Fisker, succeeding where Sir Felix Carbury and Lord Nidderdale failed, has got the girl and a large remnant of Melmotte’s money; but corrupt though England may now be, it has contrived almost by default to get rid of these outsiders.

Although Trollope falls short of what would now be thought a completely unprejudiced attitude to Jews, his treatment of the Jewish question, here and elsewhere, is more complex than that of many contemporaries. Admittedly he will refer with familiar irony to ‘the Hebrew gentleman’ and allude to the supposed habits and physical characteristics of Jews, so that he can sometimes sound like a stupid clubman anti-Semite. Quite recently, in The Eustace Diamonds, he had produced a disagreeable stereotype in Joseph Emilius. But he can also surprise one with insight and sympathy. His Nina Balatka (1867, published anonymously) is set in Prague and concerns the marriage of a Catholic woman and a Jewish merchant; as Mullen observes, it reflects the historical fact that in 1867 civil restrictions on Jews were ended in the Austrian Empire.12 The mixed marriage is beset with problems, but Catholic and Jewish beliefts are alike respectfully treated.

Unlike Nina Balatka, The Way We Live Now has been called anti-Semitic. There were already strong Jewish interests in the City, and the fact did not please everybody. Melmotte’s associate Cohenlupe is a crook; but the more interesting figure is Ezekiel Brehgert, whose manners may not be those of the English aristocrat but who is thoroughly honest – if not gentlemanly then manly, always one of Trollope’s terms of approbation. Indeed Brehgert is made to serve as a measure of the snobbery and corruption of the Longestaffes.

One of Trollope’s novelistic skills was the subtle use of letters to comment on character, and the terminal correspondence between Georgiana Longestaffe and Brehgert is a notable instance. Georgiana resists her family’s crudely snobbish rejection of the Jewish suitor, moreover a man much older than she, and ‘in trade’, mostly because she is desperate to marry, but partly because she senses that in this matter of the Jews ‘there was at present a general heaving-up of society… and a change in progress which would soon make it a matter of indifference whether anybody was Jew or Christian’ (p.461). Georgiana is small-minded and her view of the matter is not disinterested; nor would Trollope, any more than most Jews and most Christians, have thought it a good thing that all such distinction should be lost. He is not, as it were, behind Georgiana’s musings; but one feels he has a less ambiguous sympathy with her suitor.

Brehgert, after his interview with Georgiana’s father, sends her a good letter, the sort Trollope might indeed have called ‘manly’ – he does call it ‘plain-spoken and truth-telling’ – dealing with the father’s objections, and especially pointing out that Longestaffe had closed his mind to the alteration in the social circumstances of English Jews. He adds, honourably, that his losses in the Melmotte collapse will for two or three years prevent his taking the second house he promised her in London, suggesting that they might manage quite comfortably for a while with the one at Fulham. Georgiana is not well pleased with this letter, least of all about the news of Brehgert’s financial losses. In her reply she remarks that whereas she is willing to defy her family by marrying him she needs the promised town house: ‘Fulham is all very well now and then, but I don’t think I should like to live at Fulham all the year through. You talk of three years, which would be dreadful.’ She urges him to reverse his decision. His response is that her letter shows her unwilling to marry him ‘unless I can supply you with a house in the town as well as in the country’, and, with great politeness, he declares their engagement to be at an end (p. 609).

All this is intelligently done, and it is what needs to be remembered when Trollope, in this novel, is called anti-Semitic. And indeed it is characteristic of his way of writing that the story often induces him to give depth and complexity to what could in principle have been presented in black and white. A notable instance is Roger Carbury, who certainly stands for old and increasingly neglected values, who is on the whole right about Melmotte and right about Mrs Hurtle, but whose rightness is shadowed by prejudice and intolerance. He might have been, much more simply, the kind of gentleman Pope admired, a Ralph Allen doing good by stealth in a society where ‘not to be corrupted was the shame’. But although he sometimes went close to producing such stereotypes, Trollope allows none such in The Way We Live Now.

Carbury is happy only in deferential Suffolk, where ‘the poor people touch their hats, and the rich people think of the poor’ (p.129). We are mostly instructed to admire him for being, as he often says, ‘old-fashioned’:

‘“I am old-fashioned, Hetta.”

‘“And we belong to a newer and worse sort of world.”’ (p.63).

Hetta can say so, knowing her mother’s unscrupulousness and her brother’s baseness, and she can accept Carbury’s righteousness quite uncritically. On the other hand, we are also informed that whatever the world may be like it is still necessary to live in it. Mr Booker cannot ‘oppose himself altogether to the usages of the time’ (p.12), and it is all very well for Carbury to stand by the ‘old-fashioned idea that the touching of pitch will defile’ (p.61), but not everybody can; and people must marry even in a loveless world. ‘Who thinks about love nowadays?’ asks Georgiana, understandably desperate to be married (p.728); the answer is that Roger Carbury does, but with romantic extravagance, planning to spend his life a bachelor for want of the one woman he has chosen. But people have grown less romantic about love, just as they no longer felt ‘bound to be so punctilious in the paying of money as they were a few years since’ (p.570). In fact Roger Carbury represents an admired and honourable way of behaving, but one that must inevitably submit in some measure to the forces of change. These would continue irresistible even if there were no such villains as Melmotte, for whom Carbury has a special loathing, and whom of course it would have been proper for English society to reject as he did, rather than sit at his table, invite him into their houses, and invest in his companies.

In his autobiographical references to the novel Trollope mentioned that he had gone ‘beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices – on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes’.

This last intention starts the book off, though Trollope must have seen that a novel that took as its principal theme the backscratchings of minor writers in a genteel Grub Street could hardly be a grand survey of metropolitan change and corruption. Nevertheless he felt very strongly on the subject of dishonesty in literary journalism and thought of it as a symptom of the more general ill. In the Autobiography he expresses his particular dislike for anonymous reviewing (a practice maintained long after his time in, for example, the Times Literary Supplement).

Yet not even signed reviews, though more honest, would remedy the evil.