The Way We Live Now

Augustus Melmotte arrives in London from nowhere, is rumoured to be immensely rich, is put on the board of a railway that does not exist, and is elected to Parliament — and Trollope’s satire is aimed less at him than at everyone who decides not to ask questions while the share price rises. It is the great Victorian novel of financial fraud and of the social machinery that makes fraud possible, and it is the most directly useful book on this list for anyone thinking about how capital gets allocated on reputation alone.

Context: Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) wrote it after returning from eighteen months abroad, as a deliberate state-of-the-nation attack on what he saw as a general commercial dishonesty. It was poorly received at the time and is now usually ranked among his best.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Anthony Trollope — the author.
• Fraud — what the novel anatomises.
• Greed — the mechanism the story turns on.
• Capitalism — the system under inspection.
• Institutions — the unwritten rules doing the real governing.