The novel is set immediately before and during the British Panic of 1825, which was caused largely by a fraud involving "Poyais", an invented South American country. As a result, about 70 banks failed. The novel follows the effects of the events on two fictional English communities named Aldersbury and Garth.
Weyman, still a well-known novelist in the period when he wrote the book, describes the conflict between the old-established rural gentry, whose wealth is drawn as landowners exploiting large estates, and the striving business classes, drawing theirs from banking and industry.
The novel, set a century before publication, has a conventional plot involving an exaltation of honesty and love as a way of overcoming pride and prejudice.[4] It stresses that the bank had been run very carefully. As a recent scholar put it, the bank was "solvent, amply solvent", but customers "would rush in at the first alarm, like a flock of silly sheep... each bent on his own safety, blindly on ruin."[5] Another recent commentator has called it a notable attempt "to depict the ways in which urbanization and Reform politics had helped to shape the broad outlines of the Victorian world."[6]