Someone else's life -- Introduction: The Fairy Godmother -- "Advancement, of course" -- "I don't want to be patronised" -- Description of the chapters -- Erotic patronage: Rousseau, Constant, Balzac, Stendhal -- Older women -- Interest, disinterest, and boredom -- The acquisition of the donor -- " ... something a bit like love" -- How to be a benefactor without any money -- "My brother's body lies dead and naked ..." -- Saving boys: Horatio Alger -- "I wouldn't keep a pig in it myself": Great Expectations -- "It's not your fault": therapy and irresponsibility from Dreiser to Doctorow -- Styles of radical antistatism: D.S. Miller and Christopher Lasch -- Loyality and blame in Dreiser's The Financier -- " ... take hospitals, the cops and garbage collection": Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? -- "I like ... to be reliable": E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate -- A portrait of the artist as a rentier -- "Where are your nobles now?": Bohemia in Kipps, My Brilliant Career, and Trilby -- "I don't think I should be unhappy in the workhouse": George Gissing, Perry Anderson, and the Unproductive Classes -- "You're a town hall wallah, aren't you?": Pygmalion and Room at the Top -- The health visitor -- Dumpy: Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman -- Personal: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory -- Help: Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Alan Sillitoe's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" -- "I hate lawyers. I just work for them": Erin Brockovich -- On the persistence of anger in the institutions of caring -- Anger -- Caring: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -- Rising in sociology: Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Willis, and Richard Sennett -- Code: anger, caring and merit -- Conclusion -- The luck of birth and the international division of labor.