Thackeray and the Capitalists

The word capitalism, sparingly used by Karl Marx elsewhere, doesn’t appear in his 1867 masterpiece. His English readers were however familiar with the term, for William Thackeray had alluded to “the sense of capitalism” in his novel The Newcomes (1855). Taking its cue both from this lexical accident and from the productive juxtaposition of the London-based intellectual careers of Marx and Thackeray during the period spanning 1850-1863, this book explores the significance of Thackeray’s narratives from a dialectical-materialist perspective. Such exploration involves the rehabilitation, from the standpoint of a remodeled Marxism (Althusser, Jameson, Badiou, Žižek), of key notions like equality, ideology, history, labor, value, capital, antagonism and overdetermination, but also the reconsideration of Thackeray’s role as uncompromising anatomist of bourgeois society. By offering an innovative speculative reading of The Newcomes , this study contributes to a genuine updating of the materialist agenda in Victorian studies.