Eleanor Courtemanche. The “Invisible Hand” and British Fiction, 1818-1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-29078-5. Price: US$85.00 /£50.00

Over the last few decades, a proliferation of studies have addressed the notably complex relationship between nineteenth-century economic theories and the fiction of the time. Such “New Economic Criticism” peaked in the late 1990s, becoming an established feature of Victorianist scholarship—hardly surprising since Victorian popular culture often addressed the nineteenth century’s emergent finance capitalism and its impact on everyday life. Indeed, this clash is often the main theme, or more interestingly, a mysterious force in many novels of the time. By mid-century, many novels were at least referencing the fact of financial crashes which sometimes drove the plot of otherwise markedly different narratives. Evil stock market speculators feature as villains. Most frightening of all, the “invisible hand” of unknowable systems seems to pervade everything. What has emerged as an important new development of Victorian studies in recent years is a closer attention to the impact the resulting cultural and social anxieties had on narrative form: on narrative structures as well as on themes or subject matter, on deliberate uses and at times inadvertent extensions of economic metaphors, and on the aesthetic as well as epistemological potential of novels’ critical engagement with capitalism. Eleanor Courtemanche’s The “Invisible Hand” and British Fiction, 1818-1860 provides a meticulous close reading of Adam Smith’s work with the intention of critically reinvestigating the famous “invisible hand” metaphor and the ways in which it has been variously handed over and often tortuously twisted. More significantly still, Courtemanche stresses the importance that we look more closely at the tropes that are involved in the realist novel’s attempts to reconcile new concepts of capitalist involvement – including the idea, famously formulated by Smith, that free trade might have inadvertent beneficial (side) effects – with the realities of its threats to the individual. It is from this dynamic that narrative structures can be seen to emerge as attempts to achieve a resolution or reconciliation. Courtemanche’s focus on narrative structure and shifting genres is a vital step toward a new approach to the study of an intrinsically interdisciplinary subject. What is more, the reassessment is not confined to a mere rereading, through a different lens, of well-known canonical works that beg attention to their depiction of economic struggles or financial flops. Instead, such usual suspects as Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) or Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) are read together with lesser known, non-canonical works. The most compelling argument, however, is the reading of realist fiction (however slippery this term must ultimately remain) and Gothic writing along the divide made by the invisible hand metaphor. This is a truly original approach that asks us to look differently at genre formation on the whole and not just at political economy’s appearance in fiction. Altogether, Courtemanche’s study succeeds in leaving behind the confines of theoretical frameworks that have long hindered rather than helped critical analysis of a contested subject. Her methodology, she owns, owes something to all the recently fashionable schools of thought: the liberal (in the footsteps of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel) and the Marxist as well as the studies associated with New Economic Criticism. While informed by – and in reaction to – all three, however, Courtemanche’s study seeks to highlight above all aesthetic and epistemological as well as historical links (7), and this is her greatest strength.The “Invisible Hand” and British Fiction, 1818-1860 is organized in two parts: Part 1 closely reinvestigates the origins and changing potential of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor, a metaphor Courtemanche finds “beautifully suggestive in its balance between aesthetic, moral, and economic models of value” and which thus offers “mechanisms …