PREFACE: Someone Else's Life ix INTRODUCTION: The Fairy Godmother 1 "Advancement, of course" 1 "I don't want to be patronised" 10 Description of the Chapters 17 CHAPTER ONE: Erotic Patronage: Rousseau, Constant, Balzac, Stendhal 22 Older Women 22 Interest, Disinterest, and Boredom 32 The Acquisition of the Donor 38 ". something a bit like love" 50 CHAPTER TWO: How to Be a Benefactor without Any Money 55 "My brother's body lies dead and naked ." 55 Saving Boys: Horatio Alger 67 "I wouldn't keep a pig in it myself": Great Expectations 73 CHAPTER THREE: "It's not your fault": Therapy and Irresponsibility from Dreiser to Doctorow 86 Styles of Radical Antistatism: D. A. Miller and Christopher Lasch 86 Loyalty and Blame in Dreiser's The Financier 96 ". take hospitals, the cops and garbage collection": Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? 109 "I like . to be reliable": E. L.

Doctorow's Billy Bathgate 117 CHAPTER FOUR: A Portrait of the Artist as a Rentier 127 "Where are your nobles now?": Bohemia in Kipps, My Brilliant Career, and Trilby 127 "I don't think I should be unhappy in the workhouse": George Gissing, Perry Anderson, and the Unproductive Classes 136 "You're a Town Hall wallah, aren't you?": Pygmalion and Room at the Top 145 CHAPTER FIVE: The Health Visitor 158 Dumpy: Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman 158 Personal: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory 167 Help: Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Alan Sillitoe's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" 179 "I hate lawyers. I just work for them": Erin Brockovich 186 CHAPTER SIX: On the Persistence of Anger in the Institutions of Caring 190 Anger 190 Caring: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go 199 Rising in Sociology: Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Willis, and Richard Sennett 210 Coda: Anger, Caring, and Merit 229 CONCLUSION: The Luck of Birth and the International Division of Labor 232 Notes 245 Index 289.