Abstract
The accumulation of capital, a process whose limits preoccupied classical economists such as David Ricardo, appears boundless in Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). The novel lays bare the impossibility of divorcing economic expansion from the combustion of fossil fuels under industrial capitalism. This chapter shows that Craik seeks to normalize this relationship by presenting accumulation as an antidote to inequality and by conflating it with biological reproduction. The bourgeoning of multiple plotlines late in the narrative signals the clash between the myth of the self-made man and inheritance in the age of economic growth. The chapter also shows that the nineteenth-century obsession with growth that finds a full expression in Craik’s novel was critiqued by John Stuart Mill earlier in the century.
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- 1.
Jesse Oak Taylor discusses the hearth’s connection to extra-domestic economies (2016, 52–53).
- 2.
Patricia Yaeger discusses the ways in which we can temporally categorize literature based on the history of the use of energy resources (2011, 305–310).
- 3.
Benjamin Morgan argues that the era of fossil capital was “also the era that imaginatively grappled with the intersecting planetary scales of ecology and empire” (2016, 609–635). Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer argue that literature formalized “the endlessness of fossil-capitalism’s own structure” (2019, 76). Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines the literary dimension of the fossil economy in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and William Morris’s work, arguing that the fossil economy inspired a “distinct temporality” in the former case and a “surface aesthetic” in the latter (2015, 402; 2019, 86).
- 4.
The intersection of economics and ecology has recently received critical attention. Taylor argues that the materiality of the (coal-induced) London smog contrasted the abstractness of the finance economy in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and that the global circulation of petroleum found an apt analogy in the fungibility of blood in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (2016, 122–141). Turning to the ramifications of thermodynamics, Allen MacDuffie argues that in the literary imagination “the dream that unbounded energy … w[ould] provide an escape from an enclosing, limited environment” was prevalent (2014, 192).
- 5.
The ideological work of the novel has attracted critical interest, though not in regard to the fossil economy. Silvana Colella argues that John Halifax, Gentleman “contributed to the naturalization of self-interest” (2007, 397 and 410).
- 6.
A brief summary of the novel is in order, since, despite its popularity in the nineteenth century, it is not widely known in our own. John Halifax first drives a cart of skins at a tanyard, where he is employed by the father of the narrator, Phineas. Then he works as an apprentice and a partner at that business, finally becoming a manufacturer of cloth, in which line of work he makes his fortune after replacing water power with a steam engine. A poor man, John falls in love with and marries Ursula March, who becomes estranged from her wealthy and powerful relatives as a result. As John accumulates social and financial power, the two start a family. Phineas lives with them as their friend and confidant, and their happiness is complete, until, that is, their oldest child dies in a melodramatic episode. The family otherwise prospers and grows as John’s social and financial influence deepens, so much so that he singlehandedly prevents a bank run in his local community during a national financial crisis. The rest of the novel traces the adult children’s lives, reporting their economic and marital triumphs. The novel comes to a close with the deaths of John and Ursula.
- 7.
Rather than self-expansion, Ben Fowkes employs the phrase “the self-valorization of capital” in his translation (Marx 1977, 612).
- 8.
In Marxian economics, accumulation, self-expansive as it may be, is not endless, as capitalism runs into endemic crises. Marx’s principle of “the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall” had its roots in the classical economists’ work (Marx 1981, 319).
- 9.
- 10.
The desirability of growth depends on whether the nation is already developed. According to the ecological economist Tim Jackson (2017), it is developed nations that can give up growth, not developing ones.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Keynes, by contrast, thought that the market was inherently unstable. For the Keynesian position, see Skidelsky (2010, 101–102).
- 14.
Ricardo maintained that “growth will be accompanied by … diminishing returns to labor and capital” (Barnett and Morse 1963, 59).
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Çelikkol, A. (2019). Expansion. In: Hadley, E., Jaffe, A., Winter, S. (eds) From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2_5
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