…we should return to the pages of Dickens and Trollope to remind ourselves that there were wrong ’uns at every level and turn of 19th-century commerce, from crooked agents, clerks, brokers and jobbers to ‘lords on the take, knights on the make’ — and that ‘the thieves were often difficult to distinguish from the legitimate’, to the cost of the ill-informed and gullible investor and customer.
The Spectator has a review of Ian Klaus’s Forging Capitalism, which argues that there was a lot of truth in Dickens’s fiction about Victorian-era industry.
