Now & Then

The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
1875


Having a book club has been a recurring goal in my adult life. The first attempt was several years ago, when I tried to get a bunch of my friends to read Sarah Vowell's wonderful Assassination Vacation, which largely failed to capture anyone's attention enough to merit even a short discussion.

Living in large apartment complexes offers plenty of opportunities to organize social groups and a few months ago I managed to meet with exactly two (!) other residents in regards to forming a book club. After much discussion, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (a convenient choice as I was teaching it in my reading class) was selected as our first book and we managed to attract an additional three people to meet for it. At that meeting one of our new members mentioned that she was involved in a different book club, for which she was asked to read Anthony Trollope's serialized Victorian novel The Way We Live Now, a behemoth at 800-odd pages. Much to my chagrin, I discovered a month later that I was the only person up to the task of conquering those pages - although the book club has thankfully not stalled out and has selected a John Irving novel for the month of April.

The Way We Live Now is concerned with two primary topics: arrangement of marriage in Victorian society and the dawn of stocks in the British economy.

The story revolves around Lady Carbury, a widow who dreams of publishing marvelously successful novels (with atrocious titles like The Wheel of Fortune) in order to provide for her two children, Sir Felix Carbury and Hetta Carbury. Each child embodies one of these two primary themes. Hetta is in love with a young man who may or may not have already promised his hand in marriage to an American woman who may or may not still be married to her first husband. Lady Carbury will not permit this marriage and prefers instead that Hetta marry her cousin, Roger Carbury.

Hetta's plight tugs at one's heartstrings throughout the book. Hetta is an honest, modern young woman struggling to remain faithful to social mores while fashioning a new kind of courtship. Hetta is headstrong and strong-willed and the behavior of the men in her life, both her would-be suitor and her cousin, are respectful and passionate because each man senses these valuable traits. The conflict between the two men largely interrupts Hetta's quest for happiness, but Trollope makes it apparent that it is more the outdated conventions of courtship that prevents Hetta from embracing her chosen mate.

Sir Felix Carbury embodies the other theme. Sir Felix is portrayed as a garden variety laze-about cad. He mooches money of his mother, engages in trivial dalliances with many girls, and gambles away his afternoons at a club with other young man of privilege. Sir Felix becomes involved in an American business venture to build a railway from California to Mexico when he is named to its board. This decision is motivated for financial reasons; Sir Felix can draw upon his power as a chief stock holder to use this money as credit to fund his gambling, and can also ingratiate himself to Mister Melmotte, the financier behind the operation whose daughter Sir Felix intends to marry (for her money).

The Mexican-American railway never quite takes off over the course of the novel, although those involved in creating this business generate a large amount of hypothetical wealth from its stocks that they draw credit upon to finance other shady transactions. The money here is not real and the company mimics the gambling at the club Sir Felix frequents in that I.O.U.'s are generally passed around as acceptable tender while no ready cash exchanges hands. When Sir Felix runs out of money, he attempts to draw on these promissory notes, instigating a crumbling of the microcosmic financial structure of the club that foreshadows Mister Melmotte and company's own downfall as the credit upon which they build their fortunes vanishes.

Trollope spends a good deal of time on the Melmotte character, who stands as a sort of straw figure by which Trollope can expose the unstable and disingenuous nature of the social cache upon which both these marriages and capitalistic ventures are formed. The marriages are arranged on the concept of matching financial levels and marrying within social caste, but Melmotte's daughter, whose 'fortune' is a lure to a half-dozen young men and proves to be but a pecuniary mirage, demonstrates the faultiness of this system in modern times.

Melmotte, who is initially regarded as a charlatan by the privileged class of London, effectively buys his way into high society through the illusion of his wealth. Those, like Lady Carbury, who are drawn to wealth and social stature, are given a rude awakening when he is revealed be the fraud he was originally thought.

Lady Carbury with her scheming ways regarding her son's future and obstinacy regarding her daughter's intended marriage proves to be an unmistakable exception in Trollope's portrayal of women. Throughout the novel, the young man being bartered about in arranged marriages prove to be the most sincere, modern characters. Each one argues for fair treatment in terms of her relationships with men and is stymied by more traditional, misguided older generations.

Trollope's portrait of the American woman who may or may not still be married to her first husband is particularly sympathetic. She is broken by her would-be suitor, who back off after discovering her ambiguous past. The woman uses the traditions of being wooed to her advantage in order to manipulate her lover into remaining in her presence. However, she is also a fiercely independent character, determined to forge her own future on her terms and to manipulate the system (and the men who abide by it) to achieve her own ends, to effectively determine her own future.

The winning, sympathetic portrayal of women brings to mind D.H. Lawrence's knowing (albeit significantly more psychological) characterization of his female characters. This proved to be one of the most compelling reasons to finish the gargantuan novel.

The primary stumbling block to accomplishing this goal, however, proved to be the incredibly dense prose. While most of the book was readable and free of frustration (the dialogue was wooden but not especially indecipherable), there were some passages that were just ridiculous. Take, for example, this hifalutin tangle of words:

As the high mountains are intersected by deep valleys, as puritanism in one age begets infidelity in the next, as in many countries the thickness of the winter's ice will be in proportion to the number of summer musquitoes [sic], so was the keenness of the hostility displayed on this occasion in proportion to the warmth of the support which was manifested.

I, personally, was not aware of a connection of iciness and mosquitoes.

Here's another doozie:

That conclusion of antecedents which, in the hurry of the world, is often vouchsafed to success, that growing feeling that induces people to assert to themselves that they are not bound to go outside the general verdict, and that they may shake hands with whomsoever the world shakes hands with, had never reached him.

I mean.... really?

Largely, though, the prose was not an issue of intelligibility; instead, it offered numerous opportunities for guffawing at its bombastic aspirations. At the very least, I managed to learn a new word: contumely (n.): contemptuous or humiliating insults.

Like many hefty Victorian novels, The Way We Live Now was an ultimately rewarding, if somewhat slight, experience that lent me a greater feeling of the satisfaction of having completed a daunting task than the satisfaction of an intimate artistic experience.