Via an analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, this chapter argues that character – the notion that a person’s value is defined by attributes of character – was the dominant value form shaping novelistic poetics under the nineteenth-century industrial economy. Trollope’s novels bear witness to the growing influence of financial transactions in the British economy. Upon first glance, Trollope’s critique of finance capital is fairly well worn, embedded as it is in anti-Semitic and xenophobic tropes, but this chapter focuses on how the financial narratives in Can You Forgive Her? (1864) and The Prime Minister (1876) cast finance capital as an affront to the very logic of character as a novelistic value form. In those novels, we begin to see the unraveling of character, which opens up the possibility for another literary value form to emerge under modernism.