A spectre is haunting the pages of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Phantom Fortune (1883) – the spectre of Karl Marx. Although this misquotation from The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) seems paradoxical when applied to a Victorian novelist who was far from being a Socialist, Marx's rhetoric (on a textual level) and Marx's ‘political unconscious’ (on an ideological level) haunt Braddon's novel in unpredictable ways and define its themes, as well as its context of discussion. Phantom Fortune is another attempt to move beyond the Lady Audley paradigm, in order to invigorate Braddon's narrative through the influence of French realism and the interest in new social questions. Apart from the intertextual dialogue with novelists such as émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac in the critical depiction of London society, Braddon's novel dramatises the (traumatic) transition from a world economically dependent upon a ‘material’ notion of wealth in a rigid social context to a modern capitalistic society, in which the ‘phantom-like’ nature of money and of ‘fetishised’ commodities reflect the changing epistemology and the social permeability of late-Victorian England.

Phantom Fortune opens during the late thirties with the description of Lord Maulevrier's social fall. Accused of various crimes as former governor of the Madras Presidency in India, Lord Maulevrier dies in the course of his journey to his voluntary exile in the Grasmere Vale, accompanied by his wife and the factotum James Steadman.