In 1884, Arnold Toynbee described the debate between advocates of culture and political economy as “a bitter argument between economists and human beings” (Bigelow, 4). Gordon Bigelow's excellent study traces the result of this argument, analyzing the transformation of economics in the nineteenth century, from being accepted as a social discourse integral to politics and literature to being rejected as a cultural pariah and perpetrator of genocide to being relegated to scientific objectivity in the 1870s to cleanse economics of political associations linking it to catastrophic events such as the Great Famine. Bigelow seeks to understand the roles philology, romantic humanism, and literature played in this transformation.

Part 1 examines the origins of political economy as a project to contain the potentially transgressive market: words were under threat from numbers, the patriarchal landed classes by feminized speculators. Political economy proposed a rational, male subject—the capitalist investor—as the agent of world history and progress; this was, however, radically undermined by market crashes and the Great Famine. The first two chapters argue that political economy emerges from the debate between Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau over the theories of Abbé de Condillac. Condillac saw progress as linear, language as key in the development of knowledge, and “abstraction”’ as the pinnacle of human mental evolution—conveniently, this safeguarded the preeminence of Western civilization. Smith's cornerstone concept, division of labor, has its unacknowledged origins in Condillac. However, Rousseau's emphasis on circular return to spiritual beginnings rather than linear technological progress, and “abstraction” as a sign of decline, found powerful cultural disciples among British Romantics, who came to see political economy as part of the Enlightenment machinery crushing humanity. Bigelow argues that acceptance of Rousseau led to a conception of the human as “naturally expressive subject of desire” (50), producing the figure of the consumer. The debate was no longer about progress, but about value and desire; whereas Smith's entire career was devoted to arguing that desire could be controlled and neutralized by the capitalist market, desire becomes the central assumption of nineteenth century and modern economic thought. Bigelow traces this shift through David Ricardo, Thomas de Quincey, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill, whom he credits with rescuing economics from vilification.

Ireland necessarily looms large, in part because of the influence of the “Dublin School” of economics, led by the former professor of political economy at Oxford, Richard Whately. Whately became archbishop of Dublin in 1831 and combined his mission to convert unruly Papists to Protestantism with a project to convert the lazy Irish to the Protestant work ethic. Whately published Easy Lessons on Money Matters in 1832; this political economy textbook was designed for use in Irish free national schools and taught that desire for commodities was divinely ordained—the Irish, who subsisted largely on potatoes and goods of their own manufacture were therefore thwarting God's will. Easy Lessons was widely disseminated in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the Empire; indeed, Whately's position as commissioner of the national education system in the 1830s ensured that political economy—and of course his book—remained on the curriculum. It was of course fitting that political economy should take root here, as Ireland served as a testing ground for various political and economic theories in the nineteenth century; in chapter 4, Bigelow argues that Ireland was central to the economic history of Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The banking industry was hugely successful in Ireland—by 1845 the ratio of bank branches to people in Ireland was greater than in England by a factor of three. Of course, this had a great deal to do with the profitability of Irish land and the need of Irish landowners to transfer rents; the vast majority of the people of Ireland were perceived as being perversely outside of the system of market values, adhering to the potato rather than money—indeed, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan tellingly described the potato (rather than cold hard cash) as the root of evil. Political economy was to prove fatal to at least 1 million people during the Famine, when market forces failed to feed the starving.

Part 2 provides readings of Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Elizabeth Gaskell's novels as critiques of democratic capitalism; Bleak House, like contemporary commentaries on Ireland during the Famine such as Asenath Nicholson’s, is seen to offer a middle-class domestic economy in place of corrosive political economy. Space is obviously an issue, but perhaps it is too much to ask that three novels bear the weight of representing romantic humanism. Given the importance of the Irish context, it is odd that Bigelow does not pay more attention to the Irish workers, and the suicide of the Irishman Boucher in North and South, preferring instead to focus on artificiality and authenticity in written and oral communication. And while Bigelow was right to eschew the well-trodden ground of Hard Times, it is less easy to justify the exclusion of Anthony Trollope; Trollope's novel about the Great Famine and political economy, Castle Richmond, seems crucial to this discussion, and The Way We Live Now would surely have enhanced Bigelow's argument about the feminization and orientalizing of the speculator. Perhaps this lack of cohesiveness between the “economic” and “literary” sections of the book only proves Bigelow's point about how far removed economics has become from cultural discourse. Bigelow succeeds in his aim “to chart the total reorientation of economic concepts which took place in the nineteenth century” (182), but there is clearly much more to say.