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\u2018The Descent of Money: Literature, Inheritance, and Trust in Edith Wharton\u2019s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy\u2019s The Man of Property (1906)\u2019

Rob Hawkes' paper argues that Edith Wharton\u2019s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy\u2019s The Man of Property (1906) foreground, interrogate and enact questions of trust, both in their engagements with and departures from literary realism/naturalism and in their preoccupations with the value and power of money. Wharton\u2019s novel is saturated with the language of costs, payments, investments, and debts, while the first of Galsworthy\u2019s Forsyte novels presents \u2018Forsyteism\u2019 as an inescapable set of hereditary traits. Both texts, furthermore, implicitly associate money with nature and imagine a \u2018sense of property\u2019 as inherited in more ways than one, whilst simultaneously offering glimpses of a different understanding of money altogether: one that reveals surprising connections between literature, money, and trust.

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