Can we really expect Victorian novels to teach us much about the way we live now? Especially a novel by a writer condemned to the second division by his failure to make it into both the ‘canon’ as judged by the F R and D Leavis and the syllabus of traditional Eng Lit courses. Also, by his association with the costume drama slot on the BBC in the 70s and by being the favoured reading of John Major.
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (published in 1875) was referred to by Armando Iannucci in a recent edition of the political language podcast, Strong Message Here about the ongoing fallout of the Epstein Papers, as a template for the way society can fall for a rich conman.
After taking on Finnegans Wake by James Joyce on behalf of the readers of Sussex Bylines, which felt like hacking through dense jungle undergrowth, reading The Way We Live Now was more like getting on a rather slow but comfortable long-distance train journey. Many of the themes familiar to 19th century novels are there.
Living beyond their means
The aristocracy all seem to live beyond their means and so seek to marry into wealth (nicely summarised as “Rank squanders money, trade makes it – and trade purchases rank by regilding its splendour”) and display a reckless tendency to invest in speculative railway schemes. There’s Faginesque antisemitism, a terror of the workhouse, all mixed up with a sense that rules of propriety are being ignored by the younger generation, even squeezing in the ubiquitous reference to Horace on this theme showing this is nothing new.
The story involves a cast of characters clustering around Melmotte, an arriviste financier who nearly everyone believes to be a fraud but who seems to offer the path to wealth and influence. Those around him are drawn by greed or desperation, overcoming their better judgement like, as Trollope has it, moths to a flame, each believing they can fly just close enough to avoid burning their wings.
Characters fall over themselves fighting for a place at his dinner table or a seat on the board of his company. They invest in his scheme or try to marry off their sons to his ‘heiress’ daughter. In the context of the comparison with the Epstein scandal, it is a shock to read the daughter describe herself as “trafficked”.
The story chugs along, reliably reaching its inevitable destination, with Melmotte finally caught out and taking his own life rather than facing both justice and shame. Most of the characters who sought it achieve marriage, although not always entirely happily or to the person they desired, and the dissolute son is dispatched abroad.
I can only concur with the Leavises and others in the judgement that Trollope, based on this – supposedly his masterpiece – is not up there with the greats. There is not the wonderful development of characters that you find in Dickens, the passion and emotional intelligence of George Eliot nor the virtuosic digressions of scenes like the troika ride or the wolf hunt episodes in Tolstoy.
There is notably little examination of the psychology behind why characters act the way they do to satisfy their hunger for money and marriage, the Victorian surrogates for food, shelter and sex in the hierarchy of needs. There is even less consideration of characters’ need for self-actualisation or aspiration for esteem, beyond Trollope’s almost fetishistic elevation of the status of a ‘gentleman’.
It’s all so… well, transactional. More ‘The Bottom Line’ than ‘Strong Message Here’.
The inevitable comparisons with Trump
Although invited by Armando Iannucci to think of Epstein when reading about the fictional fraud Melmotte, the damage he does and the willingness of those, who should know better, to hold their noses and flatter him in the hope of benefiting from immediate gain, I perhaps inevitably found myself thinking of Donald Trump.
Trollope writes of Melmotte, “When a man’s frauds have been enormous there is a certain safety in their very diversity and proportions.” The voters of America certainly seemed to have been reassured by the ‘safety’ in the numbers like them who were taken in.
Another fictional character that Donald Trump brings to my mind is Tom Buchanan, husband of Daisy, Gatsby’s lover in The Great Gatsby. He is described as “a sturdy straw haired man” and having “a cruel body”.
By the end of the novel, with Gatsby dead and his bubble of wealth burst, Buchanan is dismissed with the memorable lines: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Novels rarely, if ever, change the world but can possibly hold a mirror to ourselves as we navigate through it. I’m afraid we are more like characters in Trollope than the high-minded ones in Eliot or Tolstoy.
Satisfying our immediate needs
We look back gratefully that the cruelty of the Victorian workhouse is now gone and wonder how people could have tolerated slavery to be able to enjoy cheap sugar. But, to satisfy our immediate needs, our brainstem still ‘trumps’ our higher capacity for moral and ethical reasoning.
We still buy cheap clothes despite knowing what the sweatshops of Bangladesh are like. I doubt the growing concern about the working conditions of content moderators, data taggers and AI trainers in places like Kenya will stop us using Large Language Models (LMM) AI tools like ChatGPT.
Despite the genuinely existential threat of climate change, we still jet off on city breaks or for winter sun, preferring not to think about the disproportionate effect of our actions on global warming, believing it won’t be our wings that get burned in the process.
The damage done is to people we can’t see because they are on the other side of the world or yet to be born.
The way we live now, we are both transactional and careless.
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