This chapter argues that antebellum sensationalism, broadly defined, offers a key archive for understanding the emotional life of capitalism. The first half of the chapter examines the period’s two best-selling novels, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and argues that sensationalism adopts and makes use of the affective excesses of melodrama. The chapter shows how, repeatedly, these and other sensational texts stage characters whose postures of emotional distress reflect a desire for spiritual meaning and social connection that transcends the modern, rational world of capitalism – that which Max Weber famously describes in terms of “disenchantment.” The second half of the chapter turns to urban sensationalism. Here, the chapter contends that most of these popular texts revolve around a sentimental logic whereby the tears of the financially distressed act as the markers of middle-class sensibility. Affect thus becomes an alternate currency. The chapter concludes with the most canonical example of urban sensation fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). The argument here is that “Bartleby” turns the emotional registers of sensationalism inside out. For though Bartleby is the melodramatic and sentimental victim of capitalism and disenchantment, he also rejects the emotional gestures of these genres.