This book breaks new ground by identifying and illustrating the realities of Victorian commercial life and examining the ways in which novelists like Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope portrayed these realities in their fiction. What exactly did Ebenezer Scrooge do for a living? How much did Dickens really know about the Stock Exchange? Why are stockbrokers the villains of so many of these novels? In answering questions like these, The Novelist and Mammon depicts a real world of frauds, villains and rogues as fascinating as any to be found in the fiction of the day.