Maybe you’d like a little social chicanery with a spectacularly contemporary resonance? Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now is a densely woven portrait of a social order in hock to financial prestidigitation; entire lives and livelihoods sustained in a house of cards. Melmotte, the crooked financier, is the lead magician. One tap of the finger at the wrong time is all it will take to bring everything tumbling down.
Trollope wrote it in a white-hot fury, on his return from a lengthy visit to Australia and New Zealand, which seems to have given him the perspective to view English society with a stranger’s eye: he was horrified by
a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places[,]
corrupting and influencing everything, endemic. Worse
If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards…can give Apician dinners, and deal in millions
very few people will reject it, indeed they’ll actively pursue and embrace this new reversal of values
so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.
This is the world he anatomises.
Trollope's style is almost chatty; and he’s lavish with the authorial commentary, often juxtaposing it with a reported event or action as an alternative narrative strand. This is a Victorian novel (1875); it's subject is finance: so we can expect the almost reflexive tropes of racism which tinge the narrative; but, what's interesting is the complexity of Trollope's depiction of Melmotte (a masterstroke is the actual haziness of his background - nothing is specifically declared) which, more widely, seems to incite an internal dynamic tension between received prejudices (of such laziness, it should be astonishing, but, of course - ) and a kind of querying insight, the author himself, groping past prejudice and assumption, really trying to see - and then, set down, examine and discuss what he sees. When Georgiana Longstaffe acquires a Jewish fiancé, it's his money and the fact that she’ll finally be getting married that are the most important factors for her:
Through she hardly knew how to explain the matter to herself, she was sure that there was at present a general heaving-up of society on this matter, and a change in progress which would soon make a matter of indifference whether anybody was a Jew or Christian. For herself she regarded the matter not at all, except as it might be regarded by the world in which she wished to live… She had seen enough of the world to be sure that her happiness did not lie in that direction, and could not depend…on the religion of her husband.
Of course, Georgiana is also manipulating the silk handkerchief somewhat, to magic into being an approval and acceptance that's clearly not implicit, talking herself into it because her time on the marriage market (and her age, thirty, the horror!) have made her ruthlessly pragmatic - her parents are infinitely less sanguine; especially as, until now, they’ve thought the worst they’d encountered was the vicarious horror of a friend’s child marrying the daughter of a tradesman and methodist. Now it's them; but there's clearly something in Georgiana’s “general heaving-up” because she would never have got engaged unless she was sure it would it bring her what she wants:
On three things she was still determined - that she would not be poor, that she would not be banished from London, and that she would not be an old maid.
This questioning also influences Trollope’s depiction of women, generally; and he actively moves beyond their popular polarisation as either angels in the house - or the other kind. Lady Carbury is pushy, apparently superficial and venal: she's also the grateful escapee of an unhappy, abusive marriage, who now has to support both herself and two adult children (one a young man, so very expensive). She's not unprincipled - it's just that, in many cases, her principles have either sprung from or adapted to her circumstances - “She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics would say was good” - although she doesn't deviate from her bedrock. There's an extraordinarily modern scene when after - tactfully - repulsing a man with whom she needs to remain on good terms for professional advantage: “She would have preferred not to have been kissed; - but what did it matter?” To her, of course, at some point it did: she has trained herself to survive. The extraordinary part is Trollope's uncritical recognition and acknowledgement of this.
Georgiana again:
She had begun life with very high aspirations, believing in her own beauty, in her mother's fashion, and her father's fortune. She had now been ten years at the work, and was aware that she had always flown a little too high for the mark…
Georgiana's unhappy trajectory in the marriage market is a perfect illustration and reflection of the wider financial markets (although, unlike so many others she is trading honestly): her initial capital is good; understandably she wants to maximise her returns; reasonably she believes she can - yet, over ten years, her speculations fail and her capital diminishes (and, unlike on the financial markets, there's no prospect of a sudden recovery - youth and beauty once gone are gone; all that can remain is birth). Georgiana goes from considering herself “entitled to demand wealth and a coronet”; to being open to “any young peer, or peer’s eldest son with a house in town or the country”; to penultimately “the years for baronets and squires…even a leading fashionable lawyer…” And Trollope stresses that it is a market: “now she was aware that hitherto she had always fixed her price a little too high”; and this is her job - “She had…been ten years at the work.”
There's the social-climbing American (a newish species) Mrs. Hurtle, notorious for having shot and killed a man back home - but also allowed to defend her action, both personally and through her reported gratitude of other women: her elliptical references suggesting self-defence against sexual assault; and the support of the other women suggesting that she wasn't the only woman who suffered - but she was the one who acted decisively.
Or how about this on Marie Melmotte and her unwanted suitor:
She never had the slightest pleasure in his society, and had only not been wretched because she had not yet recognised that she had an identity of her own, in the disposition of which, she herself should have a voice.
Extraordinary. And fighting talk. (It's tempting to infer that Trollope's unusually perceptive and sympathetic range in portraying women here is partly inspired by his family upbringing with a working mother - when her husband's presumptive inheritance disappeared in a puff of smoke with the birth of an heir, Fanny Trollope became a successful writer, to support their family.)
In the great 19thc novel stakes, Trollope is often (not without reason) placed amongst the also-rans; but this novel is, justifiably, generally held to be his masterpiece.
Or maybe try The Quincunx (Charles Palliser)? This is something of a curiosity - a fat, 19thc novel, set in the 1820s, and exhibiting all the tropes of its kind: a richly woven tapestry of a particular milieu and moment in time, packed with squandered (or is it misappropriated?) fortunes, displaced heirs and disputed inheritances; particularly good on London life and the development of the modern city (Belgravia, for those who know, is jerry-built on swamp land). Oh yes, and it was written in the late 20thc.
It's a novel whose fatherless, then orphaned hero is called John Huffam, a direct reference to the Charles John Huffam Dickens who originally cornered the market in plucky young heroes forging their way in a complex and rapacious world; and John Huffam’s circumstances often mirror both the young Dickens's real-life ones, or those of his heroes; David Copperfield (and his poor little mother) immediately springing to mind; but really pretty much the entire Dickensian panorama. (And Wilkie Collins. And, and, and - ) Setting the story in the early 19thc - the period of Dickens's youth - is another way of drawing Dickens into the narrative; and Palliser is seemingly happy to layer these resonances, creating an immersive experience that's apparently a synthesis of literary memory, and conceptions of, and conversations with, the 19thc novel in all its expansive glory. (What if the angel in the house, worn down by brutal experiences, develops an anaesthetising substance abuse habit, for instance? We know that people did, of course - alcohol, laudanum; but Palliser’s intercommunication with the 19thc novel’s form and imperatives offers a parallel commentary; allows us to lay one template above another; and consider (and maybe reconsider) the unsaid and subtext.)
Apparently: because although this is exhilarating four-in-hand driving, Palliser cops out at the end, just when he was meant to be looping his rein with panache and driving off into the sunset with a jaunty flourish of the whip. To be fair, he attempts an explanation for this: but a novel really shouldn't need an explanation and a roster of key motifs (although it might acquire these, and more, critically); and even stylistically - and he set out his stall very clearly from the first line - it doesn't work; especially as his priority seems to be to repudiate the seduction of his own audience: Casanova the librarian, legging it out of the window, calling over his shoulder that actually he’s Stephen Dedalus. (As you’ll remember, Stephen - James Joyce's youthful affinity rather than alter ego in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - has a youthfully stringent aesthetic: “The artist like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”) Palliser, in his Afterword to the second edition, “explaining1” his novel, seems to lay claim to the Olympian indifference, whilst ignoring the within, behind, beyond (although, of course, it isn't necessary to subscribe either fully or partially to Stephen's creative philosophy); which immediately diminishes his narrative to a pastiche without purpose - presumably not his intention - and although, obviously, readers can decide what they take from a novel, his final dismissal of his artfully deployed narrative tropes, in favour of this position, forces acceptance of this reduction on readers willy-nilly; tipping them out of the featherbed of propulsive narrative and multi-referential storytelling into a bleaker postmodernist landscape, that seems grafted on, rather than inherent (unlike the successful striation of the narrative’s internal conversations with the 19thc novel, which straddle the philosophical divide nicely).
No matter: this is still great fun.
(This is an expanded version of material that has previously appeared on Substack in a different form.)
Conversely, rather engagingly, Joyce was more concerned that people got the jokes.
Think his work ethic was admirable - he knocked out TWWLN in 29 weeks(!). And it really is good.
Trollope is no also-ran! A superb novelist. He has been too often unfairly dismissed because "artists" disdain his businesslike description, in the autobiography, of his own working habits (so many words every 15 minutes).