Fielding, DeFoe, and less widely-read authors like Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Jane Barker. The book, in fact, is rife with marginalized and little-known authors of novels, travel narratives, and conduct books. Mary Brunton, Regina Maria Roche, Eaton Stannard Barrett, and Pierce Egan take their place alongside acknowledged masters like Austen, Radcliffe and Burney. People without 'character' are defined in the period as people without an adequate command of language. These works in the 'It-Narrator' genre feature money which takes on adventures paralleling those of the gentleman in picaresque narratives of social circulation.
Money begins to stand in for people's concord to a standard of value.
Lynch examines the tensions between these undercharacterizations and overcharacterizations, and suggests that mid-century writers were keen to investigate not only the distinguishing features of minor characters and antagonists, but what was impersonal and indefinite about their fictional personages. Mid-century narratives explore in stories about mistaken identities, exchanged lives, and tales about foundlings the possibilities opened up by fictional characters whose identities are interchangeable. While early nineteenth century critics like Walter Scott and John Wilson Croker saw the lack of particularity in literary characters as a defect and lauded the works of Austen and Scott himself, they dismissed the more generic and opaque offerings of Clara Reeves and practitioners of the 'Burney School' novels. A new appreciation of domesticity, circulated in the narratives of Gilpin as in the poetry of Burns and Wordsworth, promoted the ideal of an introspective reader who stayed at home. Drawing on the work of Jon Klancher Lynch argues that the cultural capital of reading allowed audiences to 'amass intellectual wealth' as it helped negotiate the transition from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.