Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 by Timothy Ablorn

The cultural representation of misers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be a niche interest, but Alborn’s Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 offers a valuable contribution to general historiography in the age of digital research. Alborn traces how the perception of misers shifted across his selected period: Sermons and poems decried misers’ moral failings; ethicists and economists gave ambivalent acceptance; plays, operas, and novels made them social pariahs and punchlines; and nineteenth-century biographies and novels considered their pecuniary acumen. This exploration marks an important case study in the intersection between capitalism and popular literature and culture. Alborn accurately notes, however, that it does not “address either the formation or distribution of capital” in an economic sense (11). Instead, the book explores how British culture represented misers to themselves. Although this intervention adds important layers to the already thick description of capitalism’s cultural influence in the eighteenth and...