Economies of Things: Material Attachments in British Romantic Literature

Romantic literature reveals a persistent attention to everyday material things, such as a sheepfold, a house, and a spinning wheel. Romantic texts indicate that Britons used these things as anchors to build their identities, memories, and relationships. Yet, while recognizing the importance of mnemonic and emotional ties between people and things, these texts nonetheless portray these bonds as increasingly unstable. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, changes in two areas of the economy—paper money and the rise of consumerism—transformed the ways in which Britons understood their relationships to things, fostering more indirect, fleeting interactions with the material world, creating a gap between people and things. While some writers depict this new distance from things as tragic, Economies of Things does not portray this gap solely as a loss. As authors mobilize aesthetics to address the problem of detachment from things, their responses inspire some of the central aesthetic concerns of Romanticism. Tracing these literary responses to economic change—taking as primary case studies the writings of Austen, Burke, Wordsworth, and De Quincey—I uncover strong connections between aesthetics and economics in Romantic-era literature. While aesthetic inventions become solutions for an economic problem, economics becomes a discussion ground for aesthetics. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conversations about economy take on a peculiarly “Romantic” character by taking up concerns such as imagination, creativity, and aesthetics. The gap between people and things inspires two theories of the imagination: Wordsworth’s portable creativity, adapted to the transience of consumerism, and De Quincey’s grotesque, consumer imagination, founded on the destruction rather than the production of material things. This gap also shapes theories of the sublime and the grotesque. To prevent the powerful infinity of paper money from being interpreted as sublime, Burke theorizes an alternative infinity: the infinite grotesque. Based in bodily processes that dissolve formed, solid material things into endless streams of organic matter, this aesthetic category reappears in the works of De Quincey, Wordsworth, and the caricaturists Gillray and Newton. From the stories of lost bonds between people and things emerge aesthetic theories that shape the movement we call Romanticism.Ph.D