Money and literature have an awkward relationship. Most authors are very human and like to be well paid. Yet authors also have a tendency to distinguish between literature as an art form and writing as a way of making a living, and they put literature on a higher plane of existence than the vulgar and repetitive accumulation of wealth. Despite the undoubted genuineness of their private efforts to improve their own fees and royalties, many authors in public deprecate the materialism of modern society. In October 2000, the Institute of Economic Affairs, a London-based think tank, published a book on The Representation of Business in English Literature. In a foreword, the institute’s director, John Blundell, asked, “Why does the novelist, the writer of fiction, spit at the market, despise its institutions such as private property and the rule of law, and try to bite off the hand that feeds him?” The book provoked some irritation in such publications as The New Statesman and Prospect.

But an argument could be made that the use of literature to attack market institutions was a twentieth-century mistake. There may be intellectual mopping-up still to do, but few now question the superiority of liberal democracy and the market economy to the totalitarian, planned, and state-owned alternatives. In this respect the twenty-first century is more like the nineteenth century than its immediate predecessor. Some literature of the nineteenth century may therefore seem closer to us than much that was written in the