The Way We Live Now

<br>'Trollope did not write for posterity' observed Henry James. 'He wrote for the day the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket.' Considered by contemporary critics to be Trollope's greatest novel <i>The Way We Live Now</i> is a satire of the literary world of London in the 1870s and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. 'I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age' Trollope said. <br><br>His story concerns Augustus Melmotte a French swindler and scoundrel and his daughter to whom Felix Carbury adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope knew well the difficulties of dealing with editors publishers reviewers and the public; his portrait of Lady Carbury impetuous unprincipled and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion is one of his finest satirical achievements. <br><br>His picture of late-nineteenth-century England is a portrait of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy. In <i>The Way We Live Now</i> Trollope combines his talents as a portraitist and his skills as a storyteller to give us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago.