The loneliness of the outsider deeply interests him, and he is often at his best when writing about it.’10 Melmotte, the successful candidate in the Westminster by-election, had entered the House of Commons on the arm of the Prime Minister. (This is sometimes thought to be another of Trollope’s sneers at Disraeli, and that reading cannot be entirely ruled out; but the context may suggest only the kind of courtesy the novelist, who loved the House, associated with parliamentary intercourse; and this measure of ambiguity – this leaving the reader to decide on the significance of an event – is more usual in Trollope than might be supposed, given his reputation for lack of subtlety.)

Melmotte is thus drawn into the fraternity of politicians; but for all the Prime Minister’s courtesy and his own arrogant confidence he is a complete outsider. He has no notion of how to conduct himself in the House, making a premature maiden speech and doing it badly. By the time of his final appearance there he is ostracized, and when he rises to speak falls over, the physical fall prefigures the moral. He walks out alone.

Trollope’s perhaps extravagant opinion was that ‘to sit in the British Parliament should be the highest object of ambition to every educated Englishman’ (Autobiography), and Melmotte, the outsider claiming to be an Englishman, had, as a manifest alien, impudently usurped this privilege, just as he had impudently though without difficulty made his way into the ranks of a corrupt or listless aristocracy – or into that part of it which lacked a firm commitment to the old English honour codes.

These were single mindedly endorsed by Roger Carbury, a squire who still lived off his land and knew what guests he might without impropriety offer a seat at his table. (Certain prejudices were the degenerate attendants of this decorum.) Melmotte’s intrusion into Parliament, however politely managed, is, as Carbury could have predicted, a disastrous violation. He can brazen out his parliamentary embarrassments for a while, but when finally his dishonour forces him out he goes of his own volition, with no destination but suicide, yet with a kind of dignity that is not quite a parody of Roman stoicism. The foreign body is expelled; but there is some sense that Melmotte is a scapegoat as well as an intruder, a great man as well as a sordid villain. When Mrs Hurtle sings his praises and holds such men to be above morality she, another outsider with a grudge, is overstating the case; but the telling of the tale goes a small part of the way towards endorsing her view.

And here one ought to reflect on Trollope’s sometimes ambiguous attitudes to the alien, and in particular to his treatment of Americans and Jews. He knew the United States at first hand, and, almost of course, wrote a book about it (North America, 1862). During the Civil War he took the side of the North, against the current of English sentiment. He thought he saw the causes of the animosity that existed between the two countries; they arose from their resemblances. ‘Englishmen thought it their duty to Anglicize the world’, he remarked in a speech made in 1864, while ‘the Americans were chips off the old block, and wished to Americanize the world’.11 A later novel, The American Senator (1876–7), chronicles the comic misadventures of the senator Elias Gotobed in an England he misunderstands and traduces. In He Knew He Was Right (1868–9) Trollope describes without much animus the family of the American ambassador in Florence, finding the father rather pompous, but marrying the daughter into English aristocracy; his – venom he reserves for the ‘Republican Browning’, the feminist Wallachia Petrie. Yet one of his dearest friends, Kate Field, was not only an American but a feminist, and so should have been doubly an outsider.

America was not simple. In the Autobiography he treats the question summarily: ‘They among Englishmen who best love and most admire the United States,’ he says, ‘have felt themselves tempted to use the strongest language in denouncing the sins of Americans.’ They are admittedly generous, they love education and independence of mind; and they admire English manners. But politically they are at all levels corrupt; there is ‘glaring’ dishonesty in high places. Trollope, a very energetic person, admired American energy while distrusting the forms it took. It is impossible to doubt that he saw in the United States a warning of the way things would be if aggressive, uncontrolled, freebooting attitudes to money-making were to break down the restraints supposedly extant in England – the long-maintained habits of honourable dealing, the truthfulness of gentlemen, the solidity of squirearchy and the noblesse oblige of aristocracy. The price of these might be a certain arrogance and also some unexamined prejudice, but on the whole it was a price worth paying. Americans were not aristocrats, and only with difficulty could even the best of them be called gentlemen or ladies. Very clearly the financial operator Hamilton K. Fisker, for all his skill and energy – such a contrast with the effete members of the Beargarden – and Mrs Hurtle, for all her spirit – such a contrast with the tameness of English girls – could not be so called.

This explains the general treatment of Americans in The Way We Live Now. The grandiose operations of Melmotte (who may have an American father called Melmody, just as he may for all anybody knows be a Jew) are in part a consequence of the intrigues of Fisker, who reaches Melmotte through the financially impotent, conscience-troubled Paul Montague. In the games played by these men Montague is a mere English pawn. Fisker has a ruthlessness associated with the American West, a quality foreign to the well-born Englishman. Paul Montague, caught between the two worlds, is likewise the prey of Mrs Hurtle, also associated with the West, a woman who has lived under gun law, extracted a dubious divorce from a very American husband, and sexually enthralled the polite young Englishman.

Montague is not entirely feeble, especially if we compare him with Felix Carbury, who gets drunk and cannot even manage to get up in order to elope. Montague tries to stand up to Melmotte at the bogus meetings of the Board; and at some personal risk, with a good deal of dithering, and some stiffening talk from Roger Carbury, he stands by his decision to discard his importunate mistress. Yet even this success ultimately depends on her inherent generosity of spirit; perhaps she has been infected by English gentility to the extent that she can no longer use horsewhips and guns.

She returns to America in appropriate company – with Fisker, who has along the way won Marie Melmotte, a tough little outsider, a Jew and a bastard to boot, who, as finally becomes clear, would never have done as the wife of the English aristocrats who wanted her money. She has hung on to her father’s ample reserve of money, and will hold her own in the harsher social and financial climate of the New World.