SOURCE: "Displaced Persons: The Cost of Speculation in Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit," in Money: Lure, Lore, and Literature, edited by John Louis DiGaetani, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 245-52.

In the following essay, Baubles points out Dickens's concerns with the human cost of financial speculation by analyzing the effect of obsession with financial gain on the characters in Martin Chuzzlewit.

When Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations addresses the concept of value, he locates its source in labor:

What is bought with money or with goods is purchased with labour…. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command. (133)

But a curious...