Abstract

This article examines the depiction of the profiteer as villain within popular low and middlebrow British novels from the 1920s. It argues that concerns with profiteering persisted in the landscape of popular fiction well after the end of World War I in works by authors such as H.C. McNeile and Warwick Deeping among others. The figure of the profiteering villain embodied anxieties about profiteering, food shortages, and 'big business' during a period of intense economic and political instability, while further allowing the ex-soldier to be simultaneously re-imagined after the war as a heroic breadwinner and soldier.