In both the modern sense of the word and in the more capacious, nineteenth-century meaning of the term, the capitalist society of Victorian England was “queer.” Since Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1978), the era has been viewed as a defining epoch in queer history when homosexuality was first invented and pathologized. 1 In decades following, scholars including Eve Sedgwick, Sharon Marcus, Richard Dellamora, and Holly Furneaux have enriched our understanding of the so-called “Other Victorians,” revealing diverse forms of same-sex desire in Victorian literature and culture. Yet the unpredictable, largely unregulated economy of nineteenth-century England was queer in more mundane, day-to-day transactions as well. As Will Fisher points out, illicit sexual and economic practices were often “coded through each other” in early British discourse;“queer” could connote not just sexual but economic deviance (15). Originally used broadly as a synonym for “odd,”“peculiar,” or “eccentric,” by the eighteenth century, the term acquired specific financial valences in the context of moneylending and counterfeiting. Thus, in his famous critique of capital, it is fitting for Karl Marx to describe the commodity fetish as a “very queer thing,” spinning on its head and mystifying value (319). The coextension of queer sexual and economic meaning is also reflected in popular literature of the Victorian era. Crime stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, suggestively refer to the fraudulent activities of men in “Queer Street.” 2 Yet queer economic desire is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the peculiar financial partnerships between men in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864). On one foggy morning, for example, Dickens describes Riah paying a call on Fascination Fledgeby at his flat in “Queer Street.” After failing to rouse Fledgeby and dozing on the staircase for a few moments, Riah is eventually admitted inside: