Chapter 9 considers Victorian practices of mesmerism in the context of ongoing debates in the period as to whether a conscious, rational individual might be made to behave in certain ways through unconscious influences. The fundamental premise of mesmeric practice – the transmission and reception of nervous energy by way of the imponderable vibrations of the magnetic fluid – was, I argue, grounded in acoustics. Sound and music played a critical role in inducing trances and triggering responses, while also providing a potent series of auditory metaphors by which these unusual states of being might be framed and understood. The mesmeric bond between individuals was believed to operate as a form of communication network, which transcended the limitations of the individual body and its sensory capacities, while also pointing to the potential forces and energies that might operate beneath the threshold of human consciousness.

Chapter 5 explores how Harriet Martineau’s travel narrative Eastern Life, Present and Past and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Burden of Nineveh” organize time through ruins from the eastern Mediterranean. Eastern Life, which was criticized for its unorthodox historicization of Christianity, imagines how ruins themselves experience human empires across centuries. The temporal form of the ruin, Martineau shows, is a capacious present in which the revolutions of human religions and empires become insignificant. Rossetti’s poem, which focuses on ancient Assyrian relics arriving at the British Museum, similarly surrenders human duration to the ruin’s own temporality. For Rossetti, the museum’s attempts to redefine the ruin within its own linear historicism necessarily fail because the ruin has already proven its endurance through many changing imperial narratives. Both Rossetti’s and Martineau’s texts depict ruin as a temporal form that outlasts any empire’s claims to significance, challenging the centrality of human experience in time.

This chapter examines consistent patterns and changing trends in British representations of Scandinavia throughout the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Scandinavia became not only an alternative destination for British travellers but also the source of new literary forms and motifs which inspired and fuelled contemporary debates in British society. Its case studies are Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Harriet Martineau’s Feats on the Fjord (1841), and Maria Sharpe Pearson’s writings on Ibsen’s work published in the British press (1889–94). These texts demonstrate the growing attraction of the Scandinavian landscape and the so-called cultural (re)discovery of Old Norse literature and mythology as well as Scandinavia’s rising literary reputation from the 1880s onwards thanks to the international impact of realist and naturalist works by Scandinavian authors, notably Henrik Ibsen. Ultimately Scandinavia offered the ‘allure of accessible difference’ as the region was and continues to be perceived as both geographically and culturally close – and yet far away.

This chapter examines Harriet Martineau’s approach to gender politics through her understanding of ‘manliness’ as explored in a selection of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832−4). It was a concept essential to her configuration of male leadership fit for the testing times of the early 1830s, and highly topical. Published when the pressures experienced by men of all classes were being highlighted in periodicals and novels, the tales address the differences between ‘personality’ and ‘character’ in crises faced by fathers and husbands, magistrates and petty criminals, trades union activists, landowners, and slave-owners, at home and in the colonies, as they debate the injustices of their living and working conditions. This chapter argues that Martineau’s interventions in contemporary debates about masculinity shift the focus to a new kind of conscientious working man whose values are tested in cross-class dialogues in public places. It explores the ways in which the Illustrations show how men collaborate and compete within their communities, and the ambiguous gender messages arising from patterns of reward and punishment that seem to devalue otherwise positive characteristics.

Feminism is often portrayed as a relatively new perspective in debates about the international dimensions of political economy, but it has predecessors in ideas advanced by some prominent thinkers in the pre-1945 era. These thinkers shared– with varying levels of commitment – a broad normative goal which has echoes in contemporary feminist IPE literature: that of challenging patriarchal practices and structures in order to end women’s subordination within the world economy. There were many divisions among these thinkers, including between those who sought to promote feminist goals within an economic liberal framework (including Jane Addams, Bertha Lutz, Chrystal Macmillan, Harriet Martineau) and those more drawn to socialism and Marxism (Williama Burroughs, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Aleksandra Kollontai, Paulina Luisi, Magda Portal, Clara Zetkin). Some other thinkers also linked feminist goals to other perspectives such as neomercantilism (once again, Henry Carey), Pan-Africanism (Amy Ashwood Garvey), and anarchism (He-Yin Zhen).

The development of a scientific economic discourse and the expansion of the financial system and markets across the nineteenth century and through the British Empire proved to be rich sources of inspiration to novelists and poets. Fictional writers not only explored the themes of stock market crashes, imperial investments, industrial expansion, gambling and risk taking, fraudulent currencies, and bank failures, but also the failure of political economy to account properly for the inadequacies of the economic system and the people who fell victim to those failures. Examining the interplay, interaction, and coconstitution of literary and economic discourses in the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates the celebratory and critical ways economic writers, essayists, novelists, and poets represented and responded to political economy’s evolution. Reading the history of economic thought alongside the literary texts of the nineteenth century – this chapter argues – reveals their shared investments in value, representation, and human desires.