Abstract
Divided Labors examines how literary narratives articulate and model division of labor, which was a core organizing principle of the social body, industrial economy, and knowledge
production in the first half of the nineteenth century in industrial Britain. Investigating the way that narrative simultaneously articulates and embodies division of labor and other political economic ideas, this dissertation examines the narrative innovations made by Conversations on Political Economy (1816) by Jane Marcet, the “Days at the Factories” (1841-1844) tours by George Dodd, and the social novel, Shirley (1849) by Charlotte Brontë. Division of labor, through its logics of organization, helps give comprehensibility to the vast and complex industrial economy and populous social body. It does this by distilling interconnected networks of productive relationships between laborers, machines, tools, factories, industries, and classes down to two related activities: dividing and combining. The organizational logics of the division of labor were, I argue, adapted into literary forms that serve both narrative and economic purposes; as a result, it also is an iterative vehicle by which economic knowledge is created, and ideologies are constructed and naturalized.