Down from London: seaside reading in the railway age

Abstract

“the value of Black women’s labor in an economy otherwise inclined to cheat, forget, and abandon Black subjects of capitalism as so much bad debt” (116). The book concludes with a coda on Oscar Wilde which nicely encapsulates the multiple meanings of “queer.” At Wilde’s 1895 trials for “gross indecency,” the prosecution constructed a “moralized financial narrative” (156) in which the writer was cast as “an extravagant queer debtor” (159) for his excessive spending on art, jewelry, flowers, and champagne. In particular, Wilde’s many gifts of money to working-class youths seemed clear proof of sexual entanglements. When the prosecution demanded a valid reason for Wilde’s payments to one young man, the writer replied: “Because he was poor, because he had no money and because I liked him. What better reason is there for giving a person money than that?” (160) Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Wilde rejects a rational system of exchange based on set values or what a person deserved. As these few examples make clear, Queer Economic Dissonance offers fresh readings of familiar works while also developing bold counter-narratives to the old Victorian accounts of self-help, individual initiative, upward mobility, and wealth accumulation. Dobbins’ cast of economic misfits—frauds, bankrupts, spendthrifts, and wastrels, many of them women —reminds us that many Victorian writers were sympathetic to those persons left behind or marginalized by modern capitalism. These writers imagined more humane alternatives to an economic system driven by competition and a seemingly endless quest for profit and personal advancement. Although densely argued, Queer Economic Dissonance is written in clear, accessible prose. It also provides a nice balance of critical theory, historical research, and close readings of literary texts. Ultimately, Dobbins knocks homo economicus off his dusty pedestal, replacing him with “better, messier, more complex stories of the pleasures, risks, perks, and liabilities of capitalist life” (28).