Written and published between May 1855 and May 1857, just preceding by six months the crash of 1857, Little Dorrit, a novel about debtors' prison, a banking crash, and the circumlocutionary ineptitude of government as agent of business, portrays the rough cycle of trade. As pointed out in the last chapter, the early to mid-1850s were the proverbial years of financial equilibrium: the Victorians' burgeoning export trade sent “British-made goods all over the globe.” With the speeding up of life through the massive production of railways all over England, concomitantly there was a need for the speeding up of the circulation of capital to keep railway and train production in gear, as it were. Banks also had to find better means of keeping up with the economic needs of industry. To give a sense of the sharp increase in industrial and banking transactions, Charles Kindleberger notes that between 1852 and 1857 the deposits in a set of five London banks grew from £17.7 million to £40 million and the typical amount of bills of exchange that were in circulation increased to 200 million from just 66 million.