Three talks by Laurence Lerner about fiction and our changing attitudes to currency 1: Coins and Cheques
"The child spending his pocket money feels the coins in his hand and knows by physical contact how much he has. Wages come in the somehow less tangible form of bank notes, that were once mere promises, like cheques, and have now come to seem to us like real money as they have grown less important."
Laurence Lerner illustrates these distinctions with examples from Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale and from George Eliot 's Middlemarch.