I think I now see; Maria Edgeworth wrote the moral tales of the new English middle class. Certainly the morals in this volume are practical and prudent: "Out of Debt out of Danger", "To-Morrow" against procrastination (even for romantical geniuses), "The Lottery" suggesting not only that lottery-tickets were a bad bet, but that the imprudent habits that lead to lottery-buying would waste a prize anyway. "Murad the Unlucky" argues that no-one is lucky or unlucky, but habits make them so. "Lame Jervas", my favorite, is an early technocratic bildungsroman. (There can't be many earlier ones in English...)
The painful parts: her kindly slaveowner who doesn't free the slaves; complete scorn of Jews. (Who we see only solitary - no Jewish firms, let alone Jewish families or neighborhoods. One could replace every reference with "miser", I think, and lose no part of the story.)
Unexpectedly egalitarian: her defense of Irish persons, however unformed their commercial habits were; the defense of most other races - as in "Lame Jervas":
these poor creatures! who, say what we will, have as much sensibility, perhaps more, than we have ourselves.
It is not only proper but common that women work for money if they aren't occupied raising children; one spinning for her husband's manufactury, one working in an upholsterer's shop, without late-Victorian palpitations about delicate feminine spheres. One farmer's daughter is competent enough on horseback to gallop six miles.
Another contrast with late-Victorian moral tales; hardly anyone dies. Or rather, they do not die because of their moral state, as they might in or even stories.
Gratitude is a central virtue for her, but it isn't slavish or dependent. It isn't exactly based on a lesser being praising a greater one, although there is so clear a social hierarchy that most of the occasions for gratitude go up the ladder of power. Some of its force, I think, is from the small-scale, personal nature of the society she describes: governments, mines, manufacturies are small enough for their owners to be directly known. Gratitude might be the sweet perfume of sacrifice that leaves the meat for men, or it might be a humanization that makes the arrangement more comfortable for the people at both ends. Edgeworth's good characters don't go bad, so no-one has had the problem of expressing gratitude for a virtue their benefactor has now lost.
Gutenberg etext 8720; URI: http://www.gutenberg.net/browse/BIBREC/BR8720.HTM