Why people trust is a question that has preoccupied scholars across many disciplines. Historical explorations of trust abound, but we know relatively little about the workings of trust in the history of investment. Despite becoming increasingly mediated and institutionalized in the nineteenth century, the market for stocks and shares remained local and embedded in personal relations to a significant extent. This created a complex trust environment in which old and new forms of trust co-existed. Investors sought information from the press, but they also relied upon friends to help them navigate the market. Rather than studying trust in the aggregate, this article argues that focusing on the particular allows us to appreciate trust as an emotional and ultimately imaginative process depending as much on affective stories as rational calculation. To this end, it takes the case of a Bath clergyman and workhouse schools inspector, James Clutterbuck, who solicited investments from a wide network of friends and colleagues in the 1880s and 1890s. By capturing the complex interplay of friendship, emotions, and narrative in the formation of trust, the article offers a window onto everyday financial life in late Victorian provincial England.

为什么人们信任是一个问题，这个问题一直困扰着许多学科的学者。信任的历史探索比比皆是，但我们对信任在投资史上的运作知之甚少。尽管在 19 世纪变得越来越中介化和制度化，股票和股票市场仍然是本地的，并且在很大程度上嵌入了个人关系。这创造了一个复杂的信任环境，其中新旧信任形式并存。投资者从新闻界寻求信息，但他们也依靠朋友来帮助他们驾驭市场。本文不是从整体上研究信任，而是认为专注于特定的事物可以让我们将信任视为一种情感和最终想象的过程，它既依赖于情感故事，也依赖于理性计算。为此，以巴斯神职人员和济贫院学校督察 James Clutterbuck 为例，他在 1880 年代和 1890 年代向广泛的朋友和同事网络征求投资。通过捕捉友谊、情感和叙事在信任形成过程中的复杂相互作用，这篇文章提供了一个了解维多利亚时代晚期英格兰省级日常金融生活的窗口。