Now the world being divided thus into people of fashion and people of no fashion, a fierce contention arose between them; nor would those of one party, to avoid suspicion, be seen publicly to speak to those of the other, tho’ they often held a very good correspondence in private ... but we who know them, must have daily found very high persons know us in one place and not in another, today and not tomorrow; ... and perhaps if the gods, according to the opinions of some, made men only to laugh at them, there is no part of our behavior which answers the end of our creation better than this. One might say that the profuseness of unamiable qualities with which Fielding endows so many of his characters, was due to a peculiar humour or pessimism in this writer, if one did not find those same qualities plentifully distributed among the characters of his successors. Dickens created a whole gallery of highly interesting and unadmirable folk, and one finds such faithful counterparts in Thackeray, for example, or in George Eliot, that they are to be explained not as the mere creation of any author’s imagination, but as a product of the society in which he lived and observed. There is material for an excellent study of the relation of the economic and social system to the literary art, in the important rôle that money plays in English fiction. That intense preoccupation with the means of existence which is enforced by the fear of want, has profoundly affected the plots and characters of English novels. The number of plots which hinge on someone’s attempt to get someone else’s money, is astonishing. The number of men and women who either marry or attempt to marry for money, is legion; and no English novelist has the hardihood to settle his characters for life without providing them with a living, generally through inheritance or the generosity of some wealthy patron. It is significant that if they are going to make their own fortunes they usually strike out to make them in the new world, where there is some opportunity. The preoccupation with getting money, not through industry but through inheritance, cadging, or chicanery, is reduced to its lowest terms in the stories of W. W. Jacobs about life along the waterfront of London. These entertaining and racy stories, with monotonous regularity, present one theme, and that theme is the attempt of one character to do another--usually his closest associate--out of some trifling sum of money. It is interesting to note that one of the striking differences between English and American fiction is that where the former deals with money-getting the latter is likelier to deal with money-making. The one represents a society where opportunity is pretty thoroughly monopolized; the other a society in which it is as yet somewhat less so.