During the Irish Famine of 1845-52, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as a range of commentaries on the Irish disaster, argued for a new theory of individual expression in opposition to the systemized approach to economic life that political economy proposed. These romantic views of human subjectivity eventually provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer. | Fiction Famine And The Rise Of Economics In Victorian Britain And Ireland by Gordon Bigelow, Paperback | Indigo Chapters