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It has been argued that The Happiness of States by Simon Gray contains a precursor analysis of a Giffen good. That reading, however, produces a misleading account of the significance of Gray’s text within a teleological history of Giffen behaviour. After providing some new information for Gray’s biography, this article shows that he was one of the few nineteenth-century British political economists who argued that speculators did not necessarily play a beneficial role in food markets. It is also shown how Gray’s text has been read to install him as a pioneer of the twentieth-century Giffen good.

This paper examines the explanation for a long-period or natural wage given by W. F. Lloyd, the third Drummond professor of political economy at Oxford University (1832-37). In the aftermath of the Captain Swing disturbances and continuing debates over the Poor Law, Lloyd argued that the natural wage would settle at a subsistence level because of the high population growth rate. The behaviour of the 'labouring class' in having more children was, however, a reasoned response, in conditions of ignorance and uncertainty, to the perceptions and incentives generated by the contemporary institutional setting. This underpinned Lloyd's references to the importance of property rights for understanding poverty and the role of the Poor Law. While Lloyd owed a good deal to T. R. Malthus, his analysis was quite different in the type of reasoning attributed to the mass of the population. Lloyd's position was also markedly different from that of his predecessors in the Drummond chair, Nassau Senior and Richard Whately.

This bibliography of publications by W. Stanley Jevons makes a number of significant changes to the extensive bibliography published by Inoue and White in 2002. Fourteen new entries are identified, which include reviews, an obituary of Charles Babbage, a series of articles regarding Jevons's Coal Question and the record of a previously unknown appearance by Jevons as a witness before a House of Commons Select Committee. Information has also been added, or corrections made, to seventeen existing entries. It is argued that two entries that were previously attributed to Jevons should be deleted from his bibliography.

Describes the various components of W.S. Jevons’s work in Australia between 1854 and 1859 and the context in which it was produced. Explains how a complete list of Jevons’s Antipodean publications has been compiled from his sometimes confusing records. Discusses his social survey of Sydney, demonstrating that his manuscript was censored when published in 1929 by the Sydney Morning Herald. An appendix lists all Jevons’s Australian publications. I am becoming quite accustomed to the pen as a weapon of offence and defence….I often write a newspaper article and am then on thorns for ever so long after for fear of a libel action.William Stanley Jevons, October 1858

In The Theory of Political Economy (1871), W.S. Jevons argued that his representation of rent theory in the form of the calculus had provided a ‘clue to the correct mode of treating the whole science’. An explanation for the clue could cast some light on how Jevons’s marginalist theory was produced, although he failed to do so. This article suggests that an explanation turns on identifying the way that Jevons had transformed his predecessors’ rent theory. The explanation, in turn, clarifies how the calculus imposed a particular form of theoretical representation that constituted an analytical break with preceding work in British political economy.

This paper discusses and reprints two additions to the bibliography of published works by W. Stanley Jevons. The first, concerning Jevons’s sunspot theory of commercial fluctuations, is a signed letter, published by the Athenaeum in February 1879. The second item is a review of the first volume of Henry Dunning Macleod’s Economical Philosophy, published by the Manchester Guardian in June 1873. Unlike the sunspots letter, the review was unsigned. I suggest, however, that it can be attributed to Jevons with a high degree of probability and that it helps explain some puzzling aspects of Jevons’s comments regarding Macleod in his Theory of Political Economy

The comparison of races is no doubt an invidious task, which might sometimes lead to trouble, but I do not see that in statistical inquiries you can suppress plain facts. I think that in legislation relating to different parts of the United Kingdom it is always well to be reminded that there may be distinctly different races to be dealt with, and the more mixture of races can be promoted the better ...

(1993). The ‘Irish Factor’ in Jevons' Statistics: a Note. History of Economics Review: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 79-85.

“I am suffering the torments of the damned from that god-forgotten Thornton, who is boring on about supply and demand … He is not a bad fellow, but just now I hate him like poison.” (Leslie Stephen at the Political Economy Club, December 1866.)