This standalone novel, by Trollope, originally published in serial form, is much to do about money in Victorian England—who has it, who is making it, and who needs it. It is about an aristocracy with land and titles, but short on ready cash and a speculative merchant class with seemingly unreserved flows of new wealth, now hungry to also increase their status and rank within polite society. Marriage was often the most common way of uniting these two needy factions. Debts, mortgages, stock shares, speculations, and leverage were the coin of the times. “He never for a moment thought of paying his bills. Even the large sum of which he had become so unexpectedly possessed would not have gone far with him in such a quixotic object as that; but he could now look bright, and buy presents, and be seen with money in his hands. It is hard even to make love in these days without something in your purse.”
Melmotte, the wealthy financial speculator, is viewed by much of society as the greatest man of his age, while others never let him forget his common origins and his ignoble profession. “I look upon him as dirt in the gutter. To me, in my old-fashioned way, all his money, if he has it, can make no difference…. No one pretends to think that he is a gentleman. There is a consciousness among all who speak of him that he amasses his money, not by honest trade, but by unknown tricks—as does a card sharper. He is one whom we would not admit into our kitchens, much less to our tables, on the score of his own merits. But because he has learned the art of making money, we not only put up with him, but settle upon his carcass as so many birds of prey.”
The aristocracy maybe in want of money, but still lives within the bounds of its own eccentric code. “I’m not very good at saying my prayers, but I do think there’s something in that bit about forgiving people. Of course cheating isn’t very nice: and it isn’t very nice for a fellow to play when he knows he can’t pay; but I don’t know that it’s worse than getting drunk like Dolly Longstaffe, or quarreling with everybody as Grasslough does—or trying to marry some poor devil of a girl merely because she’s got money. I believe in living in glass houses, but I don’t believe in throwing stones…. I often think I shouldn’t have been the first to pick up a stone and pitch it at that woman. Live and let live—that’s my motto!”
In the battle between new and old money the tides were quickly shifting within society. “Augustus Melmotte was becoming greater and greater in every direction—mightier and mightier every day. He was learning to despise mere lords, and to feel that he might even domineer over a duke. In truth he did recognize it as a fact that he must either domineer over dukes, or else go to the wall. It can hardly be said of him that he had intended to play so high a game, but the game that he had intended to play had become thus high of its own accord. A man cannot always restrain his own doings and keep them within the limits which he had himself planned. They will very often fall short of the magnitude to which his ambition has aspired. They will sometimes soar higher than his own imagination. So it had now been with Mr Melmotte. He had contemplated great things; but the things which he was achieving were beyond his contemplation.”
But in this time of speculation and castles of wealth built on foundations of sand, the faster one’s rise, often, the harder one’s fall. “A failure! Of course he’s a failure, whether rich or poor—a miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end—too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not for that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of our age.” Eventually, even those in society who initially praised the bold men of business would begin to question this method of acquisition of wealth. “Hazily, as through a thick fog, Lord Nidderdale thought that he did see something of the troubles, as he had long seen something of the glories, of commerce on an extended scale, and an idea occurred to him that it might be almost more exciting than whist or unlimited loo.” The men of business, themselves, had always been clear-eyed from the start. “Fisker was not only unscrupulous himself, but he had a thorough contempt for scruples in others. According to his theory of life, nine hundred and ninety-nine men were obscure because of their scruples, whilst the thousandth man predominated and cropped up into the splendour of commercial wealth because he was free from such bondage.”
No comments:
Post a Comment