ABSTRACT
The wealth of miser biographies that appeared after 1790 added new shades to the changing landscapes of novels and plays, which industriously resolved their plots—and redeemed capitalism—with a surplus of virtue. In the process, they imaginatively developed misers’ characters beyond the limited scope enabled by biography. Characters emerged whose unique tolerance of misers’ faults allowed them to accomplish—or at least attempt—moral reform. In these cases, the real object of reform was the money, not the miser, which passed from sordid to virtuous applications by the end of the plot. How this transfer worked depended on genre: it was posthumous, and more circuitous, in tragedies and melodramas, whereas sentimental novels ended with the miser's peaceful death, surrounded by loving (and soon to be wealthy) friends or relatives. By rewarding valiant reformers with the miser's accumulated wealth, novels and plays after 1790 almost always ended where economists started, with a confident embrace of the endlessly reproductive credit economy as an engine of limitless progress.
