The Way We Live Now

Compiled from notes taken by Anne Pugh at a seminar led by Howard Gregg held in York

First published in Trollopiana, Issue 93

The rationale behind The Way We Live Now is well known. After a year in Australia in 1872 Trollope was appalled by the sophisticated dishonesty he found on his return to London. His disgust was heightened by the fact that he had moved house from the countryside (a Trollopian haven of moral certainties!) into the West End, where he was exposed to a degenerate climate. He was also approaching his 60th birthday (considered in the 19th century to be the age a man’s powers faded); his novels were sliding from popularity; he had to give up his great pleasure of hunting, and Dickens had recently died at the age of 58.

In his autobiography, Trollope wrote of his great creation:

… a class of dishonesty, dishonestly magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be some reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its comers, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonestly is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel.

Nor was he alone in his musings. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a century of world economic dominance for Britain, creating what Samuel Smiles termed “a harvest of wealth and prosperity. However, the immense social and economic changes worried and enraged writers and philosophers such as Carlyle, Ruskin and William Morris. Trollope, in pinpointing and satirizing what he saw as contemporary social corruption, followed a well-trodden path. All the vices, ambition and commercialism perceived in Victorian London are embodied in and drive his characters, either to absolute destruction in the case of Melmotte, or, in Lady Carbury’s case, to redemption, in spite of herself. And if readers were ever in doubt as to the main thrust, the title is explicit – “the way we live now” quietly seethes with disapproval.

Trollope referred to this as “the Carbury novel”, and the Young Fogey, Roger Carbury, is the rightful hero, unashamedly ‘old fashioned’, exemplifying how things ought to be. His friends and relations revere him, but such qualities separate him emotionally from his contemporaries, particularly his would-be lover Hetta Carbury, who is much younger in outlook as well as years. The fact that he is only 38 does not ring entirely true.

While Roger sits at the centre of Trollope’s web, Augustus Melmotte dominates the action. He bursts into the scene fully formed as the Great Financier, although on precisely what this reputation is based few know and even fewer care. His origins are mysterious. He says he is English. He is reputed to have untold wealth, and lives in great magnificence. Largely because of this, most people, including leaders of the Conservative party, choose to ignore his slightly odd accent and suspicious ignorance of English manners. Also overlooked are his arrogance, coarseness and bullying. Melmotte selects as his aids men over whom he has a financial hold, like the unfortunate Lord Alfred Grendall, and crudely abuses and torments them in the same way that he abuses and torments his so-called wife and daughter.

London was ripe for exploitation by a man of Melmotte’s fraudulent proclivities, and Trollope, when he created him, probably had several real-life financial predators in mind. The City was awash with money, and unlimited credit was available for investment in schemes home and abroad. All that was needed for potential investors to flock to a scheme was obvious personal wealth (manifested by conspicuous consumption) and a reputation for financial ability. It was the obvious place for Melmotte to be after he had exhausted the possibilities of Europe and New York. Sotto voce rumours of dubious practices in foreign places are quietly ignored in the face of exciting money-making opportunities.

Taking the South Central Pacific & Mexican Railway as the fraud of choice for Melmotte was clever. In England, the railway boom had first made itself felt in the 1830s, while the real ‘railway mania’ period happened between 1845-7. By the early 1870s, railways were commonplace, but widely recognized as a fail-safe investment opportunity abroad. Fisker astutely realizes he and Melmotte are soul-mates, and he has no difficulty in alerting Melmotte to the possibilities of selling shares in an exotic railway, outside the Colonies and sufficiently far away to minimize the risk of prying potential investors. One of the more obvious candidates for Trollope to use as a Melmotte role-model was indeed involved in railway speculation. George Hudson, the so-called ‘Railway King’, had the dizziest of all Victorian business careers, which led him first to Westminster and then, after his frauds were unmasked, to gaol. While Melmotte’s suicide avoided the latter, the career path is not dissimilar. Trollope may have remembered the statue erected in Hudson’s honour in York when he spoke of eventual amnesia by Melmotte’s creditors leading to talk of erecting a statue to his memory!

Melmotte did indeed live in a gorgeous palace, give Apician dinners and get into Parliament, and became accepted by Society. Scruples are thrust aside in the efforts to sit at his table or entertain him. Even the unremittingly County Longstaffes grit their teeth and invite the Melmottes to their Suffolk home. However, the characters who represent virtue – Paul Montague (although his virtue is a little suspect) Breghert (eventually) and Roger Carbury – are not taken in by Melmotte’s wealth and magnificence. Montague is reluctantly sucked into the railway project via Fisker, but is convinced from the outset that he is enmeshed with a gang of swindlers. Carbury sums him up as:

a miserable imposition, a hollow, vulgar fraud from beginning to end – too insignificant for you and me to talk about, were it not that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age.

Meanwhile Lord Alfred, who endures the indignities of his servitude for the sake of his impoverished family, sums Melmotte up with great succinctness:

Beast! Brute! Pig.

If Melmotte is the epitome of money-grubbing City vice, then the denizens of the Beargarden represent the rotten heart of West End society, about which Trollope is equally scathing. Presided over by a sleekly-dishonest German, it is a cherished haunt for louche, more-or-less aristocratic wastrels, who spend long hours getting drunk and gambling. Morality is topsy-turvy. The ghastly uber-cad Sir Felix Carbury, who shamelessly wastes his widowed mother’s money, is outraged to discover that the sleazy Miles Grendall cheats at cards, and is too cowardly to confront him. They are aware that Herr Vossner, who smooths Beargarden life, is brazenly fleecing them. After Vossner vanishes, they seriously contemplate searching for a suitable successor amenable not only to a wage but also a mutually agreeable level of theft!

The Beargarden provides an amusing arena for discussion of the various plots. Because so many of its members are sucked into Melmotte’s orbit, it effectively becomes an annexe of the railway board. The assorted members are fairly useless. Grasslough is gratuitously offensive and tolerated as someone to win money from. Dolly Longstaffe is feeble and dilatory, except when opposing his father and, most importantly, when he realizes he has been cheated out of money from his property sale. He is at least spurred to engage the sharp lawyer Squercum to enable him to stay on course in the future. Nidderdale is compliant in accepting his father’s desire for him to marry Marie (and the Melmotte millions) but Trollope seems ambivalent about him. On one hand he presents him as heartless, but on the other as a pleasant if ineffectual personality with genuine fondness for Marie. He offers surprising support in the aftermath of her father’s suicide, although there is a faint suggestion that had he followed his inclinations and married her anyway after the collapse, he would have been both truer to himself and acquired her squirreled-away fortune.

The final and perhaps most important member of the Beargarden set is Sir Felix Carbury. One wonders who Trollope modelled him on! Is he overdrawn? Roger Carbury feels the world would be greatly improved were Felix removed from it. He is a liar and a cheat, he gropes girls in alleyways, steals from his mother, gets drunk, is a physical as well as moral coward and utterly lacks anything approaching a conscience. His mother eventually gains her ascendancy of him (with the help of Mr. Broune) while his callous attitude to Marie causes even his erstwhile Beargarden friends to walk away in disgust.

What of the women and their love affairs? The central one is the triangular relationship between Paul Montague, Hetta Carbury and Mrs. Hurtle. Trollope describes the love story of Paul and Hetta as “weak and vapid.” Hetta seems curiously sexless. She seems to have fallen for Paul Montague almost because he was there and, perhaps more importantly, because he wasn’t the sainted Roger. There is little passion about her feelings for him, and her behaviour when Felix enlightens her to the existence of Mrs. Hurtle almost suggests that she was in love with the idea of being in love, but not sufficiently mature to cope with the fact that he had had a previous relationship. And since she is perfectly well aware of her brother’s character, why did she not query whether he was actually telling the truth? Or why seek her mother’s advice when she knows her dearest wish is to destroy such relationship and marry her off to Cousin Roger.

Winifred Hurtle, on the other hand, has real, if somewhat un-Victorian passion (but she is American)! Mrs. Hurtle’s feelings are intense and bold with no maidenly reserve about making her former lover aware of exactly how she feels. She senses his emotional weakness and tries to capitalize on it, although he turns out to be firmer than she has given him credit for. Ultimately she realizes, reluctantly, that they would be mismatched and retreats relatively gracefully. It is easy to see how Montague could have fallen for so vibrant and passionate a woman. The mystery is rather how Winifred Hurtle could possibly have fallen so intensely in love with him.

The efforts of the lumbering John Crumb to secure his beloved are a necessary part of the plot, although Trollope rather labours it. The feisty Ruby is Roger’s tenant (or at least her grandfather is) and Felix Carbury her would-be lover. Her aunt’s lodging-house conveniently shelters Mrs. Hurtle, and the virtuous Ruby, who has made it clear all along that it is marriage or nothing as far as she is concerned (despite the assumption in Suffolk that going to London automatically means loss of virtue) is the catalyst for the entire chain of events ending in the eclipse of Felix. One cannot help but feel sorry for her; she loves dancing and gaiety, but ends up shackled to the bovine miller, drearily accepting that in return for his undying devotion she will do her best to be a good wife.

Marie Melmotte seems initially to be the one truly tragic figure. Alternatively tyrannized by her father or bought off with trinkets, her fate at the beginning is to be sold off to Lord Nidderdale so that her father can consolidate his social pretensions by alliance with a prestigious aristocratic family. Unhappily, before this can be achieved, she sees Felix Carbury, and decides that perhaps she might dispose of her own person as she, rather than her father, sees fit. Rather like Hetta she is perhaps more in love with the idea of being in love, since she sees past Felix’s physical attractions to the inner shallowness fairly early in the relationship, but brushes the knowledge aside. Marie rapidly emerges as a fierce and resourceful personality of considerable strength, which is probably why the ineffectual Nidderdale is so drawn to her. She is, at the end, her father’s daughter, as the admiring Fisker recognizes, and not tragic at all. She sees with total clarity that romantic love is a snare and a delusion; she likes Fisker, who perhaps resembles a pleasanter version of her father, and their eventual marriage can be seen as a mutually satisfactory business partnership.

Georgiana Longstaffe’s dalliance with the Jewish banker Mr. Breghert is amusing (especially after he dumps her!) and provides a vehicle for poking fun at spinsters and the unpleasant old-fashioned anti-Semitism typified by Mr. Longstaffe. Trollope initially depicts the elderly, rich, greasy Jew stereotype (Georgiana must be desperate indeed to contemplate such a marriage) but then negates this by revealing the banker to be a person of sensitivity and honour, in the Victorian traditions of ‘manliness’. He similarly teases us with Father Barham, Roger Carbury’s tame priest. He begins by suggesting that he will be treated in the same sympathetic manner as Father John in The Macdermots of Ballycloran, but Father Barham is a convert, and a gentleman at that, and Trollope has scant sympathy for that sort of Catholicism.

Finally, there is Lady Carbury, with her literary pretensions and over-indulgence of Felix. Trollope clearly had issues with authors who shamelessly manipulated the press to inflate their sales. We are not invited to sympathize with her or her flirting, vanity and falseness of character. However, there is something admirable in her misplaced love for her vicious son which is possibly what draws Mr. Broune towards her, even if she probably made Felix into the character he became. This mature, slow-burning love affair is perhaps the most satisfying of all the novel’s love stories. Paul and Hetta may or may not be happy in their future life. The lively Ruby seems set for a dispiriting future tied to her doting rustic. Marie’s marriage is based on nothing stronger than liking and business compatibility. Winifred Hurtle has returned to America, no doubt to further adventures, probably not to emotional happiness. One somehow knows that Mr. Broune and Lady Carbury will live very happily ever after.

If Trollope had set out to prove that he was still capable of writing despite turning 60, he succeeded triumphantly. The Way We Live Now is, I believe, his masterpiece. He subsequently wrote a further 15 novels, and if he could no longer hunt, he still rode, and enjoyed the good things in life such as the 48 dozen bottles of fine French wines which he commended on his deathbed to his son Henry!