Capitalism, Character, and Community in Four Victorian Novels

"Money, money, money, and what money can make of life!", a woman laments in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. We will read four novels in this class, two by Charles Dickens (Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend), one by Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White) and one by George Eliot (Silas Marner) to see how money and the need for it penetrate souls and societies in these works. We will consider how conceptions of gender, intrigues of sexuality and fears of foreigners shape the imagination of the power and limit of money in the world that these three eminent Victorians inhabit and illuminate.