TROLLOPE'S CHARACTERS USUALLY, with some exceptions, behave decorously. They have a sense of what their obligations are and attempt to live up them. They can of course be selfish and/or obtuse, but these seem like aberrant moments that the characters recover from, finding their moral feet again.
The Way We Live Now (1875) is a remarkable exception in which hardly anyone behaves decorously.
The cast of characters is largely drawn from the upper class, as is again usual for Trollope, but the bourgeoisie (in this novel, represented by the ridiculously wealthy financier Melmotte) is throwing its weight around via sheer purchasing power. Titled young gentlemen are lining up to marry Melmotte's daughter or get in on his railway shares or latch on to his coattails somehow.
Melmotte's empire turns out to less solid than supposed. Both it and Melmotte come to a sudden, dismal end, and Trollope whips up some relatively happy endings for everyone else, but all the characters look a little the shabbier for having tried to get on the gravy train--a bit like Twain's "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg."
The Way We Live Now is a good deal more disillusioned and satirical than the usual Trollope novel and was not much loved when it was first published, but it now ranks very high among his admirers.
I was particularly impressed by a couple of chapters in which Trollope does some free indirect discourse from Melmotte's point of view, inhabiting the beast (as it were) and making him not likable, exactly, but human when he makes his disastrous first appearance in Parliament (to which his money has gotten him elected) and even sympathetic when he realizes the jig is up.
Trollope had another great f.i.d. chapter with Mr. Harding in London in The Warden, but pulling it off with Melmotte would have been much more demanding, I think, and Trollope pulls it off with élan.
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