Wealth & Money Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers takes a cozy bit of capitalist self-talk - "my money is working for me" - and yanks it back into the realm of bodies, hours, and power. The line is blunt on purpose. It refuses the soothing metaphor that money is an industrious little servant, and replaces it with a moral accounting: if capital earns while you sleep, someone else is awake doing the labor that makes that return possible.

The intent isn’t to demonize saving or prudence; it’s to puncture the innocence of passive income as a purely private triumph. Sayers makes expectation the key verb. Not "sometimes money yields a return", but "every time a man expects" it to. That word choice frames investment not as neutral mechanics but as a social claim you feel entitled to: I should receive value because I possess value. The subtext is theological as much as economic - a suspicion of unearned reward and a demand that we name the human cost hidden by abstractions.

Context matters. Writing in a Britain shaped by industrial capitalism, class stratification, and the interwar/WWII-era arguments over welfare, wages, and ownership, Sayers (a Christian humanist, not a party pamphleteer) is pushing back against the era’s politely euphemistic economics. Her craft as a novelist shows: she understands how language launders responsibility. By collapsing the metaphor, she forces a sharper question onto the reader: if your wealth depends on other people’s work, what do you owe them besides a shrug and a dividend?