Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Dates
- 1 Introduction: Trollope's Late Modernity
- 2 ‘Getting and Spending’: The Aesthetic Economist
- 3 ‘A Bond of Discord’: Colonialism and Allegory
- 4 ‘Convivial in a Cadaverous Fashion’: Satires on Sovereignty
- 5 ‘Active Citizens of a Free State’: Hellenising the History of Rome
- 6 ‘The Tone of Today’: Pedagogical Paraphrases
- 7 ‘An Admirable Shrewdness’: Character and the Law
- 8 ‘A Poise So Perfect’: Tact as Love
- 9 ‘Affectionate Reserve’: Tact as Comedy
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘Getting and Spending’: The Aesthetic Economist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Dates
- 1 Introduction: Trollope's Late Modernity
- 2 ‘Getting and Spending’: The Aesthetic Economist
- 3 ‘A Bond of Discord’: Colonialism and Allegory
- 4 ‘Convivial in a Cadaverous Fashion’: Satires on Sovereignty
- 5 ‘Active Citizens of a Free State’: Hellenising the History of Rome
- 6 ‘The Tone of Today’: Pedagogical Paraphrases
- 7 ‘An Admirable Shrewdness’: Character and the Law
- 8 ‘A Poise So Perfect’: Tact as Love
- 9 ‘Affectionate Reserve’: Tact as Comedy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is too romantic. (Auden 1973: 266)
Trollope famously tailored his novels for publication as serials, priding himself ‘on completing [his] work exactly within the proposed dimensions’ (Trollope 1999a: 119). Although the system of serialisation had become antiquated by the time he came to write The Way We Live Now, Trollope still clung to the constraints he had set himself, dividing the novel into twenty parts, with each chapter being equally long (see Sutherland 1982). Trollope's reluctance to adapt to the demands of a changing market seems, at first, a sign of his unwillingness to adopt a new economic paradigm, the theory of marginalism, which posited that an object's value is determined by market forces rather than its inherent qualities. As the preceding pages have suggested, this shift in economic thinking intensified Trollope's conceptualisation of a subjectivity in which free will has turned to stone. In the bleak story-world of The Way We Live Now, his characters’ minds are presented as having become devoid of moral qualities under the influence of consumerism. Ayala's Angel, however, puts a more positive spin on the workings of neo-classical economics. Reading these two novels alongside one another offers an interesting contrast: in both, a financier plays an important role, even though he and his thoughts remain, to a considerable extent, in the margins. A former Governor of the Bank of England and now the director of Travers and Treason in all but name, Sir Thomas Tringle in Ayala's Angel is as powerful as Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now: he ‘could affect the rate of money throughout Europe, and emissaries from national treasuries would listen to his words’ (Trollope 1989b: 226). Their personalities are substantially different, however. Melmotte is a conniving swindler, whereas Tringle is a respectable banker. This contrast suggests that The Way We Live Now and Ayala's Angel respond to the machinations of marginalist economics in opposite ways. Ayala's Angel suggests that there is potential for joy and pleasure in this brave new world, even if there is no room for morality.
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- Information
- Anthony Trollope's Late StyleVictorian Liberalism and Literary Form, pp. 17 - 25Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016