Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Charles Dickens's Economy of Excess

Résumé

Charles Dickens’s Economy of Excess Used figuratively, heights, depths and other ‘extremes’ evoke Charles Dickens’s vexed relationship with the economy; a vertigo-inducing spiral, alternating riches and penury in often unpredictable succession. Whereas neoclassical economy regarded the homo œconomicus as a sensible, responsible adult, contemporary economics analyses a range of adverse factors which interfere in the logic of decision-making; emotions (Petit), affects, impulsivity but also the environment, let alone the pressure of the herd instinct. An interesting parallel could be established between John Kucich’s Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (1981), exposing the exuberance and energy of Dickens’s writing, and Robert J. Shiller’s book Irrational Exuberance (2000) which investigates speculative bubbles through behavioural finance and the impact of magical thinking on the stock market. Recently, economics has branched out into subdisciplines to address the collateral, economic effects of developing social practices. The Economics of Excess (Winter 2011) investigates economic models of addiction and indulgences (smoking, drinking, and overeating). The notion of ‘economy of addiction’ has been forged to analyse the opioid crisis in The Downward Spiral (Greenwood 2022), a subject which is tangentially related to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Some economists have even devised a concept: ‘rational addiction’ to subject excess to a logical principle of anticipation, by arguing that addictions can be modelled on specific kinds of rational, forward-looking, optimal consumption plans. Dickens’s propensity to give pride of place to situations of economic strain or bankruptcy may originate in a deep-rooted feeling of economic insecurity, linked with his familial past. This is a biocritical aspect which has been abundantly covered by critics. To illustrate the various facets of this economy of ‘extremes’ pervading Dickens’s fiction, examples will be taken from The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. This proposal is based on a common research project on Dickens through the prism of contemporary economic paradigms, involving Prof. Nathalie Vanfasse (Aix-Marseille Université) and Prof. Emmanuel Petit (Economist. Université de Bordeaux).

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hal-05415526 , version 1 (14-12-2025)

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Georges Letissier. Charles Dickens's Economy of Excess. The European Society for the Study of English 2024 Conference, ESSE University of Lausanne, Aug 2024, Lausanne ( CH), Switzerland. ⟨hal-05415526⟩
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