Although some critics regard The Way We Live Now as Anthony Trollope’s masterpiece, the novel was greeted with disappointment by its first readers. Trollope came to see it as an aberration, going too far in its satirical disgust with the corruption of upper-class British society. His earlier novels strive for a balance between belief in the virtuous stability of British institutions and the viability of the British class structure, and skepticism about their defects. In The Way We Live Now, moral concerns seem nearly to disappear from the lives of upper-class characters, who give themselves over to greed and ostentation.

A key figure in the novel is an outsider of murky origins and shady financial dealings, Augustus Melmotte, whose rapid rise in English society, even to the point of election to Parliament, is supported by members of the ruling class. Those who support him are aware that Melmotte is a fraud but are cynically eager to attach themselves to his power to make money. He represents “the way we live now.” The central figure for “the better way we lived in the past” is Roger Carbury, one of the model English gentlemen who appear in many of Trollope’s novels. Roger is an ideal. His modest country estate has been in his family for centuries. He lives within his income, without ostentation, as did his forefathers; he believes “a man’s standing in the world should not depend at all upon his wealth” (though it certainly is connected to inherited social standing—Trollope is no democrat). He is absolutely trustworthy, and he “would have felt himself disgraced to enter the house of such a one as Augustus Melmotte.”

The Way We Live Now presents Roger as an anachronism. His social standing in the general estimation—though not in his own—is eclipsed by that of more ambitious neighboring families such as the Longstaffes, who live beyond their means and are easy prey for Melmotte’s investment schemes. Roger is nearly alone in the world: He never marries, and his sisters go off to India and the American West with their husbands. His cousin Hetta, whom he wants to marry, prefers Paul Montague, who, although not despicable, is morally and socially unanchored. Demonstration of this is his becoming one of the members of the board of directors of Melmotte’s railroad scheme. Without a son of his own, Roger fears his heir will have to be Hetta’s wastrel brother, Sir Felix.

Roger lacks an immediate family and seems unlikely to acquire one, but many other characters in the novel have dysfunctional families. One of these is Lady Carbury and her two children: Lady Carbury spoils her son, who is incapable of caring for anyone and who threatens to bankrupt her. Lady Carbury seems to have little feeling for her daughter other than anger that Hetta refuses to be married off safely to Roger. Family relations are even worse among the Longstaffes, the Melmottes, and, Trollope leads readers to assume, myriad other upper-class families of the 1870’s.

The dominant symbol of the loss of traditional moral values is gambling. The novel parallels a general upper-class eagerness to buy shares in Melmotte’s railroad speculation with the nightly card games enjoyed by Sir Felix, the Longstaffes’s son Dolly, and other dissolute young gentlemen. The IOUs they exchange when they run out of cash are the equivalent of the worthless pieces of paper representing shares in Melmotte’s yet-to-be-built railroad. When it is discovered that one of the young gentlemen habitually cheats, the others are at first shocked but quickly absorb cheating as yet another category of behavior one might as well...