Mr. Prohack

Arthur Prohack has spent years believing his family is poor. A meticulous civil servant at the Treasury, he's developed elaborate habits of denial around every expenditure - no new clothes for the children, no holidays, no exceptions. Then a financial revelation shatters his carefully constructed worldview: they're rich. The investments he made years ago have quietly compounded into a small fortune. But here's the true comedy - Prohack cannot stop being poor. He knows too much about the value of money, has lived too long in terror of running out. The wealth becomes almost unbearable, a burden he cannot spend. Bennett's sharp, affectionate satire dissects the psychology of middle-class money anxiety, showing how a man can be liberated by fortune while remaining imprisoned by his own habits. Written in 1922, it's a brilliant portrait of post-war Britain - a society where the old certainties have crumbled, where the 'new poor' cling to respectability while the ground shifts beneath them, and where a wife might resent her husband more for becoming generous than for staying mean.