Charlotte Riddell’s Financial Life and Fiction

This chapter discusses the most important financial novelist of the Victorian period, known in her time as the “novelist of the City” for works such as George Geith and Austin Friars. Yet, today Riddell remains one of the most forgotten of popular Victorian novelists. Henry provides new information about Riddell’s personal financial troubles—which may be traced back to her mother’s financial distress as a young woman in Liverpool—and the lawsuits in which Riddell was involved following the bankruptcy of her husband, a failed inventor and businessman in London. Riddell’s unique perspective on business ethics in her novels is a result of her own financial entanglements.