Charles Dickens left an estate of nearly £80,000 at his death. It was an enormous sum, and even more so for one whose father had been so famously unsuccessful with money. Dickens had made the serial publishing of his fiction pay well. Thirty-four thousand copies of each monthly instalment of Bleak House (1851–3), to take but one instance, had been sold. On that project alone, Dickens had made for himself £11,000. He used capitalist systems effectively: investment, sound banking, profitable trading practices. His son, Charley, worked for eighteen years with Barings, the merchant bank: his education was paid for by the novelist's friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, who had inherited a fortune from the Coutts bank. Charley's career was a disappointment, but it made Dickens's personal connection with banking even closer.

The novelist was not averse to the modern capitalist world of finance – and it served him and his family well. But it is easier to remember the Dickens who was impatient with other sides of a capitalist economy. Dickens as a ‘social critic’, particularly for first-generation Marxist writers, was understood to be a powerful ally against the relations of production generated by industrial capitalism. David Craig, the Marxist editor, thought Hard Times (1854) was ‘concerned … to question the intrinsic nature of industrial organization’, making Dickens sound close to Marx himself. That view, from 1969, became influential.