Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Author:Thomas Levenson [Levenson, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

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COUNT JONATHAN SWIFT among the patsies the hard-eyed types like Hoare’s traders could exploit. That’s no surprise; almost everyone in any way connected to public life in London risked a flutter along the Alley that year. The dyspeptic writer was still a few years from the lasting fame that would come in 1726, when Gulliver’s Travels made his reputation as the greatest satirist of his age. But he was already a formidable literary brawler, and it was almost inevitable that he would have something to say about the events of 1720.

He was lucky up to a point: he limited his risk through the first half of 1720 to just £500 in Company stock, most bought years earlier. By late spring he became—on paper—quite comfortable. A year later, with his phantasmal fortune gone, he was still among the lucky ones. He had barely dipped his toe into the South Sea at its height, so he didn’t lose much when the Bubble burst. Still, he knew he’d been touched by madness—and he knew exactly whom to blame.

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