Tradefull Merchants: The Portrayal of the Capitalist in Literature

Tradefull Merchants (1981) surveys the range of English literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and explores the successive new lights in which the commercial character has been depicted in poetry, drama and fiction, and thus in society at large. As capitalism began to develop into the dominant organisation of social life during and after the sixteenth century in England, literature reflected and commented on the profound change in society’s attitudes to trade and trading men. Through this survey of literature’s attitudes to capitalism the author highlights the close relationship between imaginative writing and the material and social life of the country.