Early challenge to the accountant stereotype? The accountant as hero in late Victorian romantic fiction

Recently, increasing attention has been focused on how conventionalised images of the accountant were created (Bougen, 1994). As the recent contribution to the Notebook by Boys (1994) reveals, previous to the dominance of the visual media (Beard, 1994), a potentially fruitful source of evidence of stereotyped representations of accountants is the novel. The Accountant by F.H. Mel (1894), is a rare instance of a work of romantic fiction which had as its central character an accountant