The Way We Live Now
Chapman & Hall, 1875.
First edition. Two volumes, bound in early half black morocco over marbled boards. Forty wood engraved plates by Luke Fildes, plates at 132 and 149 in vol I bound in each other's places. A little wear to the binding, but a very good set.
Fuelled by indignation, this novel begins as a satire and ends as social comedy. Trollope had returned from a tour of Australia and New Zealand to find Britain in the throes of a series of financial scandals, and he determined to write a rebuke of the greed and dishonesty those scandals exposed. In his autobiography he wrote "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now."
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