In this chapter, the author argues that literature both accommodates and helps to render intelligible the abstractions and contradictions of money as money becomes a more and more imposing and insistent part of life in nineteenth-century Britain. The Bank of England's early monopoly and its incipient role as a central bank encouraged the establishment of hundreds of private banks both in the country. Yet provincial banks were also part of the increasingly specialized business of supplying loanable capital to increasingly distant and even unknown debtors. During the crisis of 1825, panic spread beyond financial institutions, as merchants and manufacturers, desperate for money, dumped their commodities on the slumping market. As the economy expanded with exponential abstraction of exchange value, finance became increasingly specialized. Victorian literary modes show how literary form makes the dematerializing effects of money, credit, and capital familiar and even enjoyable.