The Way We Live Now

✍ Scribed by Anthony Trollope

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Year: 1875
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 534 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1101493968

✦ Synopsis

{ Oct 2020 - epub revisions. Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, content separation, and epub format error checking. }
Paperback, 816 pages
Published 1875
Penguin Classics (1994)
Guardian/Mccrum 100 Best English Novels
TheGreatestBooks.org (Top 500 of All Time)
Introduction by: Frank Kermode (1994)
A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places ... '
"Trollope did not write for posterity," observed Henry James. "He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket."

The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of London in the 1870s and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. "I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age," Trollope said. His story concerns Augustus Melmotte, a French swindler and scoundrel, and his daughter, to whom Felix Carbury, adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury, is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope knew well the difficulties of dealing with editors, publishers, reviewers, and the public; his portrait of Lady Carbury, impetuous, unprincipled, and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion, is one of his finest satirical achievements.

His picture of late nineteenth century England is of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy, where the traditional virtues of Tory squirearchy, represented by Roger Carbury, prove to be no match for the financial genius of Augustus Melmotte. In The Way We Live Now Trollope combines his talents as a portraitist and his skills as a storyteller to give us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago.
The Way We Live Now, unpopular on its first appearance in 1874-5, is now widely recognized as Trollope's masterpiece. An unorthodox satire with a happy ending, it explores decadence and change in what Frank Kermode calls 'a world increasingly more congenial to the speculator than to the gentleman'.