ABSTRACT

British fraudsters use the proceeds of their crimes to enjoy themselves. Although students of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century financial crime eschew such colourful language, they too stress the selfishness and self-indulgence of the men – always men – whose lives they study. But if they are right in what they say, there is one big difference between the spending of fraudsters and embezzlers today and that of their late Victorian and Edwardian counterparts. Whereas white-collar criminals today certainly spend their money on enjoying themselves, their predecessors a hundred years and more ago not only spent money on enjoying themselves but often did so in ways they thought likely to reflect well on them and their families. Varley, like Balfour, Bottomley and other well-known swindlers, provides, it seems, a textbook example of the amorality and hypocrisy of many white-collar criminals.