This final chapter traces railway infrastructure’s lasting impact on novel form through structural and affective dimensions of the railways in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End. A text poised in a transitional period in transport and literary history, Forster’s novel passes traverses the range of infrastructures examined through this book. This chapter provides a much-needed railway reading of a novel critically framed to date through its representation of motor cars and their attendant geographies. I explore how characters personalise public infrastructure in Howards End by unpacking the parallels Forster establishes between domestic space (the house at Howards End) and railway termini. While hypermobility via the motorcar affords a new kind of freedom of movement, it cannot match the established infrastructure in enabling imaginative mobility. Characters with a social outlook entrenched in railway infrastructure move less but see more than those who prefer the motorcar. This chapter argues that this work’s enigmatic instruction to ‘only connect’ is rooted in infrastructural railway poetics.

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.