John Law (novel)
1864 novel

John Law: The Projector is an 1864 historical novel by the British writer William Harrison Ainsworth. It was released in three volumes by the London publishing house Chapman and Hall. It focuses on the early eighteenth century Scottish financier John Law and his efforts to establish the Mississippi Company in Paris which ultimately went bankrupt after a speculative bubble.
In 1871 Ainsworth wrote a serialised novel The South Sea Bubble focusing on the near-contemporary collapse of the British South Sea Bubble.
References
Bibliography
Carver, Stephen James. The Life and Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, 1850–1882. Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.
Michie, Ranald C. Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914. Routledge, 2015.
Sutherland, J.A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1864 novel. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124785463. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1864, 1871, 1850 and 1882.
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