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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 1999
BENJAMIN LEOPOLD FARJEON (1838–1903) was a novelist of, at best, middling abilities who achieved a modicum of popular success working in the sentimental realist tradition. He was also Jewish, a fact that he neither avoided nor obsessed over. It is just Farjeon’s laissez-faire approach towards ethnic identity that spurs our interest today. He assumed an attitude that was only beginning to be possible in the British Empire in the middle to late Victorian period. Over the years, Farjeon has made perfunctory appearances in such familiar survey and reference materials as Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader (1957), John Sutherland’s The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989), and Linda Gertner Zatlin’s Nineteenth Century Anglo-Jewish Novel (1981), but the only substantial piece of scholarship devoted solely to his work is Lillian Faderman’s dissertation “B. L. Farjeon: Victorian Novelist” (1967). Where Faderman provides a broad-based chronicle of Farjeon’s publications, I focus here on one aspect of his legacy — i.e., how he partook of an incipient opportunity to construct a position for Jews as Englishmen in economic terms.