The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction by Jennifer MacLure (review)

Reviewed by: The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction by Jennifer MacLure Rebecca Easler (bio) Jennifer MacLure. The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2023. Pp. vii + 177. 69. 95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1485-5 (hb). What is the difference between "letting die" and active killing, especially in the name of the greater good? This question serves as the basis of Jennifer MacLure's fascinating study on the role of sympathy in necroeconomic politics. The Feeling of Letting Die connects economic theory and developing laissez-faire ideology with anxieties about End Page 417 the mortality and well-being of surplus populations, as seen in well-known Victorian works of fiction. Using the term "necroeconomics, " from Mike Hill and Warren Montag, in addition to Achille Mbembe's theories of necropolitics, MacLure describes a Victorian system in which ideal economic prosperity and progress occur without government intervention, but that also gives the government the "right and responsibility to abandon its citizens to death in order to preserve the market's freedom" (9). Central to this system are the themes of nonintervention and worries over population. By nonintervention, MacLure refers to the debates primarily of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who argued that individuals with "benevolent motives" can best help those in need, not by direct charity but "by withdrawing intervention" (6). Additionally, she draws on the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus for the population debates; the population must undergo "preventative checks" (7) to prevent overstretching food production. In other words, MacLure looks at necroeconomics as a free-market capitalist system that encourages self-interest and allows surplus populations to die for the public good. MacLure is not interested in merely outlining the economic theories leading into Victorian laissez-faire ideology: what makes The Feeling of Letting Die so compelling is how MacLure connects these ideas to notions of sympathy and feeling, or "the affective encounters among capitalists, consumers, and workers" (15). Affect creates a tension between the public good and the "letting die" of necroeconomic capitalism, and it is this tension that MacLure argues is a particularly Victorian conversation about life and death. Scholars interested in new economic criticism and mortality studies will certainly be interested in MacLure's literary analysis, though she also touches on critical theories surrounding race and imperialism, pathology, and sympathy in significant ways. Focusing on well-known and well-researched Victorian writers Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Morris, MacLure demonstrates that we still have much to learn about how these writers grappled with the moral and social implications of feeling and poor relief in a "let alone" capitalist society that encouraged necroeconomic politics, beginning with the New Poor Law of 1834 (2). The Feeling of Letting Die follows a clear structural process. It first examines differing emotional capacities for "letting die" in the first two chapters, before turning to Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) to question when letting people die turns into taking pleasure in suffering. Finally, the book ends with a comparative reading of Eliot and Morris that looks at capitalism as deeply problematic and unfeeling. Beginning with Martineau and the responding Marcus pamphlet, MacLure reveals the complicated position of feeling in political economy. While Martineau supports a necroeconomic End Page 418 system in Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) through Doctor Burke's nonintervention in charitable hospitals, even while recognizing that it "feels unnatural" (37) to be unsympathetic, she returns to the issue in Deerbrook (1838) in what MacLure argues is "a revisionist redemption story for the Malthusian doctor" and Martineau's "displaced self-vindication narrative" (20). At the heart of this analysis is the ethical problem of laissez-faire ideology and Martineau's attempt to distance herself from the violence of necroeconomics of which the working-class press Marcus pamphlet accused her. From Martineau, MacLure moves to Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854) as critiques of a necroeconomic system that seeks to suppress feeling and cross-class sympathies. Her argument that sympathy is not a problem but a "radical force" (54) against industrial capitalism is an especially productive analysis of how necroeconomic politics and sympathy are. . .