The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
Summary
Augustus Melmotte arrives in London trailing rumors about his origins and an apparently bottomless fortune, and launches a scheme to build a railway from Salt Lake City to Mexico that exists, so far as anyone can tell, mostly on paper. London society, hungry for his money regardless of where it came from, scrambles to attach itself to him anyway: Lady Carbury, a widowed writer scraping by on flattery and bad novels, angles for her worthless, spendthrift son Felix to marry Melmotte's daughter Marie purely for her father's fortune, while Lady Carbury's own daughter Hetta is caught between the honest but complicated Paul Montague, still entangled with an American former fiancee named Mrs Hurtle, and her steady, upright cousin Roger Carbury, who loves her without ever quite pressing his case. As Melmotte's finances unravel under the weight of forgery and fraud, his standing collapses just as fast as it rose, and he takes poison rather than face the consequences in court. Felix, having ruined his own prospects entirely, is beaten by a rival suitor named John Crumb and shipped off to Prussia in disgrace; Marie Melmotte, left with nothing from her father but her own resourcefulness, sails for San Francisco and marries a business associate on terms she sets herself; and Paul finally marries Hetta, while Roger, steadfast to the end, resolves to treat her children as the heirs to Carbury.
Trollope surrounds Melmotte's fraud with a whole ecosystem of complicity, corrupted newspapermen, mercenary suitors, and aristocrats willing to overlook anything for a share of the money, and the satire lands because Trollope never lets any single villain carry the blame alone. It is a longer, angrier book than his Barsetshire novels, built to indict an entire culture rather than a single scheme, and it reads with unsettling ease against any later market scandal a reader might already know.
Historical Context & Significance
Trollope wrote the novel between May and December 1873, and Chapman and Hall serialized it in twenty monthly parts starting in February 1874 before publishing the complete two volume edition in 1875. He conceived it as a deliberate response to the dishonesty he found on returning to England from abroad, and drew directly on the financial scandals of the early 1870s. Trollope himself judged it, in his own later assessment, by no means one of his failures, a modest verdict for a book many now consider his most ambitious.
It was one of the last major Victorian novels to appear in monthly serial parts before that format declined, and the BBC has returned to it twice, a five part 1969 adaptation and a four part 2001 version that also aired on American public television.