Dickens, Money, and Society

Dickens, Money, and Society explores how Charles Dickens’ fiction wrestles with one of the central realities of Victorian England: the pervasive power of money. Grahame Smith traces Dickens’ evolving treatment of wealth, poverty, and social value, showing how the novelist’s characters, plots, and even comic inventions are shaped by the economic transformations of nineteenth-century Britain. From Pickwick’s exuberant humor to Martin Chuzzlewit’s satire of financial speculation, Smith demonstrates that Dickens’ novels are neither mere social reportage nor pure imaginative fancy but rather complex engagements with the moral and cultural consequences of capitalism.

Balancing close literary analysis with historical context, the book situates Dickens alongside thinkers like Ruskin, Carlyle, and Mill in their shared recognition of the destabilizing effects of a money-driven society. Smith argues that Dickens’ artistry lay in fusing didactic impulses with creative autonomy, producing narratives at once socially incisive and imaginatively free. A major contribution to Dickens studies and Victorian cultural criticism, Dickens, Money, and Society will appeal to literary scholars, historians of capitalism, and all readers interested in how fiction both reflects and critiques the economic order of its time.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.