Aeron Hunt's Personal Business is a work of the “new economic criticism” that is significantly recasting our understanding of Victorian literature and culture. The subject is character—the personal, the individual—considered as a factor for business as well as literature. In some sense, Hunt harks back to Ian Watt and his mid-twentieth century Rise of the Novel, linking the development of prose fiction to burgeoning capitalist culture and correlating the realist mode of characterization with Enlightenment individualism. However, Hunt's analysis also builds on scholarship produced in the intervening decades.

Watt was welcoming, describing the “rise” of the novel. The latter decades of the twentieth century saw far less approval. In her 1996 Victorian Social Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual, and Communal Life, Josephine Guy treats individualism across novels and market culture as a big problem. She describes novelists as would-be critics of individualist socioeconomics caught up in complicity by the individualist imperatives of their own genre. Hunt is less judgmental. Her tone accords with some lightening up to “tolerance” vis-à-vis capitalism that Catherine Gallagher observes among twenty-first-century new economic critics (see her 2005 The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel, 192). To be sure, Hunt brings to bear the probing and doubting attitude toward capitalist socioeconomic systems with which we have become familiar. Three of her four chapters stress tensions and impasses for business and the realist novel in their commitment to individualism. Still, her last chapter takes an unexpected turn to the positive.

Hunt treats Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, and Margaret Oliphant's Hester . She places these novels in context of business manuals like “How to Read the Character by the Actions, Manners, and Speech,” biographies of businessmen such as by Samuel Smiles, legal and business writings on bankruptcy, and Darwinian treatises on inherited character traits aired in the press and relating to leadership succession in family firms.

We may be prepared to recognize some sharing between the novel and business with regard to individualism. But Hunt opens the way to new reflection by casting the “individual” as the “personal.” Much criticism over the years, including new economic criticism, has accustomed us to expect impersonality on the business side. We might think of depersonalizing developments, such as factory division of labor, ownership reorganizations from family firm to joint-stock company, and the development of limited liability laws. But Hunt is right to remind us that such developments were incremental and uneven. And she is right, too, to remind us that impersonal systems did not cancel the need for the personal that was still bedrock for capitalist culture. The individual of political economic theory is, after all, personal—a self with self-interest who must also recognize that the same holds for each other self. This latter factor is too often lost sight of. Hunt spends little time on economic theory. However, Adam Smith would recognize his model of mind in her account, say, of employer-agent relations—namely, as requiring for proper functioning “sympathetic imagination,” “fellow-feeling,” insight into interests, motivations, and perspectives on the other side, including perspectives on oneself, thus prompting “self-reflex[ivity]” (39, 40). Without such processes of thought, parties risk blindness to opportunities or risks within two-way transactions. So impersonalization made character judgment harder to come by but all the more needful: judgment between employer and agent (Dombey-Carker); judgment between lender and borrower (Tulliver bankruptcy); judgment by the public of great capitalists as a means to understand capitalist times (business biographies, Melmotte); judgment by business leaders choosing successors (Vernon firm).

In Hunt's central formulation, business requires skill in reading character, and novels promise to teach it. Novelists offer themselves as consummate readers of real-world character by testimony of their ability to represent character realistically. They cultivate character-reading in their readers, which in turn should prove useful to those readers in their own lives and business.

Business writers sometimes cite realist novels to illustrate character insight. Further, they show what they draw from novels in their guidelines for reading character in business manuals and their mode of characterization in business biographies. Manuals advise consideration of personal details, particulars of time, place, and circumstance down to the seemingly petty or random, in expectation of discovering the unique individual pattern. Biographies provide such details for the reader to piece together.

However, Hunt also traces incursions of non-realist characterization, owing more to romance, in Victorian business literature. Among business biographies in particular, she finds realist character representation giving way to emphasis on “charisma,” aura. Indeed, she finds something similar within realist fiction itself. There is Melmotte, whose character Trollope does not ultimately present as “readable” in realistic terms but as a man of aura exceeding comprehension. There is Dombey, whose character Dickens makes jump the traces of realism for fairy tale. Per Hunt, Dickens deeply destabilizes his novel's realist underpinnings. He shows reading of character to be important—without it Dombey misses everything about his son, his daughter, and his agent Carker, who brings him to grief. Dombey never does gain better understanding of others or himself; however that seems, after all, not to matter, as at novel's end Dickens provides him with a happy stock role of man redeemed amidst a loving family. By contrast, Hunt notes George Eliot's narrator, whom Hunt understands as a projection of the novelist, modeling the powers of realist character reading. But again, Hunt finds a weak point. Here it is the narrator's omniscience, which undermines the capacity to provide a model to the reader. In fact, this omniscience is bound to remind readers that that's a power they will never have.

Then comes the turn. It seems that Oliphant, against the odds, vindicates realist characterization and its lesson to readers, valuable for life and business. In her novel she shows the effectiveness of reading for personal character, not for character as type. Here that means judging between potential successors to head the Vernon firm, placing priority not on hereditary type, degree of Vernon-ness, but on the traits of the individual. Hunt's book ends on a surprise note of appreciation.