Here is an excerpt from an article by Jeremy Olshan for the Wall Street Journal in which he suggests that, in times of money trouble, some turn to financial advisers. He turns to books. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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No, not titles such as The Science of Getting Rich or The Automatic Millionaire, which adorn many a non-millionaire’s IKEA bookshelf. I prefer fiction, particularly 19th-century novels.

Money wreaks so much havoc in Victorian novels—arriving or departing almost magically in the opening pages—that they provide a kind of survey course in what not to do. “There had never been such an accumulation of financial wealth as happened in the 19th century on the back of the industrial revolution,” the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson says. Victorian novels were often serialized in the same publications that reported the day’s financial crises, notes Nicholas Dames, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia. “It became one of the offices of the novel to explain how these things could happen,” he says. “The narratives teach us how no one is exempt from financial peril, even if personally blameless.”

Here are [two of] four financial lesson plans for 21st-century readers.

Read Defoe to understand money. Perhaps nothing better illustrates people’s irrational relationship with money than a great scene in Robinson Crusoe not long after the hero’s ship is smashed on the shores of a strange, apparently deserted island. Crusoe scavenges the wreckage for anything useful, scooping up knives, tools, food and even booze, when he happens on a drawer full of gold coins: “I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: ‘O drug!’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for?…I have no manner of use for thee.’ ” Then he pockets the money anyway.

“This is precisely what the financial world gets wrong,” says Don Phillips, Morningstar, Inc.’s head of global research, who was on his way to a Ph.D. in literature before leaving academia for finance. “Intellectually, we understand that there are more important pursuits, that money is nothing but a means to an end—to support the lifestyle we want—and not a goal in itself. But Wall Street turns it into a game in which we have to amass bigger and bigger piles than the ones we already have.”

Still, the money did come in handy decades later, when Crusoe returned to civilization.

Read Flaubert before swiping that credit card. Claiming that Madame Bovary is about the perils of credit cards sounds like saying that King Lear is about bad estate planning. But usury, not adultery, is Emma Bovary’s true undoing.

The slimy merchant, Monsieur Lheureux, serves as both her Amazon.com and MasterCard, offering her high-end wares at even higher interest rates. “I don’t need anything,” she says at first, but as he keeps laying out lovely scarves and trinkets, she can’t help herself. “How much are they?” she asks—then ends up sinking into debt, using one loan to pay off another and drowning her woes in a bottle of arsenic.

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So always count the trees. Count them with calculators, spreadsheets or apps if you must. Or better yet, count them in their ideal form—after they’ve been churned into pulp and bound together as the pages of a good book.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Jeremy Olshan is Personal Finance Editor at WSJ Digital Network/MarketWatch.