This article argues that the language used to describe financial speculation in the nineteenth century overlapped with the moral charge of novelistic temporality: the repeated injunction against “getting rich quick” was countered by the way suspense encouraged racing or skipping through a novel to reach the end. Charles Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit (1855-57) experiments with mitigating the affect that encourages acceleration, resulting in a narrative temporality I define as “waiting.” Outside of the frenzy of finance capital, however, waiting is both a refuge and a prison, a place where character is stable and yet uninteresting, static, and a bit rotten.