The Market-Place (PDF)

The Market Place is a novel by American author Harold Frederic. It was published posthumously in 1899, following his death the previous year.

The book's publication and success as a bestseller led to a conflict over Frederic's estate between his wife Grace Frederic and mistress Kate Lyon. This resulted in a scandal involving much of London's Victorian society. The resulting furor led to the jailing of Lyon on charges of manslaughter at the behest of his wife. Another notable American figure of the time, Cora Crane, the companion of author Stephen Crane, sheltered his three children with Lyon while she was jailed pending trial. She was acquitted.

The novel was among the best selling books in the United States in 1899.

Unusual interest is attached to the posthumous work of that great man whose career ended so prematurely and so tragically. The story is a study in the ethics and purposes of money-getting, in the romantic element in modern business. In it finance is presented not as being merely the province of shrewdness, or greediness, or petty personal gratification, but of great projects, of great brain-battles, a field for the exercising of talent, daring, imagination, appealing to the strength of a strong man, filling the same place in men's lives that was once filled by the incentives of war... The hero of the story, "Joel Thorpe," is one of those men, huge of body, keen of brain, with cast iron nerves, as sound a heart as most men, and a magnificent capacity for bluff. He has lived and risked and lost in a dozen countries, been almost within reach of fortune a dozen times, and always missed her until, finally, in London, by promoting a great rubber syndicate he becomes a multi-millionaire. He marries the most beautiful and one of the most impecunious peeresses in England and retires to his country estate. There, as a gentleman of leisure, he loses his motive in life, loses power for lack of opportunity, and grows less commanding even in the eyes of his wife, who misses the uncompromising, barbaric strength which took her by storm and won her. Finally he evolves a gigantic philanthropic scheme of spending his money as laboriously as he made it.