Eliot's courtship with Cross revolved around two subjects: Dante and finance. In her diaries for 1879, she recorded that Mr. Cross came “to consult about investments” (Journals, p. 165); “to discuss investments” (Journals, p. 166); that he brought “account of sales and purchases of stock” (Journals, p. 167) and “came on business” (Journals, p. 168). Eliot signed one love letter to Cross, “Beatrice” (GEL, 7:211–12), and another, “Your obliged ex-shareholder of A and C Gaslight and Coke” (GEL, 7:234–5). Cross recreated this unusual marriage of literature and finance in writings. As if recalling Impressions of Theophrastus Such, his first book was titled, Impressions of Dante and the New World, with Some Thoughts on Bi Metallism. His second volume, A Rake's Progress in Finance (1905), once again joined literature and finance, dealing with a range of issues, including South African emigration. Recognizing that his yoking of literature and finance was unusual, he wrote that it was “not an every day combination as the person who studies the one does not often study the other.”

Money had always been important to Eliot, but she felt obliged to view it as “vulgar.” In 1859 she wrote to John Blackwood: “I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money” (GEL, 3:152).