Intersection of Gothic Economic and Fearin Little Dorrit,Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, andDracula

Abstract

Both the gothic novel and political economy belonged to a wider discourse of panic that pervaded the Victorian age as it struggled to come to terms with the terrible convulsions that had regularly racked the then commercial world. Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker are important for the ways in which their writings capitalize on economic panic. Dickens’Little Dorrit, Steven son’sDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Stoker’s Dracula constitute a privileged site wherein the hybrid languages of economics and the gothic come together to capture the bank erization panic that had engulfed the Victorians. The gothichaunts finance capital’s sober discourse, a spectre that it ceaselessly conjures up and is thus powerless to exorcise.