When one considers the thematic and figurative pervasiveness of money in novels such as Charles Dickens's Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend or Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset or The Way We Live Now, words like "fixation" and "obsession" come to mind.  Hardly a chapter goes by in these and other novels of this period without money being directly invoked; every relationship between characters comes with a monetary evaluation that other characters explicitly observe.  What is more, money is only one component of a broader and even more pervasive set of discourses concerning the exchange of capital.  The nearly continuous concentration on exchanges of capital in a novel like The Last Chronicle of Barset belies that novel's most esteemed and truthful character, Mr. Harding, when he says, "Money is worth thinking of, but it is not worth very much thought" (447).  On the contrary, if one stands back from texts like this, one can see that the intersections and progressions of fictional lives that they portray are couched within a larger pattern of interaction and exchange of which capital is the protagonist.  The old joke, told only half jokingly, about human bodies and viruses seems applicable: that nineteenth-century novels exist in the end for the circulation of a tale about capital (and thus that the promise of individualized subjectivity that characters represent and readers expect is only a disguising fiction).   If this formulation is extreme, it is only a step beyond the arguments of recent studies that money is "perhaps the most common theme in nineteenth-century fiction" (Vernon 14) or that "the universal, leveling power of money is a theme intrinsic to, perhaps even definitive of, the novel form itself" (Brantlinger 23).  The intensity of the nineteenth-century novelistic fascination with money can be explained in part by demonstrating, as Mary Poovey and James Thompson respectively have, that novelistic discourses emerged in eighteenth-century Britain in conjunction with the emergence of the discourses of political economy.  Similarly, the fact that the mid-Victorian decades in particular produced such a large number of works singularly concerned with exchanges of capital is understandable in relationship to historical developments within capitalism.  I have in mind especially the finalization in the 1830s of the long transition from gold to paper--from wealth as treasure to the exchange of capital--and the complete formalization in the first half of the nineteenth century of the central institutions of finance capitalism, namely the joint-stock company and the stock market.   But even the significant explanatory power of historical contextualization does not seem commensurate with the pervasiveness of discourses about capital in more than a few mid-Victorian novels.  Indeed, I doubt that Victorian society--any society--ever was as obsessed with capital as are certain mid-Victorian novels.  Of course, that very excess or surplus may itself be the point, one with special significance for understanding mid-nineteenth-century British society.  In pursuing an answer to the question of why a novel like The Last Chronicle of Barset is concerned to a nearly obsessional degree with exchanges of capital, this essay will focus on the how: how does capital circulate in this text and to what effect on its overall meanings?  The first purpose of this essay, then, is to theorize and test a model for representing the flow of discourse about capital within mid-Victorian novels, taking The Last Chronicle of Barset as a representative case.  The second purpose is to demonstrate how exchanges of capital are not only thematically significant but actually constitute the plot structure of this novel.   Finally, the third purpose is to challenge certain recent critical arguments that continue to positóeven while critiquingóa separation in the nineteenth century of the domains of the novel and of political economy, a separation that reproduces the Victorian notion of "separate spheres" and underestimates the cultural work of mid-Victorian novels. . . .