Rich Enough: A Tale of the Times

In 1837 America, two brothers make opposite bargains with fortune. Howard, a farmer, tends his land and his family with quiet contentment, convinced that enough is enough. His brother Mr. Draper, a merchant, cannot stop climbing. He accumulates and accumulates, yet finds his homestead too 'valuable for our own use, because it can be converted to money.' The pursuit of gain robs him of his children's laughter, his wife's companionship, his own peace. Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee wrote this moral fable in the ferment of early American capitalism, when new fortunes were being made and old certainties were dissolving. She understood something essential: that the appetite for more never arrives at a finish line. The novel builds to its inevitable tragedy with the slow certainty of Greek drama, offering no redemption for the brother who mistook accumulation for happiness. For readers who suspect our present age of wealth obsession has invented nothing new, this tart 1837 portrait of a family consumed by money will feel uncomfortably familiar.