Joshua Gooch, professor of English of D’Youville University, will present on the supernatural tales of Charlotte Elizabeth Lawson Riddell, née Cowan, a writer well-known for depicting the workings of nineteenth-century capitalism, especially in her realist works that represent the machinations of the Victorian economy reflected back to an audience of striving lower-middle class professionals their lives and their own petty bourgeois ideology. Gooch turns to her supernatural tales, particularly The Haunted River and her collection Weird Tales, to examine the tales’ engagement with nineteenth-century’s global economy. While critics of these tales have focused on the struggles between social reproduction work and capitalist production proper, Gooch situates these works within the wider imperial economy. Examining the link between the liminal spaces of the supernatural to those of borders and colonies, Gooch will demonstrate Ireland, Riddell’s childhood home and the recurrent setting of the tales, to be the site of ideological tension between what was allowed or encouraged by British finance capital in the 1870s and 1880s and what Riddell understood to be proper political economy. Confrontations with the ghosts and riches of imperial spaces inevitably lead in these tales to clashes with economic verities from Smith and Malthus and drawn in terms of domestic economics.
Julia Reagan, a graduate student in the English Department at Villanova University, sharpens the contrast between claims about the economy made in the novel and the realities represented by the novel in her analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). Against the criticisms of the novel for failing to follow through on its sympathy for impoverished workers to the point of condemning exploitation under capitalism, Reagan turns to the culminating scene of class conflict in the novel—the conversation between factory owner Mr. Carson and working man Job Legh—in which Mr. Carson’s thought experiment in political economy reminiscent of Malthus’ forms of reasoning and, like Malthus, reliant on simplification to the point of willful blindness, starkly contrasts with Job Legh’s account of the poor children who starve to death when their parents cannot find work. While Legh claims no understanding of political economy, thereby paralleling his author, who cedes authoritative knowledge of political economy to the experts in the preface of the novel, his claim to the reality of everyday lives against Mr. Carson’s empty abstractions brings attention to novel’s representation working-class characters and the particularity of their lived experiences that reveal the deliberate obtuseness of political economy’s abstract forms of reasoning.
Katie Brandt Sartain, a PhD candidate in Critical English at the University of Illinois Chicago, argues that in George Gissing’s New Grub Street the market driven aspects of literary production morphs from a pleasurable artistic pursuit into an addictive need to produce and so illustrates the last lingering threads of the Victorian social novel as the financial concerns alluded to begin to torture the form of the novel itself, influencing its content, delivery, and public reception. In outlining the “addictive practices” manifest in Edwin Reardon’s literary failures in both artistic and financial terms, Sartrain identifies the economy, the desire for popularity and commercial success, and the pressures of the literary market as the prevailing hegemonic structures influencing discourses of addiction in the novel and demonstrates Gissing’s figuration of addiction as a death-drive towards the creation of art, as addiction to writing. Sartrain will then provide the literary historical significance of the novel’s figuration of addiction for the habitual, necessary, destructive need to produce novels as rounding out the end of the Victorian historical and literary era and signaling the beginning of the Modernist movement.