Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores religious reproaches of the miser as a personification of covetousness. It identifies secular revisions of this characterization, in which poets used misers to rail against a corrupt commercial society while moral philosophers carved out weak excuses for them as burdens to bear on behalf of property rights and industry. The book reveals how plays, novels, jokes and songs refashioned the miser as a comic figure—bearing in mind that comedy, in this period, was often at least as cruel as the divine displeasure that preachers imagined to be the miser's fitting fate. It describes the portrayal of real-life misers in biographies and newspaper obituaries. The book shows how novelists and playwrights recast misers’ money after 1790 as capable of doing good, on rare occasions during their lifetimes but more commonly after they bequeath it to a sufficiently sympathetic friend or relative.