The public had no reliable critical guidance, for editors were careless or venal, and critics incompetent. Later in the Autobiography Trollope returns to the matter of ‘dishonest criticism’, the sort of reviewing Lady Carbury solicits from her editor friends, and one can see how he would relate this to other, and in the eyes of most people larger, instances of venality, regarding them all as evidence of the deplorable way we live now. Indeed in the Autobiography he imagines a typical response to his objections: ‘“Where have you lived, my friend, for the last twenty years… that you come out now with such old-fashioned stuff as this?” And thus dishonesty begets dishonesty, till dishonesty seems to be beautiful.’ Sic vivitur, as Cicero remarked in a passage Trollope, according to Ruth apRoberts, was echoing: ‘What can you do? That’s the way things are nowadays’ or, that’s the way we live now.

The implications of Lady Carbury’s behaviour are skilfully brought out, and are a good starting place for the huge complicated plot of the novel. Her son, the beautiful Sir Felix, is a graceless scamp, and the clientele of his club, the Beargarden, is, like the market, enslaved to a foreign speculator and trades in IOUs, paper as little likely to be redeemed as Melmotte’s share flotations. (There is one scene in which one member of the Beargarden acquires shares in Melmotte’s venture by the redemption of IOUs acquired from another, and for various reasons Melmotte involves several of the club members in his operations.)

Trollope’s handling of the club scenes has been praised for the accuracy with which it represents contemporary life as it was lived among idle, well-born young men, and these commendations are deserved. Yet the story of a young aristocrat bent on seducing a country girl but prevented from doing so by her sturdy peasant lover – the story of Felix and Ruby Ruggles – is an ancient one. The theme goes back to the medieval pastourelle, in which the lord sometimes gets what he wants but sometimes, like Sir Felix, gets his comeuppance; and it crops up over the ages in many a tale of peasant virtue and seigneurial wickedness.

This blending of old and new is characteristic, and Trollope’s skill in getting the most out of a plot is further illustrated by the relationship that exists between the Ruggles and John Crumb and Roger Carbury. Bold economy in plotting makes Ruby turn up at the very house in Islington that Mrs Hurtle occupies, with consequent interaction between the story of Felix and that of Montague, the close friend of Roger. The meeting of Montague and Mrs Hurtle with Roger on the sands at Lowestoft is improbable but well engineered. It is Trollope’s easy but studied matter-of-factness, as well as his willing submersion in the conventions of Victorian fiction – if events can be formed into plot patterns why should they not be formed into very elaborate plot patterns? – that prevents readers from finding these connections discouragingly improbable. Realism is a highly artificial mode and calls, as much as any melodrama of squire and maiden, for readerly cooperation. Are we troubled by the coincidence that John Crumb was at hand in a London backstreet at the very moment when Sir Felix decided to take Ruby by force? Or that Roger should, in due course, be at hand to discuss the fracas with John Crumb?

When a publisher asked for changes in the plot of John Caldigate Trollope politely told him he had never found himself able ‘to effect changes in the plot of a story. Small as the links are, one little thing hinges on another to such an extent that any change sets the whole narrative wrong’.13 To make a unity of a story that involved a study not only of Melmotte and his circle but of Mr Broune and Mr Alf, of Mrs Hurtle, of the barren and snobbish Longestaffes, of the Beargarden set, including the pleasant Nidderdale – a more complicated young man than he at first appears (witness his disinterested kindness to Marie Melmotte after her father’s death) – is no small feat of management. And that is to mention only a small number of characters; others are provided at need, like the contrasted lawyers Squercum and Bideawhile, and Lady Monogram and Father Barham, and various politicians and angry fathers. This, as Michael Sadleir remarked, was ‘the work of no ordinary mind’.14

In a private note to his son, who was trying his hand at a novel, Trollope tells him he ‘has not yet quite got into the way of writing for lengths. One cannot do all these mechanical tricks at once.’15 Trollope does them all at once – mechanical tricks calling for the fashioning of hinges, and the whole complicated structure casts some of the ethical shadows I have referred to.

Roger Carbury is quite a large hinge. Despairing lover of Hetta, head of the Carbury family (which either venerates or despises and exploits him), landlord of the Ruggles and the Crumbs, close friend of Montague, his successful rival in love, he is indeed central to the plot mechanism. And of course, as I have already remarked, he is a kind of ethical norm, a gentleman according to the minimal definition given in The Prime Minister, ‘a man who would not for worlds tell a lie’ (Chapter 30).16 He represents the way ‘we’ lived before we started living as we do now, in a time when a family might, like him, modestly thrive because they had ‘been true to their acres and their acres true to them through the perils of civil wars, Reformation, Commonwealth, and Revolution’ (p.44). Roger Carbury remains true in this way. Yet here, as we have seen, the shadow is present, the ambiguity into which Trollope was so beneficially led by the mere fact of using story to illuminate a moral or satirical theme. For his notions of justice and fairness don’t fit when it is right that they shouldn’t, but also when they should, by being adapted to a world that cannot help but change.

For The Way We Live Now, though it is undoubtedly about decadence, is also about change, and change is often identified with decadence. During Trollope’s own lifetime England changed enormously, grew wonderfully more wealthy yet, despite huge deals in the market, was already almost imperceptibly in decline. It was a world increasingly more congenial to the speculator than to the gentleman, whose morality expressed itself more easily in an older form of society, with clear ideas about proper stations and the conduct appropriate to them. It is natural to lament the passing of a civility, whatever its basis in injustice, and to deplore the rude excesses that supplant it. If Trollope says nothing about the gross disparity between rich and poor in these years, it may be that the wickedness of that disparity is reflected in the venality and inanity of the rich as he represents them. And of course it can be said that his title could be applied to the description of almost any developed society at any modern period, including our own.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text of this edition is taken from the last edition of Trollope’s lifetime (Chatto & Windus, 1877). Some obvious errors have been corrected. It has not seemed necessary to correct small inconsistencies of spelling. In the notes on individual points in the text – gathered at the end of this volume – I am indebted to the notes of Professor John Sutherland (edition of 1982), some of which are in their turn indebted to the edition of Robert Tracy (1974).

The complicated writing and publishing history of The Way We Live Now has been studied in minute detail by Professor Sutherland in two articles.1 Trollope wrote the novel in twenty parts of thirty-two printed pages, dividing each part into five chapters, a task calling for elaborate planning and ferociously methodical labour, his best performance was to write eight numbers (Chapters 31–70) in six weeks, with much necessary ‘tinkering’ as he went along. Unlike Thackeray, he did not use the proof-stage for further corrections.