Romanticism and the Cost of Living

Dr Paul Stephens has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2024-27) for a project entitled ‘Romanticism and the Cost of Living’. The project investigates how literary writers in Romantic-period Britain (c.1780-1830) understood ‘the cost of living’ to encompass both financial challenges and philosophical questions. It examines the works and finances of several literary writers (including Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Charles Lamb, and Mary Shelley) to reveal how their experiences of penury and debt shape their novels, poems, and essays. Combining archival research with scholarship in English studies and economic history, the project analyses each writers’ financial manuscripts (from ledger books to letters discussing money) to reveal their connections to the monetary ideas in their literary works, and it considers how these works converse with debates in contemporaneous newspapers and periodicals.

The project argues that writers of the Romantic period were the first to respond to the cost of living – an idea emerging in Britain at this time – in ways that anticipate modern debates on the psychological impact of financialisation. It thus investigates the connected financial and philosophical questions their work was forced to confront. Do intangible forms of money alter our understanding of value and worth? How does class and gender shape experiences of the cost of living? How is life itself impacted by the wider costs of living under changing economic conditions? Moving between literary texts and financial manuscripts, theory and life writing, the project aims to demonstrate how writers of the period articulate new moral and epistemic anxieties about Britain’s emerging financial economy.