The Way We Live Now (1875) may seem to owe its prodigious length to the author's desire to provide comprehensive evidence for the thesis clearly signalled by the title. Trollope's Autobiography retrospectively defines the novel's subject as ‘the commercial profligacy of the age’, which is most obviously embodied in the figure of Augustus Melmotte, the forger financier, whose brief ascendency is taken as symptomatic of the general deterioration. Modern commentary—greatly reassured by the prospect of a Trollope novel which seems ostensibly and incontrovertibly to address itself to large social and moral issues—has tended to assume that the book actually delivers the promised critique. Robin Gilmour rightly suspects that ‘The Way We Live Now has been so widely admired and written about … because it seems to lend itself readily to the kind of moral and thematic analysis with which modern criticism is most at home’.¹ The assumption that in any case Trollope's fiction generally functions as a searching analysis of his society has become almost automatic; he is now commonly credited not just with that photographic realism which his contemporaries admired, but with that understanding of society's central causes and hidden meaning which Balzac sought.

One of the consequences of such an approach is that pressure on the individual character is greatly increased. He comes to matter more for what he represents or illustrates than for himself since he is made the vehicle for the author's view of the world. Once characters are thus seen as creatures of rhetoric, the necessary instruments of a larger enquiry into Victorian civilisation, say, or the decline of the old values, or the nature of the gentleman, or the triumph of the commercial ethic, they are inevitably nudged away from idiosyncrasy towards allegory. Trollope's own uneasiness about satire, however, shows how foreign such subordination of the characters' interests to the author's was to his own creative instincts. A reasoned letter to Alfred Austin (2 May 1870) doubts the efficacy and truth of satiric writings ‘written as such’; satire, he complains, runs ever into exaggeration, leaving the conviction that not justice but revenge, is desired. The same worries surface in the Autobiography, both in relation to The Warden, Trollope's first success, as well as to The Way We Live Now: ‘The vices implied are coloured so as to make an effect rather than to represent truth … the very desire which moves the satirist to do his work energetically makes him dishonest’ (Chapter XX). It is therefore not surprising that even when Trollope sets out with such a clear sense of social and literary purpose as he does in this case, the force of the authorial argument should weaken and blur as fidelity to the inconvenient and complex autonomy that the characters insist on assuming becomes Trollope's principal—as it was his habitual—concern.

Reproducing in his Trollope; A Commentary the advance lay-out for the novel (which is simply an annotated list of characters), Michael Sadleir notes that Melmotte is not there envisaged as its central figure. ‘The chief character’ is to be Lady Carbury, a still attractive widow who is trying to offset the depredations caused by her worthless son Felix through hack-work masquerading as literature. The excellently written first chapter, which reproduces her letters begging various editors to puff her forthcoming book Criminal Queens, certainly shows that she lacks that integrity in literary dealings which Trollope prized so highly, and indeed exemplified himself. Although there are some sharp points made about the standards of periodicals later on (Trollope was no doubt able to draw on his experience of editing the St Paul's Magazine between 1867 and 1870), the full-scale study of corruption in literary life which our introduction to Lady Carbury seems to promise never in fact arrives; The Way We Live Now is not a precursor of Gissing's New Grub Street. During most of Trollope's novel, Lady Carbury is studied as a doting mother whose foolish indulgence of the callously selfish Felix is accompanied by her continuous irritation with the obstinacy of her daughter Henrietta, who refuses to marry her cousin Roger Carbury, a Suffolk squire and head of the family. Lady Carbury's experience of life has taught her that girls ought not to be too fussy. Her main hope is that Felix will succeed in marrying Melmotte's daughter Marie, and thus be able to call on funds magnificent beyond even his powers of depletion. The idea that access to Melmotte's cash will solve their problems is one that a considerable number of the novel's characters have in common, but most of them have nothing to do with literature—in fact, some of the aristocratic drones at the Beargarden Club most in need of subvention seem hardly able to read and write.

Lady Carbury's other worry is the attentions of Mr. Broune. As editor of the Morning Breakfast Table, he is of course literary. His partiality for Lady Carbury makes him compromise his professional ethics to some extent, but he knows well enough that she has no real talent. Nevertheless, Mr Broune not only proposes, but continues as an increasingly close friend after he has been rejected. The development of their middle-aged romance is possible because Lady Carbury refuses to think of it as such; her trust in his constant support depends on her feeling thankful that all that sort of thing is out of the way. This paradoxically leads to an intimacy that at the end of the novel she cannot evade. Mr Broune's second proposal is made in an unflustered tone quite unlike his first, and Lady Carbury finds herself ‘kneeling at his feet, with her face buried on his knees’ (Ch. XCIX). It is an unexpectedly touching moment because Trollope sees the scene not in genre terms but as involving inappropriate individuals: ‘Considering their ages perhaps we must say that their attitude was awkward. They would certainly have thought so themselves had they imagined that any one could have seen them’. However, as he explains, ‘It is not that Age is ashamed of feeling passion and acknowledging it,—but that the display of it is without the graces of which Youth is proud, and which Age regrets’. Such an understanding presentation hardly suggests satire, and when we are again told something of Lady Carbury's literary production, there is a further modification of the initial severity. Immediately after finishing her dubious Criminal Queens, she turns to fiction because it seems more likely to sell. But although The Wheel of Fortune, the resulting title, is obviously rubbish, her discipline in writing it is praiseworthy; she shows the kind of application that Trollope himself regularly practised: ‘From day to day, with all her cares heavy upon her, she had sat at her work, with a firm resolve that so many lines should be always forthcoming, let the difficulty of making them be what they might’ (Ch. LXXXIX). She takes a Trollopian pleasure in having completed her work ‘exactly in the time fixed’. Even more curiously, Trollope lends Lady Carbury an experience which as he later revealed in the Autobiography (Ch. VI) had been his own. In the novel her publisher's advice is ‘“whatever you do, Lady Carbury, don't be historical. Your historical novel, Lady Carbury, isn't worth a—”’; Trollope himself was told ‘“Whatever you do, don't be historical; your historical novel is not worth a damn”’. There was more point in such a tip in the late 1850s, when the long buoyant market in pseudo-Scott was fading, than in the world of the early 1870s, which The Way We Live Now ostensibly satirises. Trollope's transfer of this little incident is typical of his lack of superior self-regard, and his readiness to allow Lady Carbury authorial perseverance if not literary merit indicates how constitutionally unable he was to sustain the kind of astringency which comes naturally to the true satirist. The acquaintance with Lady Carbury that writing the novel has deepened has nurtured a fellow-feeling which inhibits censure. The sustained hostility of a Wyndham Lewis was something of which Trollope was too innately generous to be capable.

This magnanimous handicap substantially affects his treatment of Melmotte, seen by everybody as the essential sign that things are not now as once they were. Melmotte emerges from a continental background which seems inadequately accounted for. Although some think that his sudden arrival and mushroom prosperity in the City justifies putting the worst constructions on his previous career, he quickly establishes a commanding commercial position. Trollope's main point is that it is ‘society’ that takes Melmotte up. Lord Alfred Grendall and his son Miles, for instance, willingly submit to being patronised by and readily run errands for the great financier for the sake of what they hope to get out of him. Mr Longestaffe, who takes immense if fatuous pride in his lineage and gentility, is nevertheless sufficiently hard up to sell to the vulgar Melmotte one of the ancestral houses and to act as a dummy director on the board of Melmotte's greatest enterprise. This is the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a project originally brought over from San Francisco by a sharp American called Hamilton K. Fisker. It is quite understood though not openly admitted that the Company does not exist actually to build the railway but is rather a speculative affair designed to float shares and talk them up into dizzy profitability.² Most of the aristocratic characters in The Way We Live Now are only too eager to associate themselves with such an unprincipled venture. By the middle of the novel, Melmotte has become the acclaimed exemplar of commercial enterprise, rumoured to be the key figure in a series of vast enterprises all over the globe,—a man who has risen, of course, ‘above any feeling of personal profit’ (Ch. XLIV). He is chosen as the Conservative candidate in the forthcoming Westminster by-election, and selected as an outstanding example of British mercantile greatness to entertain the visiting Emperor of China at a banquet of spectacular expense. This period of Melmotte's life represents a kind of Balzacian apogee from which he can only decline. It is the period when Melmotte is most useful to Trollope as far as satirical purpose is concerned, since it shows in so diagrammatic a way that collusion between money and rank which is such an indictment of the way we live now. But the point at which Melmotte's empire begins to crumble is also the point at which Trollope begins to pay him a more detailed and less theoretical kind of attention; the character becomes progressively less of a portent and more of a person.

It has been ‘part of the charm of all dealings’ with Melmotte that ‘no ready money seemed ever to be necessary for anything’ (Ch. XLV). He has perfected the art of implying that ‘everything necessary had been done, when he had said that it was done’. The shaky foundations of Melmotte's aggrandisement are put under increasing stress as his projects pile up, and he becomes more and more vulnerable to a loss of confidence. It is a pleasant irony—though perhaps one of rather unnerving implication—that the Melmotte bubble is pricked by someone who, in business matters, would never claim to be more than a child. Dolly Longestaffe is the most engaging of the Beargarden Club set (it is not surprising that Trollope brought him back in The Duke's Children), and although—as he would be the first to admit—his intelligence is limited, he is bright enough to know the difference between promises and cash in hand. As critics have noted, the gambling at the Beargarden, carried on largely by means of worthless IOUs, is to be seen as analogous to speculative dealings in the real market of the City, but while Dolly may accept paper from friends out of good-nature and a wish not to spoil the game, he only agrees to sell Melmote his share in the family property for real money. As he artlessly puts it, ‘“A cheque upon his bank which I can pay in to mine is about the best thing going”’ (Ch. XLV). Dolly's inopportune simplicity finds Melmotte unable to put his hands on the required amount, and the collapse of confidence begins, helped along by resentment at his increasing arrogance and by the rumour that he has attempted to tide things over by forgery.

It is when Melmotte thus has his back to the wall that Trollope's interest quickens—an interest that is far more psychological than commercial. We are never given an exact account of Melmotte's business affairs in the kind of detail that Balzac readily supplies when accounting for the rise of figures like Birotteau or Nucingen. Round sums are casually introduced but not totted up. What is clearly shown is the kind of hubris which clouds Melmotte's judgment and precipitates his downfall, as he himself comes to realise. At one point, Trollope notes, Melmotte ‘came almost to believe in himself’ (Ch. LVI). However, in the unprecedently full account of Melmotte's thoughts during and after the great banquet, Trollope's increased command of the twists and turns of the financier's mind is presented as a new dimension of self-knowledge: ‘Perhaps never in his life had he studied his own character and his own conduct more accurately, or made sterner resolves, than he did as he stood there smiling, bowing and acting without impropriety the part of host to an Emperor’ (Ch. LXII). He determines to brave things out, and Trollope adds, ‘I think he took some pride in his own confidence as to his own courage, as he stood there turning it all over in his mind’. Trollope's interjection of ‘I think’ is not only often used as an indication that a person's motives are more interestingly and justifiably mixed than might be conventionally supposed, but also tends to imply the achievement of that familiarity with a character's interior life which it is the over-riding purpose of Trollope's art to promote. Here, it is an indication that satire is giving way to a kind of sympathy. As a result, we begin to see the Melmotte that no-one else sees. In the next chapter he is shown privately destroying some obviously incriminating documents, and we are given an hour-by-hour report of Melmotte's activities on the day of the election, which he wins by a slim majority. Ignorant as he is, Melmotte is as elated and awed as other successful parliamentary candidates in Trollope's fiction at ‘the magnitude of the achievement’. After an evening's drinking in solitary triumph, he goes up to bed ‘with careful and almost solemn steps’ (Ch. LXIV). Although his party are by now embarrassed by their newest recruit, Melmotte happens to meet its leader as he arrives at the House, and is chivalrously accompanied by him. His first impressions of the Commons are not dissimilar from those of such other new members as Phineas Finn, and, like Phineas, he is humiliated by his lack of ready words when he rashly attempts to make a premature first speech.

The more interior presentation of Melmotte does not involve any softening of the character's harsher features. His physical violence against his daughter Marie when she refuses to let him draw on the money he had put away in her name against the rainy day which has now arrived, is not glossed over (though not closely described), and we also witness the forging of further signatures. Nevertheless, the last phase of Melmotte's career is described with that concentration and neutral objectivity so characteristic of Trollope's art when he is most engaged in his material.

As ruin looks more and more imminent, Melmotte's self-communings are given at increasing length. Chapter LXXXI shows him mulling over his chances of survival and gives a full report of his self-condemnation. Melmotte's judgment of himself has ‘a certain manliness’ because it is unsparing and objective, but it never crosses his mind that he should ‘repent of the fraud in which his whole life had been passed’. His dishonesty is so axiomatic that it has a perverse kind of integrity which Trollope refrains from overtly condemning; indeed, most of the passage in question remains strictly within Melmotte's point of view.

Melmotte's last day begins with the defection of his loyal clerk and the knowledge that a City colleague, Mr Brehgert, will not help him out because he has rumbled Melmotte's forgeries. He resolves that although ‘he was about to have a crushing fall … the world should say that he had fallen like a man’ (Ch. LXXXII), and therefore goes down to the House nevertheless. His entry causes a sudden silence in the chamber, and for the rest of the evening he has briefly to endure a sense of isolation almost as intense, in its way, as that felt by such alienated characters as Mr Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) and Louis Trevelyan in He Knew He was Right (1869). Melmotte may be a crook, but he has the Trollopian sensitivity to social ostracism all the same. His self-consciousness is carefully registered through details of his dress and appearance—his hat ‘a little more cocked than usual’, his coat-lapels ‘thrown back a little wider’, his step always slow and now ‘almost majestic’—which seem the result of an ever closer authorial scrutiny. No-one will sit next to him; the waiters are reluctant to serve him at dinner, when he drinks heavily; the Speaker himself tries to ignore the new M.P.'s attempts to catch his eye, but has finally to let him speak:

Melmotte standing erect, turning his head round from one side of the House to another, as though determined that all should see his audacity, propping himself with his knees against the seat before him, remained for half a minute perfectly silent. He was drunk,—but better able than most drunken men to steady himself, and showing in his face none of those outward signs of intoxication by which drunkenness is generally made apparent. But he had forgotten in his audacity that words are needed for the making of a speech, and now he had not a word at his command. He stumbled forward, recovered himself, then looked once more round the House with a glance of anger, and after that toppled headlong over the shoulders of Mr. Beauchamp Beauclerk, who was sitting in front of him.

… The scene, as it occurred, was one very likely to be remembered when the performer should have been carried away into enforced obscurity. There was much commotion in the House. Mr. Beauclerk, a man of natural good nature, though at the moment put to considerable personal inconvenience, hastened, when he recovered his own equilibrium, to assist the drunken man. But Melmotte had by no means lost the power of helping himself. He quickly recovered his legs, and then reseating himself, put his hat on, and endeavoured to look as though nothing special had occurred … He remained in his seat for perhaps ten minutes, and then, not with a very steady step, but still with capacity sufficient for his own guidance, he made his way down to the doors. His exit was watched in silence, and the moment was an anxious one for the Speaker, the clerks, and all who were near him. Had he fallen some one,—or rather some two or three,—must have picked him up and carried him out. But he did not fall either there or in the lobbies, or on his way down to Palace Yard. Many were looking at him, but none touched him. When he had got through the gates, leaning against the wall he hallooed for his brougham, and the servant who was waiting for him soon took him home to Bruton Street.

(Ch. LXXXIII)

It is hard to say why this almost farcical episode is so oddly impressive. It might be argued that Melmotte's actual fall is simply an emblem of his metaphorical one, that his rejection by the House at this point is symbolic of the Establishment's refusal, in the end, to tolerate the corruption he represents. Such a reading, however, would indicate that society is not deteriorating as badly as Trollope seems to be implying earlier on. In fact Trollope explicitly dissociates himself from Carlylean pessimism in the Autobiography, and indeed his views coincide with those expressed by the Bishop of Elmham in chapter LV in the novel itself. His settled conviction that on the whole things were getting better, that the age was indeed one of improvement even though certain kinds of public dishonesty were disgracefully flagrant, meant that—as polemic—The Way We Live Now was always likely to run out of steam. Here the truth is surely that Trollope has preferred his intuitive understanding of the character to the logic of his argument. The close physical observation of Melmotte's movements in the paragraphs quoted—such little touches as the way he leans against the wall while waiting for the brougham—do not suggest the kind of attention that has more than half an eye on allegorical significance. The actual death of Melmotte is reported at the end of the chapter in a laconic, almost police-court manner which not only indicates Trollope's habitual refusal to sensationalise, but also reveals no wish to gloss the event through some kind of generalising comment. Trollope's restraint allows Melmotte to retrieve in death the dignity he has compromised earlier by tumbling over Mr Beauclerk. As in the analogous suicide of Lopez in The Prime Minister (1876), Trollope refrains from offering to interpret the character's last thoughts; instead—and with generous novelistic tact—we are left to make the appropriate inferences from his actions. One has only to look back to Trollope's handling of Sir Henry Harcourt's suicide in the earlier The Bertrams (1859) to register the gain in delicacy and suggestiveness. There is a kind of respect for the character in allowing him his privacy at such a time. Moreover, Trollope maintains a posthumous loyalty to Melmotte by a suddenly vigorous protest against the inquest's vindictive refusal to consider a verdict of suicide while temporarily insane: ‘it may be imagined, I think, that during that night he may have become as mad as any other wretch, have been driven as far beyond his powers of endurance as any other poor creature who ever at any time felt himself constrained to go’ (Ch. LXXXVIII). Melmotte is entitled to the same imaginative compassion as anyone else.

The strong sense that we finally have of Melmotte as an individual—and as therefore something more interesting than a mere symptom of a social malaise—is established partly by his finding himself in a fictional environment that despite Trollope's intention (as recalled in the Autobiography) ‘to take the whip of the satirist into my hand’ (Ch. XX) is not unlike the novelist's normal world. This is not just because Melmotte's Parliamentary experience and his suicide are situations that can be paralleled in that world—as can be the attempt to stave off disaster by terrorising women-folk into handing over money properly theirs (compare Harcourt's and Lopez's bullying of their wives with Melmotte's violence towards his daughter). It is also due to the fact that many features of the world of The Way We Live Now are also to be found in novels written without any proclaimed thesis. Trollope is quite ready to think of its personnel as moving in that imaginative continuum on which the Palliser series draws: some characters appear briefly in later books (Lady Carbury and Mr Broune, Dolly Longestaffe); others are mentioned who are already known (Sir Orlando Drought, Mr Bideawhile of Slow and Bideawhile, and Glencora's uncle the Marquis of Auld Reekie whose son Lord Nidderdale is Melmotte's favoured suitor for Marie).

The other main areas of plot interest in The Way We Live Now are plausibly co-ordinated with the Melmotte affair, but on a basis of loose contingency rather than thematic corroboration. For instance, Melmotte's most vocal critic is Roger Carbury, often taken to be an authorial mouthpiece; it is Roger who most strenuously insists that the rise of the great swindler is a sign of the deplorable decadence of the times. When Lady Carbury explains her scheme to solve the problem of Felix by marrying him to Marie Melmotte, Roger's reaction is trenchant:

‘You will never get me to say that I think the family will be benefited by a marriage with the daughter of Mr. Melmotte. I look upon him as dirt in the gutter … Men say openly that he is an adventurer and a swindler. No one pretends to think that he is a gentleman. There is a consciousness among all who speak of him that he amasses his money not by honest trade, but by unknown tricks,—as does a card-sharper. He is one whom we would not admit into our kitchens, much less to our tables, on the score of his own merits. But because he has learned the art of making money, we not only put up with him, but settle upon his carcase as so many birds of prey.’

(Ch. XV)

Much space in The Way We Live Now is also given over the dilemma of Paul Montague, whose vacillations are as classically Trollopian as Roger Carbury's pathological constancy. Paul has tried to make his way in America, and his partnership with Fisker leads to his involvement with the great Mexican railway speculation. Although he accepts his share of the profits, he becomes increasingly uneasy about Melmotte's manner of treating directors as rubber-stamps and makes himself awkward at board meetings. A similar mixture of weakness and principle is evident in his emotional life, which is given proportionately more attention than his business affairs (the ‘glimmerings’ of Radicalism mentioned in Trollope's advance notes come to nothing). While in the States Paul has had what clearly amounts to an affair with Mrs. Winifred Hurtle. It was only when that was safely behind him, as he thought, that he addressed himself to Hetta Carbury. Mrs. Hurtle, however, is too strong-minded a woman to give up the man she genuinely loves without a struggle, and pursues him to London where her presence cannot but be embarrassing. The mature Mrs. Hurtle is quite different from the bright but compliant American girls who marry English aristocrats in He Knew He Was Right and The Duke's Children (1880); she is rather a less respectable alternative to Mrs. Peacocke in Dr Wortle's School (1881). She is associated with the West rather than the East, and is even rumoured to have shot a man in Oregon—the latent violence of the frontier with which she is associated is part of her powerful erotic appeal. As with Mrs. Peacocke, there is some uncertainty about her marital status; she claims to be divorced according to the laws of the state of Kansas, but it is not clear whether what is good enough for Kansas is acceptable elsewhere nor is it certain whether Mr Hurtle is alive or dead. Unlike Mrs. Peacocke, Winifred Hurtle is not a lady; she admits that she is ‘wild’ where Paul is ‘sleek’ and ‘tame’, and one can easily see why Paul found her both irresistible in the short term and impossible in the long. The difficulty is that she is not ‘a woman whom a man might ill-treat or scorn with impunity’ (Ch. XXVI), and Paul is partly afraid of her. He is less than firm with Winifred, however, principally because he shrinks ‘from subjecting her to the blank misery of utter desertion’. Trollope's intervention in order to exonerate Paul from the charge of cowardice is expressed in terms rich in implication for that moral imagination on which his own art relies:

In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself,—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself.

(Ch. XLVII)

As so often, Trollope is concerned to point out that what is conventionally thought of as inconsistent is not really so, that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits are not mutually exclusive but co-exist in the same nature. His subtle sense of the intermixture of qualities which ought in theory to be distinct is one of the main reasons why he seems to have so much more flexibility and openness in his response to human reality than his contemporaries.

Like other sensitive Trollopian men caught between two women—like, most notably, Phineas Finn—Paul Montague finds it painful to cause others pain, and his vacillation is the result; it also to some degree makes matters worse. Had he been firmer in casting Mrs. Hurtle off, she might have suffered less. However, Paul's manifest kindness does at length prevail over her desire for revenge, and arouses her residual good nature in three moving scenes of resignation (Chapters LI, XCI, XCVII). In the last of these, her reaction after the parting is described thus:

She stood still, without moving a limb, as she listened to his step down the stairs and to the opening and the closing of the door. Then hiding herself at the window with the scanty drapery of the curtain she watched him as he went along the street. When he had turned the corner she came back to the centre of the room, stood for a moment with her arms stretched out towards the walls, and then fell prone upon the floor. She had spoken the very truth when she said that she had loved him with all her heart.

A criticism looking for the emblematic might rather desperately align Mrs. Hurtle's collapse with Melmotte's fall in the House (noting that she is an enthusiastic admirer of his), but what matters to Trollope's dramatic imagination is the sudden exacerbation of wordless pain and its surprising expression (conveyed by a sequence of actions similar to those which follow an earlier separation in chapter XLVII). The fact is that the emotional predicament of a highly inassimilable outsider like Mrs. Hurtle is not relevant to a satire on the venality of English society, and the more interesting she becomes in her own right, the more the novel's grip on its announced theme weakens.

The situation of Georgiana Longestaffe, however, is more germane and must be what Trollope refers to in the Autobiography when he writes of the novel's castigation of ‘other vices’ such as ‘the intrigues of girls who want to get married’ (Ch. XX). Georgiana's manoeuvres are expressed in unequivocal market terms:

At nineteen and twenty and twenty-one she had thought that all the world was before her. With her commanding figure, regular long features, and bright complexion, she had regarded herself as one of the beauties of the day, and had considered herself entitled to demand wealth and a coronet. At twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four any young peer, or peer's eldest son, with a house in town and in the country, might have sufficed. Twenty-five and six had been the years for baronets and squires; and even a leading fashionable lawyer or two had been marked by her as sufficient since that time. But now she was aware that hitherto she had always fixed her price a little too high.

(Ch. LX)

At 29, Georgiana is no longer in a strong position, and her attempts to find a man prepared to put up with her disagreeable temper as well as meet her minimum residential conditions grow more and more agitated. When the family withdraws from London in order to retrench, she is ready to stay with the despicably vulgar Melmottes so as to have a base from which to carry on her campaign. She is even prepared to accept the proposal of a middle-aged Jewish widower from the City who already has children. Her family are appalled by the very idea of an alliance with someone like Mr Brehgert, and their reactions to him are hardly to their credit. When introduced half-way through the novel, Mr Brehgert is presented in terms of his type as conventionally rendered; he is fat and greasy, his hair is dyed (as for that matter is Mr Longestaffe's), his eyes are too close together, and at first his speech has the stereotyped mannerisms of Jewish money-lenders found elsewhere in Trollope. These soon wear off, and the character gains in dignity at each appearance, perhaps as a result of a growing appreciation by Trollope of his possibilities (he is not listed at all in the advance layout). His good humour and even temper show to advantage as Georgiana wriggles to negotiate the best contract she can. After her father tells Mr Brehgert in offensive terms of his disapproval, the banker sends her a letter which leaves it to her to stand by or recede from their engagement. As the novelist says, it is ‘a plain-spoken and truth-telling letter’ of ‘single-minded genuine honesty’ (Ch. LXXIX), and as such thrown away on Georgiana. In it Brehgert explains that because of the losses he has sustained through his dealings with Melmotte he cannot now afford to maintain a house in town as well as his present home out at Fulham, as originally agreed. Georgiana thinks that in view of ‘her own value as a Christian lady of high birth and position giving herself to a commercial Jew’ she is in a position to insist, but as usual she tries for more than the market will bear. Brehgert withdraws from the engagement, on the ground—expressed with a delicate but deadly irony—that ‘“of course I have no right to ask you to share with me the discomfort of a single home”’. When, later on, Mr Longestaffe needs Mr Brehgert's professional assistance, he is made speechless by the Jew's assertion that throughout the Georgiana affair he has behaved ‘“like a gentleman”’ (Ch. LXXXVIII) and an honest man, but any unbiased reader must agree. Mr Brehgart's integrity not only shows up the Longestaffes's shabbiness, but also offsets the crimes of the other city Jews, Melmotte and his associate Cohenlupe; his upright conduct is a rebuke both to aristocratic rapacity and to the facile idea that the way we live now can be put down to semitic penetration. Brehgert argues that in thinking of Society as closed against Jews Mr Longestaffe ‘has hardly kept pace with the movements of the age’ (Ch. LXXIX), and although Roger Carbury might think such movements retrogressive, it would be hard to maintain on this evidence that Trollope does so. As so often in Trollope's work, things tend to balance out; on the one hand, Melmotte—on the other, Brehgert. Such states of equipoise (the term applied by the historian W. L. Burn to Trollope's age as a whole) are inherently inimical to satire. Similarly, although Georgiana herself is in the end perfunctorily allowed to find whatever happiness she can by eloping with a local curate, Trollope shows elsewhere that he can be intensely sympathetic to the plight of girls who work the marriage market year after year without success. His defence in a letter (17 February 1877) of Arabella Trefoil, the determined husband-hunter in The American Senator, is playful in tone, but implies a serious creative commitment, as his scrupulous presentation of her in the novel itself shows: ‘I have been, and still am very much afraid of Arabella Trefoil … Think of her virtues; how she works, how true she is to her vocation, how little there is of self indulgence, or of idleness. I think that she will go to a kind of third class heaven in which she will always be getting third class husbands’. Miss Trefoil, however, struck The Times reviewer as ‘playing a more unblushing game than is even compatible with “the way we live now”’.

The ulterior purposes of The Way We Live Now seem to lead Trollope to deal with some familiar Trollopian material less subtly than usual. Sir Felix Carbury functions as the incarnation of that selfishness which the theory of the novel postulates as the endemic contemporary condition. The only thing for which he can summon up any energy is immediate gratification: ‘he did not know how to get through a day in which no excitement was provided for him. He never read. Thinking was altogether beyond him. And he had never done a day's work in his life’. Beyond eating, drinking, lying in bed, and playing cards, there was only amusing himself with women, and ‘the lower the culture of the women, the better the amusement’ (Ch. LXVII). He is quite unable to put a future benefit before an immediate pleasure. The planned elopement with Marie Melmotte, which would have been profitable in that she has money in her own right, is aborted because Felix cannot tear himself away from the card table. Even his attempt to seduce Ruby Ruggles, which ends in his being beaten up by John Crumb, is relatively languid. He thus compares unfavourably in fictive interest with other disreputable young men elsewhere in Trollope. Although as ‘beautiful’ as the Burgo Fitzgerald of Can You Forgive Her? (1864) in appearance, he is never felt to have the genuine glamour and grace which offsets Burgo's fecklessness; although addicted to gambling like Captain Scarborough in Mr Scarborough's Family (1883), he has none of those traces of good feeling which make Scarborough refuse to think ill of his dead mother; he is not even aimless in the weak but plausible manner of Ralph the Heir (1871). The roughness of the justice he receives from Crumb is appropriate to the relatively crude terms of the portrayal. In his case, as with the off-stage and off-hand disposal of Georgiana Longestaffe, an arbitrary end to his career seems to be the result of the pressure Trollope has felt under to justify his thesis: Felix is last reported in penitential exile in Eastern Prussia under the unlikely guardianship of a clergyman. The diminished expectations finally visited on both characters is ethically retributory rather than artistically logical.

At its best, however, The Way We Live Now is a striking and significant demonstration of Trollope's inability—even when consciously and conspicuously addressing himself to the problems of his age—to prevent his concern for the particularity of individuals from prevailing over all other considerations. The effective source of authorial energy in this novel, as in all his work, is not the impulse to make public statements but the private desire to know his characters—those characters which the Autobiography insists the novelist must live with ‘in the full reality of established intimacy’. As Henry James put it, in the essay which still remains the truest short account of what he does not hesitate to call Trollope's genius: ‘We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are. Trollope's great apprehension of the real, which was what made him so interesting, came to him through his desire to satisfy us on this point—to tell us what certain people were and what they did in consequence of being so’.³

Notes

1. ‘A Lesser Thackeray? Trollope and the Victorian Novel’, in Tony Bareham (ed.), Anthony Trollope (1980).

   For some representative discussions see the sections on The Way We Live Now in the following:

   James R. Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford, 1977); Robert Tracy, Trollope's Later Novels (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1978); P. D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope (Hassocks, 1978); Geoffrey Harvey, The Art of Anthony Trollope (1980).

   For the moral complexities involved in the novelist's and the reader's relationship with some of the main characters, see Douglas Hewitt, The Approach to Fiction: Good and Bad Readings of Novels (1972).

2. On the contemporary financial background, see Norman Russell, The Novelist and Mammon (Oxford, 1986), reviewed below, pp. 72-79.

3. Henry James's essay on Trollope was included in Partial Portraits (1888), and is conveniently reprinted in Donald Smalley (ed.), Trollope: The Critical Heritage (1969).