Jennifer Maclure

Dr. Jennifer McClure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings generated by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. She analyzes works by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens and challenges our understanding of how capitalism shapes our emotions. The podcast also discusses the complex relationship between Victorian fiction and economics, the tension between Adam Smith and Malthus on population control, the critique of capitalism and the control of emotions, the concept of boundary pleasure in Dickens' writing, and the role of money as a sticky object in Middlemarch.