The Introduction outlines how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representations of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain. The study contends that nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion a temporal model for conceptualizing a heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence that produced it. The Introduction traces fashion’s transformations back to the consumer revolution and new media of the eighteenth century, and shows how fashion’s integration with visual culture in the nineteenth century led to a new consciousness of visibility and celebrity. The Introduction develops a theoretical framework for analyzing fashion’s relationship to history and the present, and its unique role in stitching individual identity and self-expression to social and public life. Taking its cue from novels that engaged with the temporality of fashion, the Introduction also provides a revisionist account of the history of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Britain in the “long eighteenth century” was the stage for some of the most momentous phases in the emergence of modern capitalism, from the founding of key financial institutions to stock market crashes, rapid urbanization, the beginnings of industrialization, and the expansion of empire. This chapter traces the often-formative role of imaginative writing in conceptualizing monetary and socioeconomic transformation. Prior to the division of disciplines, figures such as Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville moved between modes now differentiated as “literary” and “economic” while, at the end of the period, even exponents of emergent political economy such as Thomas Malthus and Jane Marcet felt called to answer the representations of a poet, and a verse satire helped to shift government economic policy. The chapter examines by turn the place of literature in framing and contesting the new centrality of credit, the defining metaphors that marked the route to a “de-moralized” economic science, and how the focus on landed property and wealth inequality in the work of realist and Gothic novelists relates to heterodox traditions, outside neoclassical economics.