Question 1

Is The Way We Live Now Trollope's masterpiece?

Accepted Answer

Many critics now regard it as his greatest novel, though it was not highly praised on publication — the Victorian reading public found its satire excessive and its tone uncharacteristically bitter. Its critical rehabilitation dates primarily from the 1970s and 1980s, when its analysis of financial fraud, media complicity, and the worship of apparent success began to look prescient rather than old-fashioned. It is certainly Trollope's largest novel (over 800 pages in most editions) and his most sustained satirical achievement. Whether it surpasses Barchester Towers (in entertainment) or The Last Chronicle of Barset (in emotional depth) is a matter of reader taste.

Question 2

Who is Augustus Melmotte, and is he a sympathetic character?

Accepted Answer

Melmotte is one of the great ambiguous figures in Victorian fiction — a fraudster and bully who is also capable of genuine courage, who is destroyed by his own social ambitions as much as by his crimes, and who in the novel's most memorable scene rises in the House of Commons (to which he has been elected by a combination of money and spectacle) and delivers a passionate attack on his persecutors before collapsing entirely. Trollope's satire is directed not so much at Melmotte personally as at the society that created him, worshipped him, and then destroyed him: Melmotte exploited a society that wanted to be exploited, and his tragedy is also the society's self-exposure.

Question 3

Who is Hamilton Fisker, and what does he represent?

Accepted Answer

Hamilton Fisker is an American promoter who brings Melmotte the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway scheme — a fictional American railroad company that has no existence except as a financial vehicle for transferring money from investors to Fisker and Melmotte. He represents the American commercial spirit in Trollope's most satirical portrait — brash, confident, entirely untroubled by the distinction between appearance and reality, and ultimately successful (he returns to America with his money while Melmotte dies). Lady Carbury's son Felix Carbury, who is sent to America to marry Fisker's partner's daughter, is the English gentry's attempt to participate in American speculation, which ends predictably.

Question 4

Is The Way We Live Now still relevant today?

Accepted Answer

The novel's relevance to contemporary financial culture is often remarked on — the mechanics of Melmotte's fraud (the railway scheme that exists only on paper, the social credit built on apparent wealth, the media that promotes a story because it's attractive, the politicians who seek association with a rich man's reputation) describe patterns that have recurred from the South Sea Bubble to Enron to various recent crypto frauds. Trollope's insight that a society organized around the worship of apparent success creates the conditions for the fraudsters who exploit it is as applicable now as in 1875. The novel is regularly assigned in business school ethics courses alongside more recent case studies.

The Way We Live Now Reading Order

Complete The Way We Live Now Book List