The 'invisible Hand' and British Fiction 1818-1860
Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism

The 'invisible hand', Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.

Some economic ideas are too interesting to be left to economists. This book argues that Adam Smith's metaphor of the 'invisible hand' -- in which selfish economic actions are mysteriously transformed into aggregate social benefits in a capitalist economy -- implies an entire spatial and temporal system in which the morality of any particular action can only be understood in the context of society as a whole. The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction argues that while political economists focused only on the optimistic outcomes of capitalist moral activity, Smith's model of ironic morality also influenced the work of novelists including Austen, Dickens, Martineau, Thackeray, Gaskell, and Eliot. Their realist novels represent the reconciliation between individual ignorance and systemic overview as much less stable than the economic synthesis, using omniscient narrative voices, multiple perspectives, and humor to depict a wide variety of possible outcomes. Smith shares with the realists a vision of modern society that is structured around a fragile trust in the benefits of unintended consequences.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Capitalist Moral Philosophy, Narrative Technology, and the Bounded Nation-State
PART I: READING ADAM SMITH Imaginary Vantage Points: The Invisible Hand and the Rise of Political Economy
PART II: EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELS AND INVISIBLE HAND SOCIAL THEORY Omniscient Narrators and the Return of the Gothic in Northanger Abbey and Bleak House
Providential Endings: Martineau, Dickens, and the Didactic Task of Political Economy
Ripple Effects and the Fog of War in Vanity Fair
Inappropriate Sympathies in Gaskell and Eliot
Conclusion: Realist Capitalism, Gothic Capitalism
Bibliography
Index