Confronted with Ruskin's Unto This Last, Shaw's Fabian Essays, or Morris's socialist lectures, a student of literature in the late twentieth century is inclined to regard them as aberrant from, or merely marginal to, their more ‘imaginative’ writings. A cursory glance at their contents appears to confirm a topicality long-outdated, and a subject-matter and terminology now considered to be the province of specialists. Such volumes are once again relegated to the murkier recesses of the college library or second-hand bookshop.

It is the intention behind this volume to rehabilitate the literature of the Victorian debate on Political Economy by suggesting that the individual works selected here are best seen, not as random or eccentric pronouncements, but as central to their authors' respective visions of society. Recognising the extent to which manipulation of the economy was in fact the source of the power to shape society, present and future, the critics of Political Economy regarded the subject as far too important to be abandoned to self-proclaimed specialists. Indeed, the early economists themselves had invariably turned to the subject either as part of some more wide-ranging intellectual inquiry, or as the groundwork for some special study. Adam Smith (1723–90) was a Professor of Moral Philosophy; Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was an Anglican clergyman, who initially formulated his theory of overpopulation as a challenge to the radical–democratic optimism of Rousseau, Condorcet and Godwin, and went on to hold the first designated chair of Political Economy; David Ricardo (1772–1823) was a successful stockbroker, whose bent towards theoretical analysis was stimulated by disputes over banking policy.