”There are a thousand little silly softnesses which are pretty and endearing between acknowledged lovers, with which no woman would like to dispense, to which even men who are in love submit sometimes with delight; but which in other circumstances would be vulgar,— and to the woman distasteful. There are closenesses and sweet approaches, smiles and nods and pleasant winkings, whispers, innuendoes and hints, little mutual admirations and assurances that there are things known to those two happy ones of which the world beyond is altogether ignorant. Much of this comes of nature, but something of it sometimes comes by art.” Anthony TrollopeAnthony Trollope wrote this satirical novel as a reaction to the financial scandals of the 1870s in Great Britain. His character Augustus Melmotte, a man of uncertain religious affiliation, and even more uncertain nationality arrives in London. There is just the whiff of scandal nipping at his heels from the continent, but along with those rumors also come rumblings of his great wealth. The Lords and Baronets of London are in need of some cash and when Melmotte sets up a company selling shares in a railroad to be built across Mexico they feel this is an opportunity for them to reach solvency. After all Melmotte seems to understand these financial matters and the Lords are only interested in profit not in comprehending exactly how something as vulgar as commerce works. Melmotte is not a gentleman, but he moves in the world of gentlemen. He is snubbed by some for not being of the proper set, but as he insnares more and more of the men of society into his dealings he begins to demand entry into the social events that normally he would be excluded from. Lord Nidderdale, one of those caught in the Melmotte web, knows all is not what it seems, but he can’t quite believe that such a thing could really be happening in his world. ”That men should be thoroughly immoral, that they should gamble, get drunk, run into debt, and make love to other men's wives, was to him a matter of everyday life. Nothing of that kind shocked him at all. But he was not as yet quite old enough to believe in swindling.” Charles Ponzi, the man who leveraged greed. Greed will always create opportunity for schemers and since I don’t ever see greed disappearing from our collective nature, schemes will continue to work. By the way Ponzi (1920s) may have been the most famous of financial deceivers, but long before he was formulating his plan to bilk rich people Charles Dickens talked about this type of deception in his novel Martin Chuzzelwit (1844). Melmotte finds that London is full of desperate Lords who have mortgaged their estates to keep up appearances and that ready cash is becoming as precious to them as their titles. ”Rank squanders money; trade makes it;— and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour.”And that is exactly Melmotte’s plan for he has a daughter, Marie. He wants to see her married to Lord Nidderdale. If not Nidderdale than another. He is pretty sure he can buy one. Marie has other plans. She doesn’t want to marry a Lord, but a Baronet, specifically Sir Felix Carbury. Now a Baronet is a step down from a Lord, but not a horrible situation if he weren’t a ne’er do well. Felix likes to drink, gamble, own expensive horses, and chase women a description that could fit most young men of rank of any generation. The problem is he has no money and no prospects to really ever have any money. His only asset is the title his father gave him and his handsome good looks. Marie wants her father to buy the pretty one. Now to complicate things Ruby Ruggles, a buxom beauty from the country, has run away from home to be near Felix. He is rather happy about this as he is only interested in Marie for her money and it isn’t like he can take her out drinking and dancing. The problem is the lovely Ruby is betrothed to a young man named John Crumb. A man not opposed to putting a few knots on the head of a baronet who thinks he can take his girl. Ruby dreams of ascending to rank. Marie dreams of owning a handsome husband. John dreams of starting a family and Felix, well, he just needs his lifestyle financed. Felix’s uncle Roger Carbury has control of the family estate that provides a modest, but steady income. Roger is in love with Felix’s sister Hetta. She is in love with Roger’s best friend Paul Montague. One of the themes of this novel is that no one seems to be in agreement about who should be in love with who. To complicate this triangle of disaster another person is lurking in the background, a lovely American named Mrs. Winifred Hurtle. She was engaged to Paul Montague and just because he has supposedly found the love of his life that doesn’t mean she is prepared to just pack her bags and go back to San Francisco. Her notorious background created the means by which Montague feels justified in breaking off their engagement. Mrs Hurtle was regarded as a mystery. Some people did not quite believe that there ever had been a Mr Hurtle. Others said that there certainly had been a Mr Hurtle, and that to the best of their belief he still existed. The fact, however, best known of her was that she had shot a man through the head somewhere in Oregon.On top of all that she once fought a duel with her husband. My sympathy for Montague evaporates as he insists their engagement is broken: and yet, whenever he is in her presence he can’t help but lavish kisses and endearments upon her. She is intelligent, gorgeous, and head over heels in love with him. So what if she has a colorful past? Your life will never lack for excitement Mr. Montague. Roger of course is well aware of circumstances regarding Mrs. Hurtle. He is an honorable man, maybe the only one in the whole book, and wants to reveal this damning information to Hetta with the hope that her affections will turn to him. He can’t do it. He simply can’t. He has obviously never heard the phrase: All is fair in love and war. Roger is a true gentleman and though Hetta values his character she does not see him as a potential husband. Another richly drawn character is the enigmatic Lady Carbury, mother of Felix and Hetta. She is trying to guide her ineffectual son through the perils of securing a heiress. Felix is so caught up in the pleasure of the moment it takes a Herculean effort to keep him on task. She is intelligent and beautiful and relies on those assets to keep the family affairs afloat. She lends too much money to Felix who squanders it on inane entertainments. She is a writer of historical points of history,but fact checking is not her strong point. With a liberal sprinkling of feminine wile she always manages to extract a check and a promise to publish from a, at least temporarily besotted, magazine editor. ”A woman's weapon is her tongue.”Certainly can be true, but Lady Carbury leaves them with a chimera of possibilities. Georgiana Longestaffe has issues with her father. He decides due to financial constraints that he will not open the house in London. They will remain in the country for the social season. Georgiana had thoughts of marrying a Lord, but as each year has passed she has widened the pool of possibilities. She can not afford to let another season escape without securing a husband. There are always a fresh crop of girls to compete with for the eligible men. Despite her tantrums and her flouncing and her threats her father refuses to change his mind about the house in London. He has leased the place to Melmotte and with the thought of making his life more peaceful agrees to allow Georgiana to go stay with them. The problem is, yes she is in London, but the Melmottes are not invited the places she wants to go. Her “friends” come up with all kinds of reasons to not invite her to their events, namely that she is tainted by staying with this upstart family. Georgiana is incensed. "As for me I shall give over caring about gentlemen now. The first man that comes to me with four or five thousand a year, I'll take him, though he'd come out of Newgate or Bedlam. And I shall always say it has been papa's doing.”She agrees to an engagement with a merchant (gasp), a man old enough to be her father (gasp), and he is Jewish (her mother just fainted). She has her father’s attention now. Graham Greene worked for the foreign office during World War Two. He was stationed for a while in Freetown, Sierra Leone a place as far removed from England as an Englishman can find himself. I can’t find the reference, but I remembered reading that Greene relied on the books of Trollope heavily to keep him sane amongst so much squalor. Well I soon formed my own addiction to Trollope needing a dollop every day. It is his longest novel, but did not feel that way at all. The cast of characters is large, but they are all so well drawn that even though I read it over a longer period than I normally take to read a book I never lost track of the threads of the plot and the subplots. I found myself despising Felix, rooting for Roger, shivering over the dastardly deeds of Melmotte, and wishing I could take Mrs. Hurtle out on the town just once. Trollope brilliantly brings these people to life, so much so, that even those characters I really didn’t like I developed an understanding of them, and dare I say a feeling of sympathy. As their worlds begin to crumble it seems that no one will be allowed to live happily ever after, but with a bit of the magic of happenstance some people discover new avenues of happiness. Trollope titled this novel The Way We Live Now referring to the 1870s, but he could have been referring to the 1890s, the 1990s, or the 2010s. So read about The Way We Live Now and see if you know Ruby Ruggles, Felix Carbury, Paul Montague, Hetta Carbury, Winifred Hurtle, Roger Carbury, Georgiana Longestaffe or Augustus Melmotte. I bet you do. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
I think it’s fairly well known by Trollope readers what he said about this book: he came back to England after a long trip (which included San Francisco) to discover how sordidly his fellow countrymen delved into shady financial shenanigans. Morality, he felt, went right out the window if the fortunes were high enough.And so he set out to write a satire. Trollope is one of those authors whose novels make absorbing reading, but who never quite attain greatness. His contemporaries scorned him, especially after his autobiography came out, in which he claimed that the ticket to success was getting your daily wordcount done. Well, obviously he was no artiste!In the 20th century some critics have maintained that this is his greatest work, even his masterpiece—a word that gets thrown around a lot, like the word ‘classic.’ I’m not willing to define what is, or is not, a masterpiece, but I do think that this book serves as an excellent example of why I think Trollope at his best is eminently readable, but does not transcend that mysterious boundary into greatness.I can look past the unexamined colonial superiority--that was the paradigm of the time. Ditto his profound ignorance of Chinese history and culture, and of dialects. Satire means a certain amount of distortion, behind which ignorance can hide behind. Spoilers are going to be legion.The book opens with Lady Carbury, a female writer, having penned a non-fiction book called Criminal Queens, setting out to beg, plead, and flatter the three primary critics in London literary circles into praising her book in order to boost sales. Each letter is tailored to its recipient, after which we get a disquisition about the editors in such a way that I suspect not only were specific periodicals or newspapers of Trollope’s time being lampooned, but maybe even specific editors.There is a lot in this book about the hypocrisies and phonies and egos of the literary world. And the political world. And the financial world. And above all, the world of the beau monde. The book apparently was savaged by early reviewers. When I got to passages in which a couple of young ladies negotiate favors for introduction into high society circles couched in the crass language of business barter, I thought, Trollope is channeling Thackeray.But Thackeray’s sometimes vulgar satire fit an earlier, less “refined” age. I suspect that the lampooning of high society on just about every level (including its comfortably unexamined anti-Semitism) did not sit well at all with the 1870s audiences who very much liked to read about doings among the noble ranks. This is no silver fork novel, though it partly engages the London season, exclusive clubs, Parliament, and duchesses. Trollope does a splendid job here, especially with details like the grandson of an ancient marquis who cheats at cards, and whose peers have no idea what to do about it. They don't want to rock their comfortable boat, though all aware aware it is leaking like a sieve. (As one of them says toward the end of the book, when they try to rejuvenate their club, that they must simply find a fellow and ask him how much he's going to steal from them above and beyond his salary, so everyone knows what to expect.)So why isn’t it great? I think that halfway through Trollope gradually began to alter what kind of book it was. The satire becomes more fitful, the sharp point more diffuse. Lady Carbury, our bad writer (who may or may not have initially been based on Trollope’s remarkable mother Frances Trollope, a famous writer who earned her living by the pen) gradually becomes less a satiric and more a pitiful figure as her beautiful-but-rotten son Sir Felix descends inexorably into infamy, until at last she submits to the will of one of her admirers, and is rewarded with marriage. Likewise the second half furnishes more palatable endings for the deserving secondary characters than one might find in a satire; Vanity Fair, for example, never errs on the side of mercy. I actually have no problem with characters getting happy endings, or deserving endings. My problem is that Trollope waffles, always in the direction of convention. For example, he takes a good whack at anti-Semitism, and yet his Jewish characters are still singled out with opprobious adjectives such “greasy.” This word appears several times, and is especially egregious given that Trollope was writing at the height of the antimacassar period: everybody was greasy, dukes and watermen alike, from their well-oiled mustaches to their shiny hair leaning against those lace doilies protecting the backs of chairs.But far more important than that, though Trollope demonstrates his skill at creating interesting, even complex characters, he is unable to resist forcing them firmly into well-grooved channels in order to prove his lifelong point, that heroines—good women—deserve happy endings only when they passively fall in love (once and only once) after the gentleman has hinted that he is in love with her.At the beginning of what I believe was meant to be read as a comic side-story, in country girl Ruby Ruggles’ struggle for independence (which nearly ruins her) there occurs what I think sums up Trollope’s attitude toward women when he says about her: Poor Ruby Ruggles, who was left to be so much mistress of herself at the time of her life in which she most required the kindness of a controlling hand! A controlling hand! Ruby at this time is 23, not 13.It’s not just that Trollope is a proponent of the Victorian “angel in the home” attitude toward women. Which he is. Over and over in his books Trollope rides his particular hobby horse, affirming that women who have been in love more than once, unless they are genuine widows, are tainted—soiled goods—unworthy of a good man’s love. (This is not true, needless to say, of men.) Mrs. Hurtle, the American adventuress, we are to understand is unmarriagable by the insufferable hero Paul Montague because she either murdered or divorced her abusive drunk of a husband. Oh, and she traveled with Paul without benefit of chaperone. Taint! Taint!It’s perfectly okay for Paul to promise to marry her, then dump her for nineteen year old (and oh so pure) Hetta Carbury. In fact, the whole Paul/Hetta/Roger/Mrs. Hurtle quadrangle is one of the longest and most irritatingly boring threads in the entire book full of otherwise delightful characters. Hetta is frustratingly passive until near the end; her otherwise interesting, though stolid, cousin Roger becomes tiresome in his constantly reiterated statement that he will never fall in love with any other woman if Hetta won’t marry him (he’s near forty, she’s nineteen), and Paul and Mrs. Hurtle argue exhaustively in circles as she practices her feminine wiles to bring him back to her side, until the very end. I began to wonder as yet another long, long argument between these two commenced if Trollope in some wise was arguing with himself, testing out various theories before firmly wrenching the characters' emotional truths right back to his inescapable conviction. Finally, after she does a series of good turns to a host of characters, Mrs. Hurtle gives up and returns to America. Where, I fervently hope, she found someone more interesting than Paul. It wouldn’t be hard.Much more interesting are the other characters, like the comically useless clubmen (I wonder if the Beargarden was P.G. Wodehouse’s model for the Drones Club), but especially the mysterious financier Augustus Melmotte, whose financial schemes are at the center of the book. Of shady background, he is a perfect example of the Bernie Madoff/Koch Brothers amoral financial pirate. In those days, it was railroad schemes and gilt-edged stocks: how the supposed leaders of politics and society found reasons, however spurious, to kowtow to those with money (while busily slandering them behind their backs) is a scene that should read depressingly familiar to today’s citizen. In the middle of Trollope's skillful demonstration of how great wealth distorts everything in its vicinity, Melmotte’s daughter Marie nearly walks away with the book. In someone else’s hands—someone not quite so obsessed with female “purity”—this might have been a terrific book, with Marie Melmotte as its center, as she goes from gutter rat to being courted by duke’s sons to embarking for a life on the wild west coast, having gained at bitter cost an impressive sense of how big business is conducted. But alas, Trollope shoves her to one side and keeps the focus firmly on conventional Hetta and her two honorable swains, their emotional lives carefully tailored to fit Trollope's pet theory. Bringing to a close a book I thought readable and wonderful in places, but . . . . finally not one of the enduring greats.
What do You think about The Way We Live Now (1995)?
I have to admit that I got a tiny little bit impatient with this. It is admittedly a comprehensive portrayal of an age, the 1870s when money, and indeed speculative money, stock market gambles and credit based on nothing more concrete than a reputation for being rich began to take over as the ticket to high society, instead of the privilege that went with the aristocratic title. The Lords and Baronets and other gentlemen are all impecunious, none can any longer afford to continue to live in the way to which they have become accustomed, none of them have a clue about business and the way they try to win the prize of the rich heiress is purely cynical and entirely reprehensible, only matched by the romanticism of the heiress's father, who imagines all kinds of benefits for himself once he is the father-in-law of a Lord. But I felt a lot of the time that Trollope was filling pages: he keeps five troubled love affairs on the go, but each time he has to leave one for a while and then go back to it, we get a repeat of what has gone before, as if we might have forgotten, and in the end it is nigh on 1000 pages on how a few people either come together and marry, or don't. And I maybe wasn't in the right mood to plough through quite so many pages for so little reward. There was a kind of inevitability to much of it, where I just began to think, oh get ON with it.
—·Karen·
Who does not know that sudden thoughtfulness at waking, that first matutinal retrospection, and pro-spection, into things as they have been and are to be; and the lowness of the heart, the blankness of hope which follows the first remembrance of some folly lately done, some word ill-spoken, some money misspent - or perhaps a cigar too much, or a glass of brandy and soda-water which he should have left untasted? And when things have gone well, how the waker comforts himself among the bedclothes as he claims for himself to be whole all over, teres atque rotundus - so to have managed his little affairs that he has to fear no harm, and to blush inwardly at no error!(p 274)It's late and the wine has almost worn off, so I'm sleepy. But I was hellbent on finishing this book tonight. Thankfully for all, I don't have to wake up in a few hours to go to work, because no one in my office would care that I am crabby(ier) than usual because I stayed up too late finishing Trollope.I feel like I've been reading this book forever. I was really into it for the first half of the book or so, and then took a break for themed reads in October. Returning to it in November was exceptionally difficult, and it's hard for me to tell if my mood towards the book changed or if there was a shift in the story's tone. I think, actually, there's a little bit of both.There's been a lot of chatter about how Trollope was a better author than Dickens, but for some reason Trollope never got the same sort of lovin' that Dickens received. I actually agree with that - and that's after reading quite a few Dickens and this was my only Trollope so far. I feel like with Dickens you know what you're going to get; and since this was my first Trollope, it's arguable that I enjoyed it more in some ways because I didn't know what to expect.That being said, as delicious as this book was in parts (where Dickens often can be really boring in comparison), I'd say even more delicious than Trollope was Benito Pérez Galdós - at least in Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women.The aspects of this book I enjoyed more involved Trollope's honesty. I've read a lot of Victorian novels, and I would say direct references to domestic violence, for example, are rather rare. There might be indirect references, maybe a metaphor for something, but in this book there is very open discussion, as flippant at times as it might be. I found this refreshing, actually.While some of the characters of fantastically portrayed, I feel others were there merely as plot points, which made them feel bland in comparison. I found this disappointing at times; for such a long book one would expect more character development all around, though in reality I feel we only got a good sense of a select few.This is a heavy book and covers a lot of ground with a lot of characters. I agree with many readers in that the wrap-ups at the end left a bit to be desired, but also that I want for them what I would expect from a 21st-century perspective which would have been crazy idealistic (and unrealistic) for the 19th-century.Whatever. I need more wine.
—El
This book is my first read of a Trollope novel, and it captured me on many different levels, which led to Trollope catapulting to the top of my Victorian author list.Like Hardy, I see Trollope as a cool Victorian writer. Cool because he lets his woman kick ass, and he is not afraid to show the ugly underside of a Victorian culture that on the surface appears to be governed by propriety and the use of good manners. People are greedy in Trollope's world. They seek money, lots of money, without having to really to do much to earn it or to care whether they produce anything that contributes to the betterment of society. With a novel as long as this one, the reader finds that there are multiple storylines among an interesting cast of characters. Trollope really covers it all from villains to degenerate gamblers to women who seek marriage for money, and women who seek marriage for love. The feelings of Trollope's characters are intense and his characters follow their feelings, unlike in many other Victorian novels, where the characters act according to what society expects or asks them to do.Overall, I see much Trollope in my future. I have been stockpiling his books from library sales over the years so that I'm hopeful that I have been able to cobble together a good bit of his works, but the man was incredibly prolific as a writer, which means that I am more likely to find that I have accumulated just a small piece.I highly recommend this book.
—Sera
