2 - Gothic economies in Bagehot, Marx, and Lord Overstone

Summary

While T. E. Gregory suggests that it is important to consider the rhetoric of economic statements as well as their content, Jean-Joseph Goux argues that probing the fictional aspects of economic theory reveals the “density of [economic] assumptions.” Victorian descriptions of speculation, financial crisis, and the Bank Act of 1844 illustrate the panicked underside of the scientific, objective language ostensibly favored by professional economists. As Charles Kindleberger has noted, his nineteenth-century counterparts did not shy away from using the language of panic, frenzy, and crisis to describe the triumphs and terrors of capitalism. In this chapter, I consider explicit and subliminal Gothic tropes in the writings of Bagehot, Marx, Overstone, and other Victorians as they discuss financial panic. I argue that panicked accounts of financial disaster suggest that the objective reporting of professionalized economics elides but cannot cancel out a whole range of knowledge about the trade cycle when it excludes language that conveys emotional – and even bodily – responses to panic. Following the modern tendency to separate the economic from other areas of life, even Overstone and Bagehot cannot fully omit the emotion of panic when describing banking crises. Marx's “economic” writings often sound anything but professional to modern ears because he insists on describing capitalism's effects on the body and the psyche, as well as on the economy. Likewise, articulate emotional responses from Victorian have-nots illustrate frustration with economists who view feelings and moral responsibilities to the community as peripheral to the work of economics.