ABSTRACT
In eighteenth-century British novels and conduct books, the miser emerged as a friend, suitor, spouse, and parent, not a soul in need of saving or an abstract economic agent. In the hands of such authors and artists as Ned Ward, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and William Hogarth, the miser's anxious unhappiness went from being a solipsism to a contagion, which threatened to harm the hospitality and romantic love around which these genres revolved. Among friends, misers sharpened the contours of what qualified as hospitality in the eighteenth century, when they failed to provide ample accommodation or gorged themselves at the expense of others. In proximity to the opposite sex, they often crossed the thin line separating greed from lust, personified money's corrosive effects on the institution of marriage, or sedulously impeded their wives' tendency to spend. And as parents, they either extended their obstruction of monetary circulation to their daughters' bodies, by privileging financial calculation over romantic desire; or converted the debate over extreme saving and spending into an intergenerational saga, when their self-inflicted penury spawned spendthrift male heirs.
