Links the nonempirical concepts within nineteenth-century energy physics to Victorian discourse about capitalist production and exchange and presents the case that the concept of imponderable matter was both a theoretical construction within physics and a heuristic for understanding economic issues. Discusses imponderable matter; Dickensian physics-Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and the luminiferous ether; the residuum, Victorian naturalism, and the entropic narrative; overcoming entropy-energy, capital, and the late-Victorian literary utopia; empire and the fourth dimension-non-Euclidian geometry, the heterotopic narrative, and the economics of space; atoms and economics-vortex theory and finance. Alexander is at the University of Vermont. Index.
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