Clara Cheeseman's triple-decker novel A Rolling Stone (1886) offers an intriguingly urgent example of the pervasive concern in nineteenth-century antipodal domestic fiction with debt, discipline and reputation. It was written and set in New Zealand during the severe recession triggered in 1878 by the collapse of the colony's credit in London, which in turn followed a decade-long economic boom generated by enormous government borrowing in London. Not previously considered in this light, the novel has instead been described most charitably as ‘a remarkable but forgotten achievement’ whose domestic focus offers ‘a fascinating picture of colonial households’, while elsewhere it has been castigated (in common with other settler writing) as ‘a desert of facts, anecdotes, pointless descriptions, [and] absurd melodramatic contortions#x2019;, and as little more than ‘a three-volume library love story whose hero survives various pioneering vicissitudes’. Yet blanket assertions of Cheeseman's authorial naivety and unselfconsciousness should be viewed with some caution when it is remembered that she, although leaving virtually no other biographical traces, also authored the first full-length critical article on New Zealand fiction. In this essay, I shall suggest that the domestic concerns of A Rolling Stone cannot be understood apart from New Zealand's broader economic travails in a global financial environment, and that its interests in debt and reputation therefore extend far beyond the walls of the settler home.