This chapter charts a chronology of British literary realism in relation to nineteenth-century capitalism. It considers formal innovations in Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, situating those techniques in conjunction with processes such as enclosure, financialization, urbanization, and imperialism. Throughout, it argues for the dialectical faculties of novel forms (counterbalancing interior and exterior, individual and society, event and context, exceptional and exemplary, concrete and abstract, cartography and utopia) to mediate capitalist contradiction, transformation, and totality.