Picture Copyright: Sew Many Books
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1874-1875)
What is it about?
This is a sprawling novel packed with characters and incident. There would seem to be two main storylines. One is driven the mysterious businessman, Augustus Melmotte, who has cheated his way to a lot of money in previous lives and is currently engaged in swindling London society through the selling of shares in a dubious railway company supposedly building a line from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz. The other is a love triangle between Hetta Carbury, her cousin Roger and Paul Montague, who is entangled financially in the railway company and romantically with an older American woman, Winifred Hurtle.
What did I think about it?
This is a book that requires quite some commitment. The plotting is distinctly leisurely although there are some brilliant set pieces and funny moments. I enjoyed the character of Melmotte and would have liked even more about the shady business dealings. However, I found the story of drippy Hetta and her drippier admirers a bit dull. I’m not really sure that the two parts of the book really work together and I don’t feel I have much of a sense of ‘the way we live now’. It seems that ‘now’ we have to put up with vulgar people at dinner, young women gad about more than they used to and people don’t always pay their debts as promptly as they ought. Trollope seems to be saying that everything is a bit worse than it was, in a grumpy old man sort of way.
Readers should be aware that there is a fair amount of casual racism expressed by the characters.
Is there any needlework in it?
There’s not very much needlework in it. It’s something ladies do to occupy themselves when they are not doing something more important – like talking to men. Weddings require a bit of dress-making but it’s not quite clear who actually does this.
Inspiration for textile art
There is surprisingly little physical description in the novel. One might choose to represent one of the social occasions: there is a ball at the Melmottes where ‘the stair-case was fairyland. The lobbies were grottoes rich with ferns’. At a grand dinner given for the emperor of China there are ‘wreaths of flowers and green boughs’ and ‘heavy gildings were given to the wooden capitals of mock pilasters.’ The aftermath of these parties is often quite evocative - for example, ‘Within the hall the pilasters and trophies, the wreaths and the banners which three or four dances since had been built up with so much trouble were now being pulled down and hauled away. And amidst the ruins Melmotte himself was standing’. The young men of the novel frequent a club, the Beargarden, where there is much playing at cards, which suggests the wider financial speculation in the novel. The Great Railway itself could provide inspiration, with its ‘brilliantly printed programmes… with gorgeous maps and beautiful little pictures of trains running into tunnels beneath snowy mountains and coming out of them on the margin of sunlit lakes’.
I have chosen a largely abstract design for this book. It represents wealth and luxury with rich colours and bursts of brilliance. The ladder patterns represent both the railway and the ups and downs of fortune.
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