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THE SOCIALLY-EMBEDDED MARKET AND THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH CAPITALISM IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2014

Denise Lovett
Denise Lovett*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Extract

With its biting portrait of mid-Victorian greed, foolishness, and the obsessive pursuit of wealth, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now is often read as both a eulogy for traditional English society and an attack on rapacious capitalist values, particularly as they manifest themselves in the market for finance capital. Indeed, in the novel, the market mechanism seems to have run amok: social status, titles, and reputations circulate like commodities in a sea of new money that swamps traditional distinctions between creditworthiness and social capital, investment and speculation, and commerce and graft. The pervasive sense that everything has its price extends to intimate social relations, including courtship and marriage. Penniless, pretty women of good families, such as Julia Triplex (later Lady Monogram) and Lady Carbury, much like penniless, titled men such as Lord Nidderdale and Lady Carbury's handsome son Felix, recognize that, for them, marriage is a business arrangement in which the pretense of sentiment between the parties is little more than a social convention. Yet, the novel also suggests that the frenzy that free-for-all market forces have unleashed will exhaust itself, just as the speculative price bubble in railway shares central to the narrative eventually collapses. Countering its satire of capitalist excess is the novel's more optimistic treatment of exchange, which implies that fraud in the share market can be contained through the imposition of standards of behavior that foster honest commerce.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 691 - 707
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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