Banking scandals, corporate greed, and social irresponsibility – who says Trollope isn’t relevant? The Way We Live Now (1875) is perhaps his darkest novel and is markedly different from the rest of his oeuvre. This probably explains why it is often sidelined and not given the attention it deserves. I’ve written many times before that readers tended to punish Trollope for experimenting with different styles, but his willingness to try new ideas is what makes him so interesting as a writer. Often referred to as the most “Dickensian” of Trollope’s novels, The Way We Live Now is a scathing attack on the dwindling morality of the mid-Victorian period and the “commercial profligacy of the age”. The glittering cast of characters is headed by Augustus Melmotte, an entrepreneur of dubious provenance who seeks social advantage through his immense wealth. There are marked similarities with Ferdinand Lopez, anti-hero of The Prime Minister. Melmotte angles to pair his timorous daughter Marie with an aristocrat who can confer respectability and lineage upon his house.
Feckless baronets are queueing up for her hand, hypnotised by their prospective father-in-law’s fortune, and are inexorably drawn into his web of fraud and speculation. Melmotte’s vertiginous rise and inevitable fall transfixes the reader, and the fates of those who are dragged down with him are told with great poignancy. Melmotte is an extraordinary character – a cynical beast who knows exactly how to exploit the weaknesses of his fellow men.
One of his main dupes is Sir Felix Carbury, an indolent cad who thinks the world owes him a living. He is described as having a heart of stone, but he desperately tries to feign emotion to win the hand of Marie Melmotte. His beleaguered mother, Lady Carbury, writes books of dubious quality to subsidise her feckless son’s carousing. Although the narrator describes her as “false from head to foot,” she is one of the few characters actually prepared to work for a living. Many critics have identified her as a caricature of Trollope’s mother, the author Frances Trollope. However, Trollope’s greatest biographer, Victoria Glendinning, thinks she was partly inspired by Mrs Oliphant. In his notes for the novel, Trollope refers to Lady Carbury as “Mrs E.” Glendinning writes, “There’s no point disguising a name by an initial if you give the right initial. Oliphant easily becomes Elephant, if one must seek a free association. 1 We can only hope that Mrs O never found out, else she’ll be tweaking Trollope’s beard in the afterlife.
For me, the most interesting character is Winifred Hurtle, an American widow who threatened her violent husband with a gun and shot a rapist in the head. She is the only woman prepared to resist male violence, but is punished with loneliness. After much vacillation her lover, Paul Montague, rejects her charm and urbanity for the insipid purity of Hetta Carbury. Trollope implies Mrs Hurtle should have submitted meekly to brutal attacks, as at least she would have retained her femininity.
Trollope makes no attempt at an optimistic conclusion, and many of his characters are entirely lacking in redeeming qualities. It was his desire to present a realistic portrait of the age that inspired such odium among reviewers. Trollope later wrote in his Autobiography that, “The accusations are exaggerated. The vices are coloured, so as to make effect rather than to represent truth.” This clarification notwithstanding, his fictional world is contiguous with our own.
This vision is certainly dark, but it is brilliant. The novel is indeed Trollope’s most “Dickensian” in terms of scope and biting social commentary, but the voice is all his own.
Trollope by Victoria Glendinning ↩︎