The Conscience of the Rich (1958) dramatizes the conflict between father and son which begins when Charles March, the favoured scion of a wealthy, long-established Anglo-Jewish family, decides to renounce a promising career as a barrister and become a doctor. It originally appeared as the seventh novel in Snow's “Strangers and Brothers” series, but Snow placed it third, after Time of Hope (1949) and George Passant (1940), when he rearranged the sequence for the 1972 omnibus edition. As throughout the series, Lewis Eliot is the narrator, but whereas Time of Hope focused on his own story, in this novel, as in George Passant, he is not centre-stage. The Conscience of the Rich runs from 1927-37, and thus partly overlaps with Time of Hope and George Passant, which both end in 1933; but whereas they are...
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The Conscience of the Rich". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 February 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=19409, accessed 05 December 2025.]
