"The Way We Live Now," Anthony Trollope

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

“The Way We Live Now,” Anthony Trollope

October 10, 2020

 

“Rank squanders money; trade makes it;
and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour.”
The Way We live Now, 1875

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

 

As a satirist (mild would be the operative adjective), Trollope was fascinated with the trappings of wealth and the advantages and disadvantagess of rank and privilege, the Church of England and the Houses of Parliament. But he recognized the limits of satire as it applies to truth. In his posthumously published autobiography, he wrote: “The spirit which produces the satire is honest enough, but the very desire which moves the satirist to do his work energetically makes him dishonest.” In this novel, through sacrifice and redemption of his several characters, he explores differences between story and substance, fable and truth.

 

While there is no single hero or heroine in this novel, Augustus Melmotte, a financier of unknown origin and of dubious (but assumed substantial) means, dominates much of the story: “The more arrogant he became, the more vulgar he was.” Besides Melmotte, the other major characters are the Carbury’s. Early on, Trollope called this his ‘Carbury novel.’ The family consists of a mother, her two children and a cousin. The mother, Lady Matilda Carbury: “If there was anything that she could not forgive in life it was romance.” Her son, Sir Felix, whose beauty and profligacy are stressed: “He never read. Thinking was altogether beyond him. And he had never done a day’s work in his life…He could play cards; and could amuse himself with women – the lower the culture of the women, the better the amusement.” The daughter, Henrietta (Hetta), who “had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter.” While Lady Carbury and her children live in London. another branch – the senior branch – is represented by cousin Roger Carbury, of Carbury Hall, in Suffolk: “But then, dear Roger was old-fashioned, and knew nothing of people as they are now. He lived in a world, which though slow, had been good in its way, but which, whether bad or good, had now passed away.” Roger, in his 40s, is deeply in love with his comely cousin Henrietta, a passion not reciprocated.

 

Melmotte, had arrived in London from the continent, amidst rumors of fraud and scandal, with his wife and daughter Marie, the latter plays an important role. Lady Carbury, who had been married at eighteen to Sir Patrick, a man twenty-six years her senior and who treated her poorly, was widowed when we meet her. She encourages her foolish and dissipated son to marry Marie for the wealth she is said to possess.

 

Characters and places, too numerous to mention, are introduced. But one of the beauties of reading Trollope are the bits of wisdom that percolate through his work: The Bishop of Elmham dining with Roger Carbury: “I think that men on the whole do live better lives than they did a hundred years ago. There is a wider spirit of justice abroad., more of mercy from one to another, a more lively charity, and if less of religious enthusiasm, less also of superstition.” On election day – when he is a candidate for Parliament and his crime has been uncovered – Melmotte visits the committee room: “It is so hard not to tumble into Scylla when you are avoiding Charybdis.” Sir Felix feeling sorry for himself: “Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done him.” And then there is a lesson to us all, including our federal, state and local governments: “…the necessity of so living that the income might always be more than sufficient for the wants of the household.” 

 

In the voice of Lady Carbury as she speaks to her publisher Mr. Alf, Trollope writes of concerns of all writers: “When the mind is attuned to it, one is tempted to think that it is all so good. One cries at one’s own pathos, laughs at one’s own humour, and is lost in one’s own sagacity and knowledge…But then comes the reversed picture, the other side of the coin. On a sudden everything becomes flat, tedious and unnatural…I was sure that there was my monument…today I feel it to be only too heavy for a gravestone.” Sitting alone, after receiving a modest check from her publisher, she quotes Byron:

 

“Oh Amos Cottle, for a moment think

What meagre profits spread from pen and ink.”

 

Trollope covers more territory than in most of his novels. We meet the rustic farmer John Crumb and Ruby Ruggles, who had been enticed by Sir Felix, but who finally consents to become Crumb’s wife. We get to know two Americans: Winfred Hurtle, who once had a relationship with Paul Montague (who later marries Henrietta Carbury), and Hamilton Fisker, the American partner of Melmotte in the South Central and Pacific Railway. We spend long evenings at the Beargarden Club with Sir Felix, Lord Nidderdale, Adolphus (Dolly) Longestaffe Lord Grasslough, Miles Grendell and others. We are witness to anti-Semitism in the refusal of Georgiana Longstaffe’s parents to allow her to marry the wealthy and worthy Mr. Brehgert. We attend a ball in Grosvenor Square and a dinner with the Emperor of China, hosted by Mr. Melmotte, and we watch the lives of lovers fall apart and then come together. 

 

The book is long (754 pages in the copy I read), but its length extends its pleasures – the deceptions and lies, the anger the reader has for Sir Felix, the concern for his mother who is unable to face the truth of her son; the honor of Roger Carbury and the dishonor of Mr. Melmotte; the determination of Marie Melmotte and Winifred Hurtle; and the endearing love of Henrietta for Paul Montague. And so much more. The story stays with you long after the book has been shelved.