The Way We Live Now
A financier with no history arrives in London, is received everywhere, and builds a railway company out of nothing but confidence. Trollope wrote the book in the aftermath of a real crash and put the City at its centre, which was unusual for a novelist who usually preferred cathedrals and country houses.
The satire is broad but the observation is exact: how a rumour becomes credit, how a dinner invitation becomes evidence of solvency. It is Trollope's longest novel and his angriest, and the scenes at Melmotte's parties have a chill that his Barsetshire books never attempt.
Public-domain status
First published in 1875. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Anthony Trollope died in 1882, so this work has been free to republish there since 1953.
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