Solving the Hero's Problems: Trade

Sometimes, the wealthy man creates his own occupation.

He becomes an inventor! Good cover for

Cat Sebastian's book from Tumblr.

Wealthy lovers are a common trope in romance literature. They are often portrayed, by outsiders to the genre, as tropes of romantic escapism.

But then, the "sad=real!" crowd tends to be a tad lacking in level-headed judgment. Poverty-stricken literature is no less escapist than any other kind of literature and often, far more emotional. I've read (rarely by choice) and scanned (occasionally by choice) supposedly "realistic" tomes about people wallowing in the mires of poverty; most of these books frankly read like entries to Book Clubs About Survivors, venues in which ex-victims sit around and talk about their horrible previous lives.

There's something uncomfortably voyeuristic about the whole thing. The readers/audiences seem a little too fascinated by the reallyreallyreallyreally shockingly bad stuff that happened before as opposed to the constructive lives these ex-victims supposedly built after.

In comparison, wealthy lovers don't bother me all that much--except when their wealth--as with the poverty-stricken characters mentioned above--turns into a substitute for personality or action or plot. Then, they just get boring.

In other words, even wealthy lovers need something to do--including, especially, wealthy lovers of the past.

The idleness has a cost.

One of the things I attempted to rectify in my tributes to Austen (A Man of Few Words) and Richardson (Mr. B Speaks!) was the perception that a wealthy man is automatically a dilettante.  Darcy, for instance, actually has a job. His ten thousand a year is to his credit as a manager, not simply a nice inheritance that he can waste on statues (yeah, the Keira Knightley-Matthew Macfadyen movie bugs me). Likewise, as the lady of the household, Pamela manages a budget of approximately $30,000 a year. To a large extent, how she chooses to deploy that money is up to her.

Good romance writers of the past will acknowledge the actual work that goes on, even on an estate. The Amanda Root-Ciaran Hinds version of Persuasion does an excellent job showing that the family's near-bankruptcy affects more lives than their own.

In both traditional and M/M historical romances, heroes often grapple with the changes of the nineteenth century. They presciently realize that they need to invest in railways and steam engines, to behave like merchants rather than politicians.

One of my favorite examples here is the Enlightenment series by Joanna Chambers where Lord Murdo Balfour meets David Lauriston. David, a Scottish lawyer, has all the pride of his burgeoning middle-class culture (I'm as good a man as you). Murdo is looking for ways to separate himself from his politically-minded, aristocratic father.

Trade is the answer.