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.