SOURCE: Review of Pin Money, in Westminster Review, Vol. 15, October, 1831, pp. 433-42.

In the following review, the anonymous writer criticizes Pin Money for its puffing—its indiscriminate name-dropping of upper-class shops and tradesmen—but finds that the novel contains "exceedingly clever sketches of society."

Pin Money is a novel which shews, in three volumes, the danger of a married lady's possessing four hundred a year independent of her husband. A person reasoning of these times in another age, might be led into a great mistake, by considering as an indication of the vast diffusion of wealth in this country, that it was thought a fit subject for a book, to guard the female sex against being led into the error of accepting an income. The manner in which this income is represented as being employed, will also strike the reasoner in question as a singular proof of the...