ABSTRACT
In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, a number of liberal British intellectuals attempted to popularize the “laws” of classical political economy in the hope, as the Victorian statistician William Farr put it, that “knowledge [would] banish panic”—that a better understanding of economic laws would quiet the growing unease of the middle and upper classes and the growing unrest of the laboring classes over an increasingly deregulated and industrialized market economy.1 Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-3) was among the most successful of such works. Published in nine pocket-sized volumes, the Illustrations consist of stories about the happy endings that await those who place their faith in a market left to its own “natural” workings. A narrative method that invests heavily in plot and economizes severely on character and detail allows the stories to pick their way through the minefield of Britain’s new economy, speedily and systematically revealing the signs of growing stability and prosperity that lie just beneath its very troubled surface.
