The Way We Live Now
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 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).
FRANK KERMODE 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
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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
INTRODUCTION
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 aristocracy1 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.
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