The mysterious financier Augustus Melmotte buys a great house in London, where he succeeds in persuading many prominent Londoners to invest in his fictitious railroad, the South Central Pacific and Mexican. Melmotte also attempts to secure for himself a place in the House of Commons and to marry his daughter to a titled aristocrat. His daughter, however, falls for the rakish Felix Carbury and steals the money to finance their elopement; Felix gambles it away and jilts her, and she marries an American speculator as crooked as her father. Melmotte''s various schemes and forgeries lead to his unmasking and, in one of Trollope''s most powerful scenes, he kills himself. Although unpopular and considered almost unbearably cynical when it first appeared in 1875, THE WAY WE LIVE NOW is widely considered Trollope''s masterpiece--a scathing indictment of the materialism and greed that permeated the Victorian Age, and a devastating satire of the effects of crass commercialism on politics, the upper classes, the literary world, marriage, and financial institutions. It also contains the memorable portrait of Lady Carbury, an unscrupulous writer who will do anything to promote her books.
The Duke''s Children is the last of Trollope''s six Palliser novels and concludes the story of Plantagenet Palliser, former Prime Minister and latterly Duke of Omnium. Lady Glencora is dead and the Duke, widowed and grieving, is left with the responsibility of three difficult children. His sons are sent down from university in disgrace and the Duke is further dismayed when his daughter Lady Mary and his eldest son Silverbridge both propose to marry out of the English nobility. One by one the Duke''s dearest wishes are thwarted, yet at the same time he discovers how parents can learn from their children, and is rescued from his own inflexible pride and snobbery by the strength of his private affections. As Birch remarks in her introduction, ''of all the many late developers in Trollope''s fiction, Palliser is the most impressive''. The Duke''s Children (1880) is resonant with the memories of the Duke of Omnium who had come to be more than a fiction to Trollope, ''so much do I love the man whose character I had endeavoured to portray''.
Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. Increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation, her situation is contrasted with that of her friend Lady Glencora - forced to marry the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser in order to prevent the worthless Burgo Fitzgerald from wasting her vast fortune. In asking his readers to pardon Alice for her transgression of the Victorian moral code, Trollope created a telling and wide-ranging account of the social world of his day.
