Chinese stock-market maniacs may have gone overboard this year, but they aren’t the first. Charles Dickens nailed the sensibility 143 years ago

MARKET MANIAS are as old as the bubble in Dutch tulip bulbs that burst in 1636, pouring hundreds of thousands of florins into a whole lot of back gardens. In Great Britain, two of the biggest bubbles occurred in 1837 and 1846 when investors went wild for shares of railroad companies. Capitalism was evolving rapidly and those bubbles were notable for pulling in money from the mass public - not just wealthy investors or institutions – for the first time. Charles Dickens, the novelist extolled as “the greatest instructor of the Nineteenth Century” in his Times of London obituary, commented on the fresh phenomenon in his final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864-65.

As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, “Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, » next