Nineteenth-century novelists obviously did not use the same categories we do to describe the social structures of their time, but they depicted the same deep structures: those of a society in which a truly comfortable life required the possession of a large fortune. It is striking to see how similar the inegalitarian structures, orders of magnitude, and amounts minutely specified by Balzac and Austen were on both sides of the English Channel, despite the differences in currency, literary style, and plot.
