Wealth Demoralized

Smith had pronounced that the pursuit of self-interest would yield wealth and wealth in turn would strengthen the moral sentiments. A generation of English writers expressed fury at this claim.

The harmony and happiness of man

Yields to the wealth of nations; that which lifts His nature to the heaven of its pride, Is bartered for the poison of his soul.¹

The verse continued with a description of the ‘‘sordid lust of self', one of the few forms of lust of which Shelley did not approve.² In the more moderate and nostalgic language of the epigraph above, William Wordsworth described preoccupation with economic growth as a kind of perverse religion.³

Even more popular glosses on political economy were written by a man who avoided fancy language and initially published most of his novels in serial magazine installments. Most of Charles Dickens's novels portrayed the pursuit of economic self-interest as an excuse for hard-heartedness. Oliver Twist, published in 1837, parodied the reform of the poor laws. A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, pointedly contrasted the twisted priorities of the childless miser Ebeneezer Scrooge with those of his subordinate Bob Cratchit—a penniless but happy husband and father—and his dead partner Marley—who pronounced benevolence part of his business.

In Hard Times, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind personifies a kind of impersonal calculation that brings no one (including him) anything resembling happi­ness. Here too, the wealth of nations makes an appearance. A poor young girl insolently asks her teacher how she can know whether she lives in a prosperous nation or not, until she knows who actually has the wealth, and whether she is ever likely to enjoy any of it.⁴ Mr. Gradgrind eventually needs help from a former student, but receives only a reminder of the catechism of self-interest which he had himself inculcated:

It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn't get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.⁵

As his contemporary Harriet Martineau complained, Dickens was more likely to find fault with the existing order than to offer remedies for it.⁶ He never engaged with specific reformist efforts. But no one better satirized the underlying doctrine of political economy, or, in Dickens's own words, the doctrine of ‘‘everybody for himself and nobody for the rest.''⁷