Via an analysis of H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, this chapter explores how novels adapted to accommodate the metropolitan spaces of London, and it argues that Wells’s novel links the financialization of the British economy and the cultural turn toward London to the emergence of a new novelistic poetics and to the development of a new novelistic character. Tono-Bungay narrates the rise and fall of Teddy Ponderevo’s financial empire, but the source of drama in the novel is more often the narrator’s inability to reconcile classical novelistic poetics with the logic of value production under finance capitalism and with his experiences in London. The narrator longs for a new mode of representation that can account for the largely imaginary and highly volatile value produced by the financial empire, and he finds inspiration for that new mode of representation in the urban spaces of London.

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark maps the distinction between the country and the city onto the geopolitical scale of colonial metropole and periphery, where the colonial periphery is the semiotic placeholder for the role that London plays in the previous two chapters as the space that disrupts conventional novelistic poetics. In Anna Morgan, two worlds that do not compute – the financialized metropole of London and the preindustrial periphery – collide and the result is a character that operates according to the logic of affect rather than conventional narratives of sentiment and emotion. Her character thereby anticipates the emergence of affect as value form.