O'Gorman, F (2016) Is Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) about the ‘commercial profligacy of the age’? Review of English Studies, 67 (281). pp. 751-763. ISSN 0034-6551
Abstract
This essay argues that Anthony Trollope‟s celebrated financial satire The Way We Live Now (1875) is not best regarded in the terms the novelist told us to regard it: that is, as an assault on „the commercial profligacy of the age‟. If this is true, then it is so only in the most general sense. But Trollope‟s own experiences with money in the years before the novel, discussed in this essay, suggest that he was intriguingly un-self-conscious about his own relationship with money and always declined to perceive in his own financial practices any reason to reflect on the morals of legitimate business. Examining the documentary evidence of Trollope‟s attitudes to finance in his own life, the essay concludes that The Way We Live Now continues the novelist‟s private assumptions by declining to probe the unsettling question of the ethics of capitalism within the law. To this extent, one of the most famous financial satires in the nineteenth century, concentrating on criminal acts in business, deflects one the hardest questions of its (and our) day onto an easy one.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author, 2016. Published by Oxford University Press 2016; all rights reserved. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the Review of English Studies following peer review. The version of record 'O'Gorman, F (2016) Is Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) about the ‘commercial profligacy of the age’? Review of English Studies, 67 (281). pp. 751-763' is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgw013. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 25 Jan 2016 16:15 |
Last Modified: | 26 Feb 2018 01:38 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgw013 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/res/hgw013 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:94064 |