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.

Trollope, then, was working with contemporary material. But he was also a keen student of classical antiquity, and parallels with Roman history seem natural in this tale of imperial splendour and corruption. He was also alive to the mythic qualities that may inhere even in stories intended to convey what Henry James described as Trollope’s ‘complete appreciation of the usual’.8 Certainly the usual is carefully presented, for example in the detailed London topography. The route of Felix’s drunken ramblings on the morning of his proposed elopement, and Melmotte’s walk on the morning of his election, could easily be followed today; like Melmotte we might well walk as far as he did and then take a cab to the City, as he did. The character and intentions of the walkers may be unusual, but their setting is markedly usual.

But Melmotte, a mythical figure, transforms the usual. An emblem as well as an agent of a more general social corruption and disorder, he may begin as one more sordid City confidence man of somewhat mysterious origins, but in the course of the narrative he acquires another dimension. One even begins to see in him, for all his vanity and ambition, qualities that make him, in a sense, nobler than many of the other characters; after his interview with Sir Felix in Chapter 23 we might judge him morally superior to the baronet. His entertainment for the Emperor of China is an absurd occasion, but the fact of his giving it establishes him as a prince among London merchants; the absurdity, and also the disappointment, are on the heroic, imperial scale, and it is not Melmotte who seems mean but some of his guests. For all his bullying, fawning, equivocating, he deserves his ‘Balzacian apogee’, as Stephen Wall calls it.

Wall is right to suggest that in the brief period when Melmotte is on or near that point Trollope can show in a diagrammatic way ‘that collusion between money and rank which is such an indictment of the way we live now’ 9 moreover the ruined magnificence of the occasion confers on him a glamour that somehow belies the too simple judgement of Roger Carbury: ‘he is what he is because he has been a swindler greater than other swindlers’ (p. 424). Vulgarthough he may be, he has complexity, and he is not afraid to be gigantic; he might have said with Nero, Qualis artifex pereo, what an artist perishes with me, but instead claims as a reward for his spectacular career, something like the. immortality Horace thought to gain from his poems: Non omnis moriar, I shall not wholly die.

Robin Gilmour justly remarks that the catastrophe of Melmotte illustrates ‘a central paradox of Trollope’s fiction – that of all Victorian novelists he has the most intimate knowledge of, and respect for, the norms that hold society together, and yet is drawn again and again to the creation of characters who flout and transgress these norms.