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Summary
Summary
At first savagely reviewed, The Way We Live Now (1875) has since emerged as Trollope's masterpiece and the most admired of his works. When Trollope returned to England from the colonies in 1872 he was horrified by the immorality and dishonesty he found. In a fever of indignation he sat down to write The Way We Live Now, his longest novel. Nothing escaped the satirist's whip: politics, finance, the aristocracy, the literary world, gambling, sex, and much else. In this world of bribes and vendettas, swindling and suicide, in which heiresses are won like gambling stakes, Trollope's characters embody all the vices: Lady Carbury, a 43-year-old coquette, 'false from head to foot'; her son Felix, with the 'instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog'; and Melmotte, the colossal figure who dominates the book, a 'horrid, big, rich scoundrel ... a bloated swindler ... a vile city ruffian'.
Author Notes
Anthony Trollope was born in London, England on April 24, 1815. In 1834, he became a junior clerk in the General Post Office, London. In 1841, he became a deputy postal surveyor in Banagher, Ireland. He was sent on many postal missions ending up as a surveyor general in the post office outside of London.
His first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, was published in 1847. His other works included Castle Richmond, The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lady Anna, The Two Heroines of Plumplington, and The Noble Jilt. He died after suffering from a paralytic stroke on December 6, 1882.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
Whatever negative effect John Major's choice of underwear may have had on the sale of blue Y-fronts, it is nothing compared with the damage that his professed literary preference has done to Trollope's reputation. No one rates Trollope any more but they should - and will - when they've heard Timothy West's wonderfully sharp, funny reading of his cleverest, darkest satire of Victorian society and politics of the 19th century. Drop in at one of Lady Carbury's Tuesday soirees and meet a dazzling collection of duchesses, cads, parvenus, literary poseurs, fortune hunters and a few thoroughly decent chaps who will tell you more about the Victorian chattering classes than a shelf full of reference books. Trollope makes me laugh. So does poor penniless Lord Alfred Grendall, who must rely on shady foreign entrepreneur Augustus Melmotte to provide for his six children and pay his debts. "Lord Alfred, in spite of his habitual idleness . . . had still left about him a dash of vigour, and sometimes thought that he would kick Melmotte and have done with it. But there were his poor boys, and those bills in Melmotte's safe . . . 'Come and have a glass of champagne Alfred,' Melmotte said . . . Lord Alfred liked champagne and followed his host but as he went he almost made up his mind that on some future date he would kick the man." Forget Major and remember Trollope. It's horribly expensive but worth every penny. Caption: article-arnold01.3 Whatever negative effect John Major's choice of underwear may have had on the sale of blue Y-fronts, it is nothing compared with the damage that his professed literary preference has done to Trollope's reputation. No one rates Trollope any more but they should - and will - when they've heard Timothy West's wonderfully sharp, funny reading of his cleverest, darkest satire of Victorian society and politics of the 19th century. - Sue Arnold.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Karen Odden's Introduction to The Way We Live Now When I tell my friends that Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) is one of my favorite Victorian authors, most of them--even my book club friends--look at me with an expression of mild bewilderment. "Who? I've never heard of him. Did he write novels?" Yes, and he wrote political articles, literary criticism, articles on fox hunting, a book on Julius Caesar, travel books, and social articles, as well as serving as an editor for the Fortnightly Review . "And his name is pronounced Trollope, as in trollop ?" Well, yes; but the silent "e" marks a critical difference between a corpulent, bearded, hard-working author and what the OED defines as "an untidy or slovenly woman; . . . a morally loose woman." Trollope wrote more than sixty books, including forty-seven novels, many of which sold more than 100,000 copies, which constituted a best-seller in the Victorian age. In his day, he was as popular as his contemporaries Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot. Indeed, his work was much admired by Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who wrote to Trollope that she was impressed . . . very happily in all those writings of [his] that [she knew] -- . . . people are breathing good bracing air in reading them -- . . . the books are filled with belief in goodness without the slightest tinge of maudlin. They are like pleasant public gardens, where people go for amusement, & whether they think of it or not, get health as well (quoted in Mullen, Anthony Trollope , p. 474; see "For Further Reading"). In spite of the benefits of "amusement" and "health," Trollope's works are now seldom taught in high school or even college literature courses--partly because his novels are long. Like most Victorian novels, many were written to be published as "triple-deckers," so that lending libraries could charge a borrowing fee for each of the three volumes. The two-volume novel The Way We Live Now , which many critics consider his masterpiece, is one of Trollope's longest, at 425,000 words. Further, Trollope's novels can be rather difficult going for a reader who is not familiar with the significant changes that occurred in Victorian England, changes in politics, religion, law, science, socio-economics, marriage, employment, trade, communication, and transport. The Victorian period stretches from 1837, the year the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria came to the throne, until her death in 1901. To suggest the depth and range of changes, here are just a few of the events and developments that a long-lived Victorian fly on the wall might have witnessed: the birth and spread of railways and the telegraph system across Britain; the rise of joint-stock companies; the rise of the Chartist movement, which called for voting reforms such as universal male suffrage, secret ballots, and equality among electoral districts; the introduction of the penny post in 1840 (which meant the sender, rather than the receiver, paid the new, standardized rate for postage); Hong Kong coming under British sovereignty; the potato famines and the Hungry '40s; the establishment of the Detective Department in London; a series of Factory Acts, which regulated the hours of women and children; coal-mining strikes; the repeal of the Corn Laws (tariffs on foreign grain); publication of Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England and Karl Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto ; the 1848 French Revolution; the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, which celebrated Britain's triumphs in the arts and sciences; the publication in the Westminster Review of Harriet Taylor Mill's "The Enfranchisement of Women," which denounced wife beating; the 1851 Census, the first of its kind, which placed the population of England and Wales at 17.9 million; the Crimean War; the founding of the Daily Telegraph ; a substantial rise in literacy; the introduction to Parliament of a series of bills that would allow women to keep their property after marriage; the Divorce Bill of 1857, which enabled both women (for the first time) and men to sue for divorce; the publication of William Acton's Prostitution Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects (there were approximately 75,000 prostitutes in London in the 1860s); the Indian Mutiny; Charles Darwin's publication of Origin of Species (1859); public education reform; a Second Reform Bill of 1867, which extended the vote to two-fifths of the male population (up from one-fifth); the admission of Jews to Parliament; the Franco-Prussian war; the legalization of trade unions; petitions and protests against vivisection; the invention of the telephone; the Russo-Turkish war; the first Boer War; a third Reform Bill (1884), which provided the vote to all men who had a £10 stake in the community; the Irish Home Rule Bill; the Jack the Ripper murders in London; a second Boer War; and the invention of electric light. Excerpted from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
