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No mere mocking display of human weakness this, instead the author says the book is "a pleasant way to instil a moral". Whether you will allow such to be instilled is up to you - the rest of us will pick up the book and go back to the past with Euripides and Aristotle for this tour of avarice through the ages. It comes far enough to the present to include Tulip Mania and the South Sea Bubble so the 20th century would greatly have appalled (or maybe amused?) the author.
Dickens owned a copy of this book and Wegg reads it in Our Mutual Friend. Arnold Bennett apparently also read it.
The author died in 1900 and had been a newspaper editor for ten years.
