrary to views of contemporary commentators who interpreted the Chancery ridiculed in the novel as a Benthamite system, Blake reminds readers of Bentham's harsh criticism of the Chancery and the common law as inefficient and obsolete. In the second chapter, devoted to Hard Times, Blake raises the core ideas of her study, arguing not only against the received interpretation of the novel but also against Dickens's own account of utilitarianism and classical political economy. The chapter concludes that Bentham himself and his ideas were very much poles apart from Gradgrind's and surprisingly resembled, instead, the ideas of Mr Sleary from the circus, an advocate of pleasures and fun. Blake bases her interpretation on Bentham's preoccupation with pleasure, especially in his Table of the Springs of Action and The Principles of Morals and Legislation. According to her, Bentham's reduction of the concept of utility to pleasure is grounded in his philosophical objection to religious asceticism and his commitment to individuality. She furthermore represents the utilitarian agenda as ‘doing as we like’, which is inaccurate of course. But she also claims that Bentham's Panopticon, contrary to what too many commentators have wrongly maintained, was meant to promote less pain and more happiness, amusement, efficiency and comfort, as well as expression of creativity and innovation (pp. 51–7). In the same light, she favourably defends Bentham's approach to usury, sex, homosexuality, and his famous argument regarding ‘push-pin’ and poetry.

More significantly, Blake insists that classical political economy is wholly consistent with maximizing pleasure. In chapters 3 and 4, for example, Blake refers to the special emphasis classical political economists placed on labour, saving and investment, arguing that they typically argued that interim pain was necessary for promoting more pleasure in the future. She discovers similar concerns in the novels by Carlyle and Trollope (chapter 3) and George Eliot (chapter 4). Contrary to the common view that Carlyle opposed political economy, Blake claims that his attitude to labour and his ‘cloth philosophy’ were not so much at odds with ‘the dismal science’ (pp. 96–7).

Chapters 5 and 7 are devoted to selected texts by utilitarians. Blake's decision to analyse J. S. Mill's On Liberty in particular is not a natural one since pleasure is not explicitly at the heart of Mill's argument there. A more natural choice would have been of course his Utilitarianism, in which he addresses and clarifies explicitly the connections between utilitarianism and pleasure. Blake is aware of this and also of some of the extensive discussions of Utilitarianism (see p. 162, n. 16), and yet she focuses on On Liberty, reading it through the lens of the ‘philosophy of pleasures’. She sees the text as a literary work and interprets ‘liberty’ as first and foremost a pleasure in itself.

In her concluding chapter, Blake faces the challenge of reconciling Bentham's liberalism with the fact that ‘the Mills’ and other utilitarians took an active part in British colonialism in India. She approaches this issue carefully, providing a complex account of imperialism, both liberal and paternalistic.

While I take this book to be an important attempt to approach utilitarianism and classical political economy as a part of the spirit of the age, nevertheless Blake sometimes forces her arguments insensitively. I will focus here particularly on her representation of utilitarianism and classical political economy and not so much on their echoes in Victorian literature.

In my view, the book confuses descriptive and normative aspects of utilitarianism, which leads to numerous misrepresentations. Blake refers to Bentham's analysis of pleasures (on the descriptive level) as almost naturally leading to the normative imperative of promoting self-centred hedonic behaviour. Moreover, on her account, this results in the maximization of the aggregate utility. Blake completely neglects a central tension that utilitarianism was meant to resolve, namely that individuals’ ‘doing as they like’ does not always result in their promoting common good. Classical utilitarians never held, like Mandeville, that selfish behaviour naturally promoted ‘public benefit’. Indeed Bentham famously argued that: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.’ But the less quoted other part of this pivotal paragraph claims:

Thus the pursuit of personal pleasure alone does not necessarily result in promoting utility either in Bentham's doctrine or in his followers’ versions, particularly in Mill's version of the doctrine in which individuals are explicitly expected to act in accordance with the principle of utility, i.e. promoting the good of the whole sometimes at the expense of their own pleasure.

Mill, relatedly and contrary to what Blake fully appreciates, warned his readers in Utilitarianism against two misinterpretations of the doctrine, namely interpreting utility as opposed to pleasure and ‘the contrary accusation, of referring everything to pleasure’. While Blake sees that Mill warned against attributing the first error to utilitarianism, she should have been more careful in appreciating his worries about the latter error as well.

Blake also avoids facing the problem for classical political economists between promoting future welfare and happiness (a term not used enough in the book) at the cost of sacrificing present pleasures. And she wrongly injects Malthus into her discussion in so far as he was far from advocating that pleasure ought to be promoted, especially in his Essay on The Principle of Population. On the other hand, David Hume, who is not even mentioned in the book, could suit Blake's argument better here. The first two essays of his Political Discourses explicitly advocated promoting pleasure, and much more vigorously than many later political economists did.

Finally, Blake's study fails to mention some important recent literature relevant to her concerns, such as Rosen's Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (2003), as well as Hirschman's less recent but still relevant The Passions and the Interests (1977). She might have addressed Winch's Wealth and Life (2009), though it may have appeared too recently for her to take account of it.