Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T06:26:48.319Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

THE ECONOMICS OF “A BIT O' VICTUAL,” OR MALTHUS AND MOTHERS IN ADAM BEDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

Lana L. Dalley*
Affiliation:
California State University, Fullerton

Extract

Hetty Sorrel's economic self-interest is impossible to ignore, as is its sexual nature. George Eliot tells us that Hetty is “quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her” and is determined to exchange her physical charms for a life of luxuries (96; ch. 9). Hetty's attraction to the young, wealthy Arthur Donnithorne is unabashedly opportunistic. While Hetty is searching for Arthur, once she is aware of her “swift-advancing shame,” the narrator reveals the turn of her thoughts: “He would not marry her and make her a lady; and apart from that she could think of nothing he could give her towards which she looked with longing and ambition” (364; ch. 35, 372; ch. 36). And it is certainly not unusual for economic considerations to figure in the Victorian marriage plot; Mary Barton's attraction to Harry Carson is predicated on his ability to make her a lady; Rosamond Vincy marries Lydgate in the hopes that his relationship to the landed gentry will, quite literally, pay off. It is the lethal turn of Hetty's material self-interest – the murder of her illegitimate child – that makes her story exceptional. I suggest that Hetty's desire to “purchase” Arthur's social prestige and her ultimate rejection of maternal responsibility intersect with Malthusian economics. The central action of the story, infanticide, signifies one of the chief topics of Malthusian debate. T. R. Malthus and his followers suggested that economically imprudent marriages were akin to an unthinking infanticide because the newlyweds would likely be unable to feed the children that would arise from their conjugal relations; they also registered child-murder as one of the checks to population, classifying it as “one of the worst forms of vice and misery” (1803: 71; ch. 3). In this essay, I read food and the life-and-death economics of food in Adam Bede as a register for Malthusian concerns about sex, family, responsibility, and dependence. In the novel, these concerns are not only for fathers – which is Malthus's own emphasis – but also for mothers. Although published in 1859, the novel is set in 1799, a year after the first publication of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and three decades before the Poor Law reform developed in response to Malthusian analysis. It is in this context that I propose reading Adam Bede alongside Malthus's Essay.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Banks, J. A., and Banks, Olive. Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England. New York: Schocken, 1972.Google Scholar
Blake, Kathleen. “Between Economies in The Mill on the Floss: Loans Versus Gifts, or, Auditing Mr. Tulliver's Accounts.” Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005): 219–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlile, Richard. Every Woman's Book, or, What is Love? London: R. Carlile, 1825.Google Scholar
Chandrasekhar, S.“A Dirty, Filthy Book” The Writings of Charles Knowlton and Annie Besant on Reproductive Physiology and Birth Control and an Account of the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981.Google Scholar
Connell, Philip. Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Coovadia, Imraan. “George Eliot's Realism and Adam Smith.Studies in English Literature 42 (2002): 819–35.Google Scholar
Davidoff, Leonore, and Hall, Catherine. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Fennell, Francis L., and Monica, A. “‘Ladies—Loaf Givers’: Food, Women, and Society in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.” Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Dickerson, Vanessa D.. New York: Garland, 1995. 235–58.Google Scholar
Flint, Kate. “George Eliot and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Ed. Levine, George. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 159–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, James. “Gallery of Literary Characters.Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 8 (Nov. 1833): 576.Google Scholar
Fraser, James. “On National Economy, No. III, Miss Martineau's ‘Cousin Marshall’—‘The Preventive Check.’” 6 (Nov. 1832): 403–13.Google Scholar
Fraser, James. “Suicide of a Financier.” 1 (March 1830): 245.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1985.Google Scholar
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. London: Penguin, 1996.Google Scholar
Kingsley, Charles. Alton Locke. London: Everyman's Library, 1905.Google Scholar
Kreisel, Deanna. “Superfluity and Suction: The Problem with Saving in The Mill on the Floss.Novel 35 (2001): 69105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798] and A Summary View of the Principle of Population [1830]. Ed. Flew, Anthony. London: Penguin, 1970.Google Scholar
Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1803. Ed. Winch, Donald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Marcet, Jane. Conversations on Political Economy; in which the Elements of that Science are Familiarly Explained. Philadelphia: Moses Thomas, 1817.Google Scholar
Martineau, Harriet. Autobiography. London: Smith, Elder, 1877.Google Scholar
Martineau, Harriet. Illustrations of Political Economy. Ed. Logan, Deborah Anna.. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004.Google Scholar
Osteen, Mark and Woodmansee, Martha. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge, 1999.Google Scholar
Place, Francis. Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930.Google Scholar
Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pujol, Michèle. Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought. Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1992.Google Scholar
Rendall, Jane. “Virtue and Commerce: Women in the Making of Adam Smith's Political Economy.” Women in Western Political Philosophy, Kant to Nietzsche. Ed. Kennedy, Ellen and Mendus, Susan. Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987. 4477.Google Scholar
Rignall, John, ed. Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Thompson, F. M. L.The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Britain, 1830–1900. London: Fontana, 1988.Google Scholar
Winch, Donald. Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.Google Scholar