 Thank you very much. I am absolutely delighted to be here. I'm a little bit worried about this talk though. Last weekend I was at a conference for Liberty Fund and I mentioned to a very senior, very esteemed, very market-friendly humanities scholar that I was going to be giving a talk on Dickens and market friendly ideas in Dickens. And he sort of leaned back in his chair and he looked over the top of his glasses at me and he said, well, he's a beautiful writer, Sarah, but oh my god, the ideas. Oh, the ideas. So I'm thinking that Larry and Carl might have invited me to give this talk tonight because since the place is sold it's not going to matter if the roof actually falls in from your combined shock and horror. I'm also a little bit worried about this whole Jonah Lehrer thing that's been happening. I don't know if you guys have been following this. This talk originated as a talk for API, the Association for Private Enterprise Education, and then it spent a little bit of time as a post on my blog and I think that means that I can't write for the New Yorker, doesn't it? What it does mean I know is that I'm following in the pattern of a master. In a discussion of Dickens' famous public readings from his works, Joyce Carol Oates argued that one must not think that Dickens was reading authentic Dickens to these mass audiences. Instead, he prepared scripts showcasing his and his audience's favorite characters. Now, there's probably a way to justify referring to a reading given by Dickens from excerpts made by Dickens taken from novels written by Dickens as being inauthentic Dickens, but I have yet failed to figure out what that could be. So I want to assure you that whether it is qualified for the New Yorker or not, this talk is authentic Sarah. And I would like very much to thank Larry and Carl and everyone at Fee for the opportunity to share it with you. And I very much want to thank all of you for taking a summer Saturday evening to spend with me thinking about Dickens for a little bit. So let's get going. All of us who love literature and who love private enterprise and business have heard a lot about the problem. In literature, as John Blundell and other critics tell us, we are presented again and again with quote, prodigiously wasteful yet scrooge like businessmen who are abnormal and antagonistic, corrupt, cunning and cynical, dishonest, disorderly, doltish, dumb and duplicitous, inhumane, insensitive and irresponsible, ruthless, unethical and unprincipled and villainous to boot. Literature, we are told, hates business or at least holds it in contempt. And it hates or at least holds in contempt those who engage in it. And the most contemptuous, the most opposed of all authors to the power and the capabilities and the promising potential of private enterprise is, of course, as my friend from the conference knows, Charles Dickens. We know this because when we, even we, need a term of repugnance and distaste for a businessman of a certain type, we instinctively think of Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. How instinctive is that thinking? Well, since the 1950s, the Oxford English Dictionary records multiple uses of Scrooge's name as a common noun used as a synonym for miser in a wide range of contexts, contexts that have no bearing on Dickens' work, contexts that have no explicit or implicit reference to Christmas. For example, in October of 1976, a Texas newspaper noted that Jim Catfish Hunter, baseball's foremost money picture, turned in a Scrooge-like performance on Saturday. You all know this guy, Disney's Scrooge McDuck, a familiar character to Disney and comic fans. And this common vision of Scrooge is no surprise. We're supposed to hate him. Dickens built him that way. And because Dickens is a writer of undeniable power and influence, we can't resist. And how could we resist? How could we be expected to resist with descriptions like this one? Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone. Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rhyme was on his head and on his eyebrows and on his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about him. He iced his office in the dog days and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas. Scrooge is a villain. And we take our pleasure from his story as we see him get punished and we undergo a catharsis as we see him reform. At least most of us do. Apparently tired of the endless drubbing that Scrooge takes as an exemplar of every form of financial evil and possibly even more tired of sugar-coated financial advice books that use Scrooge's fictional transformation to sort of this picture of charity as a model for how rational people should handle their money. Witness, for example, the financial wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge, which comes with a foreword written by the esteemed financial wizard Naomi Judd. The economists Bruce Buena de Moschita and Steven Landsberg have both published defenses of Scrooge's miserly behavior before his reformation. Landsberg's 2004 article in Slate, which is called What I Like About Scrooge in Praise of Misers, is a ringing defense of the social, not just individual, virtues of saving money. Landsberg writes, put a dollar in the bank and you'll bid down the interest rate by just enough so that someone somewhere can afford an extra dollar's worth of vacation or home improvement. Put a dollar in your mattress and by effectively reducing the money supply, you'll drive down prices by just enough so someone somewhere can have an extra dollar's worth of coffee with his dinner. Scrooge, no doubt a canny investor, lent his money at interest. His less conventional namesake, Scrooge McDuck, filled a vault with dollar bills to roll around in. No matter. Ebenezer Scrooge lowered interest rates, Scrooge McDuck lowered prices. Each Scrooge enriched his neighbors as much as any Lord Mayor who invited the town in for a Christmas feast. So with his tongue firmly in cheek but his economic principles firmly intact, Landsberg concludes his article by noting that great artists are sometimes unaware of the deepest meanings in their own creations. Though Dickens might not have recognized it, the primary moral of a Christmas carol is that there should be no limits on IRA contributions. Now, I love that one. Well, Landsberg's article uses Dickens novel and its representation of Scrooge as an example of one kind of thinking about miserliness, and then challenges readers to reexamine that kind of thinking in ways that are productive of intelligent economic thought. Bruce Buena de Moschita actually rewrites the novel. In his book, The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge, he engineers a new history for Scrooge, one of consistent and consistently hidden charity of grinding personal poverty that is only increased by the many sacrifices Scrooge makes in order to help others. It's a novel of a man who is misunderstood, misjudged and wrongly punished. Now, while Buena de Moschita asserts that he does this by relying on evidence found within the body of Dickens great work, he finds himself driven to borrow characters from other novels by Dickens and other Victorian writers to accuse Charles Dickens of non specific but damning unhallowedness and to blacken the reputation of tiny Tim in order to defend Scrooge. Now, I understand the impulse. For those who are exhausted by yet another negative representation of the businessperson in literature, it must sometimes seem as if the whole problem could just be solved if we could turn Scrooge into a hero. If he's the root of the problem, we should just be able to reinterpret Scrooge and revision Dickens, as we say in the English department, until the problem goes away. The problem with this approach, though, as contrast into Landsberg's use of the Scrooge story as a springboard for an intriguing economic counterintuitive, is that the Buena de Moschita approaches all but guaranteed to enrage people who love literature. Now, that might be your goal, in which case go for it. It's a winner. But if the goal is instead to open up a conversation between lovers of literature and lovers of private enterprise, there may be a more productive technique to use. And the work of Charles Dickens is perfectly suited to it. It's my contention that in order to rescue the representation of business and literature and more specifically to rescue the reputation of business in literature by Charles Dickens, that great enemy of private enterprise, all we actually need to do is do the reading. This is not meant to be insulting advice. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens weighs in at 20-month volumes, more than 30 pounds and over 12,000 pages accounted. There are excellent reasons. And Dickens, in addition to all that, he knocked off about 14,000 letters in his spare time and wrote weekly newspaper columns. So he was a busy guy. There are excellent reasons like opportunity costs and aging vision for not reading everything that Dickens ever wrote. I certainly haven't read everything that Dickens ever wrote. However, with novels and conveniently he has put them out. With novels like those right there that frequently add up to over 800 pages, with thousands of characters, little Dorot alone has 45 named major characters and countless unnamed shopkeepers and maid servants and beggars and cavern keepers and so on. And with scores of scenes and characters who are so memorable and so ingrained in our popular culture that we think we remember them before we've even read them. The danger when reading Dickens is that we assume that we know what it's about. This danger is only increased when we approach the novels wanting to prove a point, particularly a point about something we care as much about as private enterprise. We know, in other words, that Dickens created Scrooge. That's not a point in his favor. We know that he wrote Hard Times, where he describes Coketown, his analog of 19th century Manchester like this. And here's 19th century Manchester, which Dickens uses as a model for the village of Coketown in his novel Hard Times. And he describes it this way. It lay shrouded in a haze of a city that was in its own which appeared impervious to the sun's rays. You only knew the town was there because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke now tending this way now that way now aspiring to the vault of heaven now merkily creeping along the path as the wind rose and fell or changed its quarter. A dense formless jumble with sheets of cross light in it that showed the city's vastness. Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen. Well, the wonder was that it was there at all. It had been ruined so often that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely, there was never such fragile chinaware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handled them never so lightly and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined when they were required to send laboring children to school. They were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works. They were ruined when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery. They were utterly undone when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. We know that what we will find on every page of Dickens is contempt for industry coupled with the mockery of businessmen and their over-inflated egos. Businessmen like Scrooge, businessmen like Paul Dombie Sr., who believes that the earth was made for Dombie and Sun to trade in and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships. Rainbows gave them promise of fair weather. Winds blew for or against their enterprises. Stars and planets circled in their orbits to preserve in violet a system of which they were the center. We know that we won't find anything in the writing of the man who produced these Jeremiah's against commerce and industry anything that supports business, private enterprise, free markets or the kind of financial responsibility that is so important to a free society. The problem is we're wrong. The works of Charles Dickens, and I'm thinking of the major novels here, not the letters or forgotten magazine articles, the major works provide a range of counter arguments to the anti-market, anti-business arguments made in other places in his own works. Indeed, it's not at all unusual for these supportive arguments to occur in the same books as the arguments that critique business and the market. Whether it's support for the importance of innovation or the respectability of work or the moral failing involved in personal financial irresponsibility, these arguments are available in Dickens. It only remains for those of us who care about these issues and not merely about heart-wrenching accounts of families ruined by malevolent dishonest schemers to draw attention to these moments and create a fuller and more sophisticated picture of Dickens' work and thought. So Dickens and innovation. When we think of Little Dorot, and you did all read Dickens' major novels before the talk tonight, right, because there's a quiz after, and I'll, okay, well, then just try and follow along. When we think of Little Dorot, we think of its portrayal of the Marshall C, which is London's notorious debtor's prison, about which we're going to talk a little bit more later, and the novel's account of the financial chicanery of Mr. Myrtle, upon whose demise, by his own hand, out of shame at being exposed as a scoundrel, it is discovered that numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his insolvency. Old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse. Legions of women and children would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel. Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes. Every servile worshipper of riches who had helped set him on his pedestal would have done better to worship the devil point blank. He was simply the greatest forger and thief that had ever cheated the gallows. Now just for the record, it does not seem to me that hatred of graft and corruption and forgery and theft is an anti-market or anti-business stance. People who value and appreciate free markets and honest business should despise the people who corrupt them. Just as people who love their religion should despise those who bastardize its teachings. That said, I'm certainly not going to try to make the claim that Dickens' presentation of Mr. Myrtle, the Bernie Madoff of 19th century London, is in any way intended to encourage private enterprise or to encourage the sort of risk acceptance that is needed for investment. But Mr. Myrtle is not the only character and not the only businessman in Little Dorot. An important foil to Mr. Myrtle and his criminal misuse of funds is Dan Dois. We are introduced to Dan Dois by Mr. Meagles, keep this all straight, who a kindly retired banker. Please note that despite Mr. Meagles' occasional character flaws, he is kindly. He is so kindly that Dickens even describes him in the list of characters as a kindly banker. He's kindly. As Meagles tells us, Dan Dois is a Smith and engineer. He's not in a large way, but he is well known as a very ingenious man. A dozen years ago, he perfects an invention involving a very curious secret process of great importance to his country and his fellow creatures. I won't say how much money it cost him or how many years of his life he had been about it, but he brought it to perfection a dozen years ago. Dois is, in other words, an independent businessman, an inventor, and an entrepreneur. Notice too that Dickens is very careful to specify both the enormous potential utility of Dan Dois' invention and the cost of time, intellectual effort, money, and energy that Dois has invested in it. The invention we are told repeatedly throughout the novel will be of great, if unspecified, benefit to England if he can only get a patent and put it into production. However, in order to do that, Dois has to get past parliament and the Circumlocution Office. The Trials, Dickens writes about the Circumlocution Office. The Trials for patents were made in the presence of a board of six, of whom two ancient members were too blind to see it, two other ancient members were too deaf to hear it, one other ancient member was too lame to get near it, and the final ancient member was too pig-headed to go look at it. He also tells us how the Circumlocution Office in the course of time took up the business as if it were a brand new thing of yesterday, which had never been heard of before, muddled the business, addled the business, tossed the business in a wet blanket, how the impertinences, ignorances, and insults went through the multiplication table, how there was a reference of the invention to three barnacles and assault stocking, parliamentary members, who knew nothing about it, into whose heads nothing could be hammered about it, who got bored about it, who repeated physical impossibilities about it, how the Circumlocution Office saw no reason to reverse the decision at which my lords had arrived, how the Circumlocution Office, upon being reminded that my lords had arrived at no decision, shelved the business. Dickens makes it very clear to his readers, as he takes us through Dois' rough but accurate accounting methods and business practices, that the problems Dois faces in achieving his patent and in being allowed to produce his invention and to profit from his own innovation are not due to any failing on Dan Dois' part. He does everything right. He is hampered only as a result of an ossified government structure, a crew of bureaucrats who are too stupid to recognize a good thing when they see it, and an endlessly circulatory political process. George Orwell's observation about Dickens is well worth noting here, and Orwell's observations about Dickens are virtually always well worth noting. He writes that Dickens despises politics, does not believe that any good can come out of parliament. He had been a parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning experience. Entrepreneur and innovator that he is, Dois takes the only possible action. He shrugs. He picks up his invention, and the considerable intellectual capital contained in his innovative brain, and he heads for other countries. The result of this move, which I think is a fine example of the need for international labor mobility, is that at the end of the novel, Mr. Meagle is able to report back on Dan Dois. Don't talk about happiness until you see Dan. I assure you Dan is directing works and executing labors over yonder that it would make your hair stand on end to look at. He's no public offender, blushing now. He's meddled and ribbed and starred and crossed, and I don't know what all, like a born nobleman. But we mustn't talk about that over here. Britannia is a Britannia in the manger, won't give her children such distinctions herself, and won't allow them to be seen when they are given by other countries. As a result of this outstanding success, Dois is able to return to England at the end of the novel to pay off the debts of his business partner, Arthur Clenum, who's the novel's romantic hero, who lost all of the firm's money when he invested it with Mr. Myrtle and enabled the marriage of our hero to the heroine, little Dorot. All of this good, every last bit of it, is achieved through Dois's innovation and entrepreneurship. Wealth and happiness for scores of characters in the book are assured through Dois's good auspices, and Dickens readers are assured, in some final comments by the narrator, that the firm of Dois and Clenum will continue successfully long into a fictional afterward. That's Dan Dois. Dickens and work. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Victorians considered work un-gentlemanly. It has been endlessly pointed out that the only occupations available to Jane Austen's male heroes are land-owning gentry, officer in the military, preferably the Navy, or member of the clergy. Trollope does a lot better, bringing in lawyers, engineers, and a few others. Wilkie Collins gives us some drawing masters and police detectives added into the mix. In Dickens, however, almost everyone works. Here I disagree with Orwell, who says oddly, I think that Dickens does not noticeably write about work. I suspect, though, that what Orwell is seeking and not finding in Dickens is a sort of day-to-day occupational detail that you get in novelists like Trollope or in Melville. Dickens' novels are filled with people who have jobs. Donald Hawes notes that in Everyone with Dickens, there's a list of 1,024 occupations and vocations for men and 137 for women. And that drawing from a more restricted range of Dickens' works, another author has compiled a list of class list of characters that distinguishes among 150 different professions, trades, and occupations. So at a minimum, we can say that in the novels of Dickens we have a much fuller picture of the world of work than is available in other Victorian novels and novelists. But a fuller picture of the world of work doesn't make a whole lot of difference if the work is being described by a writer who, like Jane Austen's Netherfield Ladies, would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade and within view of his own warehouses could have possibly been well-bred and agreeable. Happily, Dickens is no Netherfield Lady. For the young heroes of Dickens' novels there are generally two central questions. First, whom should they marry? And second, what ought they to become? For both David Copperfield of David Copperfield and Richard Jarndice of the novel Bleak House, that second question, what should I become, is an enormous driving factor in the plot of their respective stories. David Copperfield begins his working life when his mother dies in childbirth and his stepfather sends him to work in the family bottling factory. This episode in the novel David Copperfield famously replicates a miserable episode from Dickens' childhood. He spent a year pasting labels onto bottles in a blacking factory in order to try to repay some of his father's accumulated debts. So this is an autobiographical incident that Dickens has put into a novel that has a lot of autobiographical moments. Taken in later by an eccentric and sympathetic aunt, Betsy Trotward, David Copperfield is then established as an article clerk, apprentice to a lawyer, and a proctor at the courts of Doctors Commons. Purchasing David Copperfield's articles, making him an article clerk, cost his aunt £1,000, which the web tells me comes out to about £70,000 in today's money, so it's a significant sum, and it commits David to years as an unpaid apprentice. The expectation, however, is that entering David into this apprenticeship will assure him of a comfortable income and a respectable profession for the rest of his life. All of this changes when Betsy Trotward's money is lost through the machinations of the vile Uriah Heap, who is the chief villain of the novel. Suddenly, Betsy Trotward has no income out of which to support herself, let alone David or her friend who is the mentally challenged friend who she supports, and someone needs to earn some money somewhere. After a fruitless attempt to get his articles cancelled and get the £1,000 investment returned to him, David sets out to try to earn a living. His determination to do this leads him to work first for his old tutor as a secretary and ghostwriter, to try to learn shorthand in order to be able to report parliamentary debates for the newspapers, as Dickens did, and eventually to establish himself as a respected writer of novels and non-fiction, as Dickens did. What is notable, I think, is that after one night of absolute despair, when David thought and thought about my being poor, about my not being what I thought I was when I proposed to Dodora, about how I should contrive to live during the long term of my apprenticeship, when I was earning nothing, about doing something to assist my aunt and seeing no way of doing anything. After that one night of despair, his focus immediately shifts to hope and to practical consideration, knowing that he must support himself, that he hopes to be able to support his future wife, Dorah, and that he must help to support his aunt as well. He resolves, what I had to do was to show my aunt that her past goodness to me had not been thrown away on an insensible, ungrateful object. What I had to do was to turn the painful discipline of my younger days to account by going to work with a resolute and steady heart. I had to take my woodsman's axe in my hand and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty. And that's David and Dorah learning to be responsible, aren't they adorable? David Copperfield is a model and perhaps a particularly useful model for these times of the way in which those of us who believe in entrepreneurship and personal initiative should respond to reversals in fortune. He may grieve over lost opportunities and destroyed wealth, and he's well justified in doing so, but he never lets that grief stand in the way of his determination to find work and do it well. Rather, it is the work and the determination to do it well and to improve himself and support himself and his family that carries David through the maddening years of his marriage to his utterly charming and completely irresponsible child-wife, Dorah. His work pulls him out of his depression after Dorah's death. Indeed, by the close of the novel, David has become a successful novelist of his own. He writes, I worked early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a story with a purpose growing out of my experience and arranged for its publication very advantageously for me. And then he begins to work on another book and another book and another book. His work, specifically the self-examination and contemplation required by working as a writer, turns David Copperfield into an adult who's able to realize that his love for Dorah was true but childish, his love for Agnes, his second wife is full, lasting and adult. It is work, learning to do it, and finding the right kind that helps David Copperfield to his happy ending. Much less happy is the ending that awaits Richard Carstone of Bleak House, another Dickens hero in search of a profession. There's Richard Carstone. As one of the heirs in Jarn Dice, Richard is waiting and will spend his entire life waiting for the resolution of Jarn Dice and Jarn Dice, the longest-running suit in the history of the Courts of Chancery. A lawsuit over a will that in fact lasts so long that it completely consumes through its legal expenses every penny from the estate, which was enormous. It's quite the lawsuit. So in one of the novel's lengthy discussions about what Richard is to do, his guardian, John Jarn Dice, suggests that this interminable waiting over the lawsuit has left Richard incapable of making decisions. How much of this indecision of character, he says, is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth? I don't pretend to say, but Chancery, among its other sins, is responsible for some of it. It has engendered or confirmed in him a habit of putting off and trusting to this, that and the other chance, without knowing what and dismissing everything as unsettled, uncertain and confused. Now, with such a character driving his decision-making progress about professions, Richard tries medicine and the law and the military and fails abysmally at all of them. Unable to make any kind of commitment to working diligently because that lawsuit going to be settled any day now, Richard alienates his affectionate guardian, falls into debt, begins compulsive and expensive pursuit of the hopeless law case, and eventually dies destitute, leaving a wife and infant son behind him. Much of the blame for Richard's death is squarely laid at the feet of the lawsuit, which is certainly the great evil hulking over the entire novel. But nearly equal responsibility lies with his failure to find a profession that could carry him through the vicissitudes of a life darkened by that madness of that lawsuit. On his deathbed, Richard seems to realize this, saying, I have to begin the world. I will not begin it in the old way now. I've learned a lesson now. This resolution to begin the world echoes the hope and determination of the job seekers setting out to the market or the young apprentice beginning his profession. The suggestion is clear. With a real profession to study him and help him grow out, grow up, as David Copperfield's profession does, Richard might have made it out of Jarnadis and Jarnadis alive. Without it, there was never any hope. Dickens in debt. That Richard Carstone slides into debt while waiting for some sort of resolution to the case of Jarnadis and Jarnadis is not in any way unusual for Dickens characters. Dickens is justly famed for his grim representations of the dire conditions and the Alice in Wonderland logic that drove the creation and existence of England's debtor's prisons. Little Dorrit is the novel that most focuses on debtor's prison in particular. It's mostly set inside the Marshall Sea. But it's secondary characters in David Copperfield and in Bleak House who best served to illustrate the complex relationship that Dickens had with debt and debtors. Without giving in to the fraught temptations of a psychoanalytic reading of Dickens's novels, which I suspect would not go over real well with you guys, it's important that we remember when we talk about debt in Dickens that his father was imprisoned in the Marshall Sea for debt and that as a result of this, 12 year old Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory to support himself and his family and attempt to pay off his father's debts. It is only the death of his grandmother and a 450 pound legacy that releases Dickens' father from prison and eventually allows Dickens to stop work and return to school. The debt problems continued throughout Dickens' adult life as the returns from his endless writing and performing often went to pay for his father's and brother's and son's equally endless debts. Knowing that, it is no surprise that Dickens' portraits of the financially improvident, personally irresponsible debtors, Wilcomes McAuber and Harold Skimpole are drawn with a complicated mixture of affection and disgust. Mr. McAuber, everyone's favorite, Mr. McAuber, is famously based on Dickens' father and ever since his appearance in David Copperfield, he has been one of Dickens' most beloved characters portrayed in film by stars like W.C. Fields, McAuber's comic language and his irrepressible good cheer in the face of self-created adversity and his unending faith that something will turn up have made it seem to some as if his portrait is an example of a moment when Dickens is overly kind to a dangerously flawed character. Now certainly it would be ridiculous to argue that McAuber's portrayal isn't affectionate, described in the list of characters for the novel as jaunty, grand, eloquent, recklessly good-natured and improvident. McAuber is funny and charming and he inspires unceasing devotion in his wife, children and friends. He also, by the way, gives the single best piece of financial advice ever given in any work of fiction. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 pounds, 19 and 6. Result? Happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds, ought and 6. Result? Misery. McAuber's inability to abide by his own advice is the source of much of the comedy of his story and much of its tragedy. For despite every scene where McAuber makes us laugh, one thinks, for example, of his plans to put bow windows into his house the minute something turns up, although just that morning he has sold all of the family's cutlery. There's a distinct air of sadness and even potential menace surrounding Mr. McAuber. He and his family are forever traveling from one place to another in search of promising opportunities, which even when found he's incapable of following through. In the course of these travels they're separated, often destitute, often in prison. Their exigencies in the end drive McAuber to what initially appears to be an unholy alliance with Uriah Heap, surely one of the most revolting characters in Dickens' long catalog of memorable villains. There he is. One of a series of malevolent seconds in command in Dickens, Uriah Heap exploits the growing alcoholism and irresponsible behavior of David's friend and mentor Mr. Wickfield in order to pillage and ruin his business. Heap's plan is that by so doing he will render Wickfield's daughter, David's future wife, into such a state of submission that she will agree to marry him purely in order to save her father's reputation. We know from early on that this is Uriah Heap's plan. We have with David loathed Uriah Heap since his first appearance in the novel. Thus to hear McAuber tell David, I have entered into arrangements by virtue of which I stand pledged and contracted to our friend Heap to assist and serve him in the capacity of and to be his confidential clerk while we shudder. And when McAuber further specifies, my friend Heap has not fixed the positive remuneration at too high a figure but he has made a great deal in the way of extrication from the pressure pecuniary difficulties contingent on the value of my services. We are sickened. It is instantly evident to us that Uriah Heap has purchased Mr. McAuber's soul by paying off his debts and that he will do with him as he likes. For the next 200 pages we believe entirely that Mr. McAuber is in league with Uriah Heap. It is no more of a relief to him than it is to us when he finally breaks forth to tell David, I'll know nobody and say nothing and live nowhere until I have crushed to undiscoverable atoms the transcendent and immortal hypocrite and perjurer Uriah Heap and crush him he does. After serving as his confidential clerk he knows every detail of his plots and plans. He is able to destroy them and save his friends. He is in the end heroic although he is in the end relocated to Australia where he is conveniently unable to borrow any more money from David or any of his other friends. McAuber's happy ending might still trouble those of us who want to argue for the importance of personal financial responsibility so we may find ourselves more satisfied with the story of Harold Skimpole in Bleakhouse. Such critics, sorry, one of John Jondo's innumerable friends and charitable cases. Harold Skimpole introduces himself to us as a mere child who has two of the oldest infirmities in the world. One was that he had no idea of time and the other that he had no idea of money in consequence of which he never kept an appointment, never could transact any business and never knew the value of anything. Upon their initial meeting with Skimpole our young hero and heroine confessed themselves enchanted and dazzled by his charm. Later that same evening he's arrested for a debt of more than 24 pounds, about 2000 pounds today. Utterly charmed by him the young people give him all the money they possess in order to clear him of the debt. John Jondo says at first horrified that Skimpole has squeezed his young heirs this way like a couple of tender young oranges but he calms himself by remembering what a child Skimpole is. This initial counter however leaves the reader feeling a little bit nervous about Skimpole. As the novel continues he blithely fails to pay his butcher's bill and blames the butcher for wanting to be paid because the butcher could have paid himself simply by not wasting his time trying to collect money from Skimpole. Skimpole has all his furniture unpaid for confiscated until he pays his rent also unpaid for. The expenses for which he cheerfully refers to John John Dice. To ensure that we are further troubled by this sort of behavior Dickens is careful to have our virtuous heroine note I always wondered on these occasions whether he ever thought of Mrs. Skimpole and the children and in what point of view they presented themselves to his cosmopolitan mind. So far as I could understand they rarely presented themselves at all. It's possible possible even with this discomforting reminder that Skimpole has a family that he is utterly neglecting to still find him comical we're all still laughing particularly if one is familiar with Mr. McCobber as a precedent. But once the pathetic character of Joe the crossing sweeper crosses paths with Skimpole such comic possibilities aren't no longer available. Joe and here's an actual Victorian era crossing sweeper the squeegee guy of the 19th century. Joe first wins our sympathies as the loyal friend of the mysterious law writer Nemo. He's an utterly uneducated all but totally solitary orphan who sweeps the streets of London in hopes of getting tips. He's one of the lost and the least of Victorian society. He's one of Dickens most pathetic orphaned children. And he's made all the more pathetic by the death of his only friend at the beginning of the book. Now that death for a variety of plot reasons that I promise I'm not going to get into leads to Joe being chased through the city of London by the police. Harold Skimpole enters his life when Joe appears sick and harried near Jarnadis' home. Esther our young heroine brings him inside and Skimpole argues that the child should be turned out into the street instantly. He's not safe you know there's a very bad sort of fever about him. I am a child then I never pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the road you only put him where he was before he'll be no worse off than he was you know. You could even make him better off if you like. Give him six pence or five shillings or five pounds ten. I recommend you're turning him out before he gets any worse. This child Skimpole's utter lack of sympathy and human compassion for an actual child is chilling all the more so when we remember that he's a father all the more so when we remember that he's a doctor. It would be chilling enough if Skimpole's effect on Joe ended there but it doesn't. Joe is put into a comfortable bed in the hayloft where he will be warm and safe and not risk any of the house's occupants. The plan is to take him to the hospital in the morning but in the morning Joe is gone. No one in the house knows what to make of his disappearance and they worry that maybe he's wandered off in a moment of delirium. They all worried that is to say but Mr. Skimpole who repeatedly suggested in his usual easy lifestyle that it had occurred to our young friend that he was not a safe inmate having a bad kind of fever upon him and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off. We find out though at the end of the novel that Skimpole knows precisely what has happened to Joe and he knows because it was Skimpole who in exchange for five pounds turned Joe into the police who harry Joe so relentlessly from place to place that he dies from illness and exhaustion and there is no one to blame for that but Skimpole. As Mr. Bucket the policeman who pays Skimpole notes whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as can be in all things concerning money look well after your own money for they are dead certain to collar it if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you in worldly matters I'm a child you consider that that person is only crying off from being held accountable and that you have got that person's number and it is number one. Skimpole is reprehensible and any whimsical charms that he possessed at the beginning of the novel turn our stomachs by the end. We should note too that Skimpole's treachery is driven by his financial irresponsibility incapable as he claims of understanding the value of money he does nothing but waste it chase it and spend it. When he is presented with the chance of a five pound note it would be madness to expect him to do anything other than what he does. It is this moral turning point where the difference between macabre and Skimpole comes to light. Macabre turns against the villain who has bought him and emerges heroically though still in debt from the moral challenges he faces. Skimpole continues as he always has destroying everyone in his path. There are other aspects of Dickens novels that while perhaps of somewhat less specific interest to fans of business economics and free markets are still surely of great concern. Dickens for example uses his novels for extensive discussions of charity. His vision of private charities complex with competent and helpful characters like the cheerable brothers and John John Dice contrasting with figures like Mrs. Jellaby who's so devoted to hoping helping the poor and neglected children of Africa that she utterly ignores her own. His vision of public charity is much less nuanced. He hates it. The workhouse, the state orphanage, the state charity school all of these are places of absolute horror for Dickens. Surely those of us who believe in the importance of private charity can make something of this acknowledgement that while private charity has its problems and complexities public charity has even more. Dickens noted hatred of for force in all forms and his distrust of political force in particular also deserves our attention and respect. As Orwell notes of Dickens if you hate violence and don't believe in politics the only major remedy remaining is education which I really think you guys need to have on a t-shirt. I will buy it. It would also be an interesting although enormous project to track the stories of the young lovers in Dickens novels. How many of them claim as many of them do that they do not need money but find that their best happy endings are resolved through money they have earned or inherited or been put in the way of. Bleakhouse is a great example of this. Esther Somerson's happy ending is insured by her receipt of a house from her guardian. Her husband's receipt of an excellent position made possible through her guardian's influence and presumably their expectations of inheriting her guardian's wealth when he dies. Of all of this Esther notes we are not rich in the bank but we have always prospered and we have quite enough. Now I confess I find it find it difficult to decipher what Esther who's just gotten a house and a job and an inheritance could possibly mean by the phrase not rich in the bank but prospering. I suspect it may have more to do with the Victorian difficulty of attaining ready cash, actual cash on hand, rather than any claim to actual poverty. Regardless, in each of the three books I've discussed most extensively tonight, Little Dorrit, Bleakhouse, and David Copperfield, the happy endings enjoyed by more than one pair of young lovers are enabled by literal financial prosperity. It would be madness to try to turn Dickens into a thoroughgoing fran of private enterprise, free markets, entrepreneurship, and business. There's far too much evidence in his work that goes against that. And to ignore that evidence is an injustice to the work and to the man. But it is equally an injustice if we allow Dickens to be thought of as some sort of mealy-headed, overly emotional romantic who thinks that all rich people are evil, all work as oppression, all businesses corruption, and all financially irresponsible people are charming butterflies. We have the tools to argue against this. We have Dickens' own work. So over the years a host of great scholars from my dissertation director Richard Stryer to the economist Deirdre McCluskey have reminded all of us that we have to answer the so what question. Their response to a talk like this one, and it's a justified response, is to say, all right, so great, so Dickens doesn't always hate business and markets. So what? So a couple of things. So it's worth our while to be better readers of Dickens, simply in order to be better readers of a great writer. So it's worth our while to stop making glancing negative references to Christmas Carol and hard times in front of our students, giving them the false impression that Dickens isn't much more than a punching bag. But more importantly, and as I said recently over at Cato Unbound, here's the big so what. The whole debate over weather literature, Shakespeare or Dickens or pick your literary punching bag of the week is pro-market or anti-market is a false argument. It's trying to make literature do something that it does not do well. Literature, particularly novels and plays, thrives on subtlety and complexity. This is because it gives writers this space to explore a range of opinions and attitudes towards a problem as well as a wide set of responses and possible outcomes. So to expect any novel by a good and intelligent author to be always and always on message about anything, be it business or religion or love or death, is to expect a novel to be no more than a campaign speech. And that's a foolish error. As Steve Horwitz recently commented, libertarians have to stop judging other thinkers in black and white terms. The world is not just about good guys and bad guys, but about people, real people, who are good and bad in various mixes. And we need to appreciate them when they were good, even if it wasn't all the time. And Tyler Cowan notes, now some things actually are good versus evil. We know this, right? But as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good versus evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're lowering your IQ by 10 points or more. Literature is not for clear answers. Literature is for complicated questions. There's vital empirical data in literary texts. Not data about economic fact, though there's some of that. But there's data about how people felt and thought and wrote about economics and about market issues. If we care about that, if that's as important as Deirdre McCloskey and others have argued, we have a responsibility to find that data, to write about it, to share it and to teach it. And the reason we want to do that? This may be hard to believe, but there are those of us who are more readily able to appreciate the glorious aesthetics of Little Dorot or Bleak House than the equally glorious but very different aesthetics of Stubblebine and Buchanan writing about externalities. So if we accept the same old assessment of Dickens and others, if we simply and weakly agree that yes, literature is anti-market, we're conceding a frontier that we do not need to concede and we're forfeiting an audience that we do not need to forfeit. We're giving up eloquent discourse and humane arguments and weighty support that we do not need to give up. We cannot afford to surrender literature, to surrender culture without a fight. And every time we do, we are increasingly rhetorically impoverished, emotionally bereft, and culturally bankrupt. Thank you very much.