The Way We Live Now

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

A
NTHONY
T
ROLLOPE
was born in London in 1815 and died in 1882. His father was a barrister who went bankrupt and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who was a well-known writer. His education was disjointed and his childhood generally seems to have been an unhappy one.

Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime, publishing over forty novels and many short stories, at the same time following a notable career as a senior civil servant in the Post Office.
The Warden (1855)
, the first of his novels to achieve success, was succeeded by the sequence of ‘Barsetshire' novels
Barcbester Towers
(1857),
Doctor Thorne
(1858),
Framley Parsonage
(1861),
The Small House at Allington
(1864) and
The Last Chronicle of Barset
(1867). This series, regarded by some as Trollope's masterpiece, demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English novels – property – and features a gallery of recurring characters, among others, Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. Almost equally popular were the six brilliant Palliser novels comprising
Can You Forgive Her?
(1864),
Phineas Finn
(1869),
The Eustace Diamonds
(1873),
Phineas Redux
(1874),
The Prime Minister
(1876) and
The Duke's Children
(1880). The notable titles among his many other novels and books include
He Knew He Was Right
(1868–9),
The Way We Live Now
(1874–5),
An Autobiography
(1875–6) and
Dr Worth's School
(1881).

F
RANK
K
ERMODE
was born in 1919 and educated at Douglas High School and Liverpool University. From 1974 to 1982 he was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. He is an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and holds honorary doctorates from Chicago, Liverpool, Newcastle, Yale, Wesleyan, Sewanee and Amsterdam universities. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des
Sciences. He was knighted in 1991. Professor Kermode's publications include
Romantic Image, The Sense of an Ending, Puzzles and Epiphanies, Continuities, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, The Classic, The Genesis of Secrecy, Essays on Fiction 1971–82, Forms of Attention, History and Value, An Appetite for Poetry, The Uses of Error, Shakespeare's Language
(Penguin, 2000),
Pleasing Myself
(Penguin, 2001) and an autobiography,
Not Entitled.
He has also edited
He Knew He Was Right
by Anthony Trollope and
The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories
by Henry James for Penguin Classics.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY SIR FRANK KERMODE

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 1875
Published in Penguin Classics 1994

17

Introduction and notes copyright © Frank Kermode, 1994
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9781101493960

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

NOTES

In December 1872 Trollope, having spent eighteen busy months in the Australian Colonies and in New Zealand, returned to England, via San Francisco, Salt Lake City and New York. Travel and business could not stop him from writing, and his book about these remote places was ‘all but completed'. But during those hectic and industrious months of exile he had badly missed his hunting, and now made up for lost time. Close to sixty, he still had enough energy to undertake in addition to the fatigues of the chase an exhausting house move, from Waltham to 39 Montagu Square in London.

It took time to settle in and to shelve and recatalogue the library, and these activities did hold him up; it was not until I May 1873 that he began another book,
The Way We Live Now.
But he had promised
The Graphic
a Christmas story, and was obliged to put the bigger project aside while he wrote
Harry Heathcote of Gangoil
, a short novel about a midsummer Christmas in Australia. This occupied his writing time for four weeks in June, and was duly published in the Christmas number of
The Graphic
and in book form in October 1874.

The Way We Live Now
, restarted in July and finished on 22 December, was published in twenty monthly numbers between February 1874 and September 1875, and in book form in June 1875, that is, before the serial was complete. Written at something like his usual gruelling pace, it is the longest of Trollope's books. In his most prolific years it had been his habit to get up at five and write, at the rate of a thousand words an hour, for three hours before breakfast. Though his productivity had declined a little from its peak, it remained prodigious, and he was not at all ashamed of it. ‘All those I think who have lived as literary men – working daily as literary labourers –' he wrote in his
Autobiography
, ‘will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then, he should have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours – so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. 'He admitted that his rate of work would enable him to produce ‘three novels of three volumes each
in the year', which must be ‘quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man', as well as being more than publishers could easily cope with. But this disciplined use of energy, this practised morning fluency, was what allowed him, especially after his retirement from the Post Office, to pass the rest of his day in hunting or social amusements.

Although he was willing to reveal the substantial fees earned by his novels – the profits on
The Eustace Diamonds
, published in 1872, provided funds for the purchase of the house in Montagu Square – Trollope did not call himself a rich man. Richard Mullen, his biographer, remarks that whereas Trollope was indeed not rich by the standards of the Victorian aristocracy
¹
he was very well off by comparison with most of the population; it was calculated that only 60,000 of Britain's 4,600,000 families had the £800 a year necessary to qualify for membership of the ‘comfortable' class, and Trollope ‘enjoyed at least five times that amount'.
²

It is always difficult to give an idea of Victorian incomes in our money, but perhaps a modern equivalent of about £350,000 a year would not be far out. His writing and his fondness for money were inextricably related, and he was for a long time condemned for this association, as well as for the candour with which he confessed it. In fact he was a conscientious as well as an industrious artist, as
The Way We Live Now
surely testifies. He felt worthy of his hire; but it may be that having so much money constricted his vision of the whole society. It excludes a great deal that might be thought relevant, especially in a book entitled
The Way We Live Now.

His
Autobiography
contains a straightforward account of his politics, unchanged, he says, throughout his life. He is an ‘advanced Conservative Liberal'. Not being privy to ‘the operations of Almighty wisdom', we cannot understand ‘the causes of the terrible inequalities we see', though the privileged ‘cannot, I think, look upon the inane, unintellectual, and toil-bound life of those who cannot even feed themselves sufficiently by their sweat, without some feeling of injustice, a sting of pain'. Yet those who clamour for equality are ‘unbalanced'. Inequality is ‘the work of God'. On the other hand God, though committed like the Conservatives to the preservation of social divisions, is also at work reducing inequality,
and therefore can with even more reason be counted on the side of cautious, balanced Liberals, with their admittedly dim vision of a far-off millennium, their endorsement of ‘a tendency towards equality'.

This confession of political faith, dating from 1876, is worth bearing in mind when one contemplates the social panorama of
The Way We Live Now.
One reviewer was indignant about the
We
, accusing Trollope's title of ‘incivility', and pointing out that not
all
of ‘us' live like that; but even this complainant presumably belonged to the ‘comfortable' class, like the deluded investors robbed by Melmotte. And the ‘we' of the title refers to that class. It has no application to the vast, uncomfortable majority who suffered most from ‘inequalities' – to those who, at the time Trollope was writing, were living in the squalor of Seven Dials as Gustave Doré recorded it, or earning twelve shillings a week in a tailor's workshop or fifteen in a (good) week at the docks – incomes which, as
The Morning Chronicle
pointed out some years earlier, were hardly conducive to ‘prudence, economy, or moderation'.
³
Certainly they would sustain a form of life remote from that of a novelist who, though not rich by the highest standards, made about a hundred times more per annum.

So the way the mass of the population lived, whether in London or in the industrial north – though of concern a generation or so earlier to Dickens and Disraeli – is not considered under the rubric of how ‘we' live. The very topography of Trollope's novel illustrates his limited concerns, which are with the City of the financial institutions and the West End of the clubs and mansions (with Mrs Hurtle, as befits an outsider, banished to the fringe at Islington, and with squire and peasant buried in the country except when business of one sort or another irritatingly calls them to the capital). His subject is the intermingling of those who grow rich, or mean to, by means of capital investment, and those who have or have had the ‘old money' of the landed aristocracy, and seek to retain or augment it by the old method of advantageous marriage settlements or the newer one of City directorships. The decline of upper-class manners (and to some extent the accompanying relaxations of class and racial prejudice) are what concern him. The relations between these developments and the grosser social inequalities are not, at any rate on the surface, a theme of the novel.

Montagu Square which, though ‘north of the park' and meant for the ‘comfortable' rather than for the aristocracy, was nevertheless central,
made Trollope's social life much easier. During the writing of
The Way We Live Now
he was able to spend a good deal of time in his three clubs, and to serve on the committee of the Garrick, its new building only five minutes or so from Seven Dials. He also did his duty at the Royal Literary Fund, hunted, played whist, dined out and entertained. And of course he worked steadily and with speed. In April 1874, with
The Way We Live Now
behind him, he began, with a sigh of pleasure, another huge Palliser novel,
The Prime Minister.
After Barsetshire, the House of Commons was the milieu in which he worked with most ease and interest. There are notable parliamentary moments in
The Way We Live Now
but, despite a few hits at Disraeli, they are dominated by Melmotte's extraordinary performances in the House of Commons and exist for his sake.
The Prime Minister
returned Trollope to the fuller political context. It would occupy his mornings during six presumably contented months.

The Way We Live Now
did not, at the time of its publication, attract the commendations it has earned more recently. It is now widely regarded as Trollope's greatest, or at any rate, his most serious and ambitious novel. He himself says that in writing it he ‘was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age. Whether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on, is a question which probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think. That men have become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no doubt – but have they become less honest?' And he wonders whether, if they have failed this cardinal test, we can think that there has been progress.

He won't acquiesce in the denunciations of Carlyle and Ruskin, who pay no attention to the fact that comfort, health and education have all been improved; but he fears that ‘a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable'.

Animated by such reflections, he says, ‘I sat down in my new house to write
The Way We Live Now.
' He would show vice and dishonesty in the City but also in other circles, for example among young women scheming to be married, and idle young men, and authors seeking to ‘puff' their books. Looking back at a distance of a few years he claims to think, as some of his critics had thought, that his ‘accusations are exaggerated'. Melmotte, he argued, he had brought off well, and the Beargarden
Club, and Lady Carbury; but he found the story of Hetta and her lovers, Roger Carbury and Paul Montague, ‘vapid', and the two main lines of story not truly compatible. He denied that the book was a failure, but allowed it to be imperfect; its main fault, in his eyes, was satirical excess.

Trollope's account of the genesis of the novel, casually recalled, needs some amendment. It appears from surviving notes and plans that Lady Carbury was to have been ‘the chief character' – a woman ‘thoroughly unprincipled from want of knowledge of honesty', spoiling her ‘magnificently beautiful… utterly selfish' son, ‘bad to her daughter from want of sympathy', and ‘trying all schemes with editors to get puffed'. Other scenarios are adumbrated, not all of which turn up in the novel. The Roger–Hetta–Montague plot is sketched quite accurately, though Montague is credited with ‘glimmerings of Radical policy for the good of the people', which disgust Roger Carbury. These glimmerings evidently expired. Melmotte is a ‘great French [originally American] swindler', his wife a ‘fat Jewess'. Some characters are named who fail to appear.

One who does survive is Father John Barham – described as ‘Pervert. [i.e., convert to Romanism]. Waltham priest. Very poor.' He plays a lesser part in the completed novel than was perhaps originally intended, for Trollope, by including him along with a bishop among Roger Carbury's acquaintance, seems to have considered a subplot about Roger's religious doubts; what remains is chiefly a few scraps of conversation at Roger's dinner party, and Roger's kindness to the priest has nothing to do with any likelihood of his conversion. In the novel Carbury grows impatient at Barham's mannerless missionary persistence and wants to drop him. Indeed he might, in the end, have been dropped by the novelist also, without his absence being much noticed, though his scene with Melmotte is worth having. He was based on a convert-priest who had bothered Trollope at Waltham much as Barham bothers Carbury.
⁴

All commentators agree that what is now the central narrative, the story of Melmotte, assumed its position some time after the first planning. In a London that was the world's chief financial market, and for the past twenty years or so habituated to enormous share issues, there was no great novelty in the idea of a big-time swindler. Limited liability companies, banned since the South Sea Bubble, were legalized
in 1856. A commercial crisis of 1866 is attributed to the development of financial enterprises with such grand names as ‘The Imperial Mercantile Credit Company', which attracted speculative investment and no doubt created opportunities for the kind of scheme Melmotte specialized in.

Many of the investors would not hitherto have had any interest in the City,
⁵
and it was no doubt agreeable, even exciting, to discover that money could beget money without anybody being put to the trouble of producing real goods. Even better, one could sometimes escape the necessity of producing actual money, since paper promises were all that were needed. Melmotte would only be taking a step along a route already established when he even dispensed with papen ‘As for many years past we have exchanged paper instead of actual money for our commodities, so now it seemed that, under the new Melmotte régime, an exchange of words was to suffice.' And as the links, financial and social, between the Stock Exchange and the West End grew stronger, the new morality established in the market could directly influence a class – Trollope's
We
– that had hitherto been thought content with inherited, but now obsolescent, ideas about truth and honesty.

Merdle, in Dickens's
Little Dorrit
(1855–7), is an earlier fictional rendering of a grand speculator;
⁶
Trollope had read that novel. And various real-life models have been proposed for Melmotte. John Sutherland suggests a composite of John Sadleir, a banker MP who killed himself, ‘King' Hudson, a notorious railway speculator and also an MP; and the Frenchman Charles Lefevre, who launched an Interoceanic Railway Scheme and a Honduras Loan. Lefevre's career resembles Melmotte's in some details. Richard Mullen, however, favours Albert Gottheimer, later known as Grant; like Melmotte, he acquired a very grand house and even bought Leicester Square. Having raised capital of £24,000,000 in the City he lost £20,000,000 of it.
⁷
There was no shortage of swindlers.