Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature, by Meg Dobbins

In the sense that it does not entirely share the analytical priorities of queer scholarship, Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature is not the book one expects it to be. That is to say, while the volume does not preclude analysis of LGBTQ+ lives and modes of engagement with nineteenth-century economic culture, its aspiration is primarily to recuperate the historic definition of queer as a term for the eccentric, odd, or strange. As Meg Dobbins notes, the term itself, as well as the peculiarities it denotes, is frequently associated with forms of economic behavior which stood in contrast to (and sometimes, in defiance of) the standardizing currents of nineteenth-century capitalism. As Dobbins reminds us, this is a phenomenon which gives rise to the term “queer street” as a description of financial difficulty. Included within the remit of queer economic dissonance are eccentric bookkeeping and forms of accumulation, debt, expenditure, or desire deemed peculiar for their violation of gendered, sexual, or racial norms and expectations. This is an exciting premise, and colorfully, Dobbins opens the volume with an anecdote about a Victorian shoemaker who kept accounts by means of a board containing hieroglyphs fashioned of “hobnails, tacks, brass and steel rivets” (1). As Dobbins points out, such eccentric behaviors produce “dissonance” at a time when political economy increasingly schematized economic desire as a category of human behavior that could be submitted to scientific analysis. Together with “newly standardized modes of efficient streamlined bookkeeping” and “institutionalized forms of capitalism,” this current of political economy has the effect of rendering such irregular behaviors as oddly out of step with the realities, and abstractions, of nineteenth-century economic life (3).