The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
Considered by many to be Anthony Trollope's greatest novel, How We Live Now covers much of the commercial, political, social and literary life of 1870s London in its broad scope. At its center is the larger figure than life of August Melmott, a financier with an uncertain descent, who has risen to great heights due to a plan of financial speculation about railroad plans in America. Trollope wrote of this novel, "I was provoked by what I conceived as a commercial profiling of the period," and the work remains one of the world's most ambitious fictional critics of capitalism. It also gives a unique insight into the workings of the late Victorian literary world, the dynamics of anti-Semitism in the Victorian era, and a number of other topics of ongoing interest. Moreover, it remains one of the most legible of Trollope's many novels.
