The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Published 1875 · 356,329 words · about 23 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Satire, Social Commentary
How hard is The Way We Live Now to read?
The Way We Live Now scores 43 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Trollope writes in polished Victorian literary prose, deploying period-specific financial vocabulary (bills of exchange, railway shares, directors' allocations), Latin legal tags (in utrumque paratus), and aristocratic social idiom. The register is elevated but never obscure — far below Melville's cetological jargon or Gibbon's Latin cadences, which Trollope himself parodies in Lady Carbury's hustling letters.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences run long, frequently stacking subordinate clauses and em-dash asides: Trollope will qualify a character's motive, then qualify the qualification, before arriving at his real point. The syntax is Victorian hypotaxis, more complex than Dickens's theatrical energy but far more navigable than James's late style or Proust's 40-line subjunctive chains. Readers comfortable with 19th-century fiction will find the pace natural.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The novel operates through concrete social action: card-debt at the Beargarden, forged share certificates, a disastrous dinner party at which the Emperor of China is guest. Moral commentary arrives through character behaviour, not philosophical digression. Trollope occasionally steps back to address the reader directly — 'Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury' — but these authorial intrusions are concrete in their own way, pointing at facts rather than ideas.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Eight or nine interlocking plots run simultaneously — the Melmotte railway fraud, Felix Carbury's gambling and courtship of Marie, Roger Carbury's unrequited love, Paul Montague's American business entanglement, Ruby Ruggles and John Crumb in Suffolk, the Longestaffe financial crisis, Georgiana Longestaffe's Jewish suitor. Readers must track a cast of roughly thirty named characters and their shifting relationships. The Victorian financial mechanics — call options, hypothecated shares, parliamentary corruption — add a further layer of period-specific density.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Trollope is famously transparent, addressing readers in the first person and explaining exactly what each character thinks and why. He tells us Lady Carbury's letters are 'detestably false' and explains precisely how she is deceiving herself. The irony operates on top of this directness, not in place of it. Nothing meaningful is left for readers to infer that Trollope has not already announced.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Melmotte functions as an avatar of corrupt commercial society, and the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway serves as the speculative bubble that gives the novel its structure. But Trollope does not build a systematic symbolic apparatus — the railway is primarily a realistic fraud plot, not a Whale or a Green Light. The satire is social-realist rather than mythic.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- The entire novel is organized by a central irony: London society lionizes a man universally suspected of being a swindler, because his money is real enough. The title announces the governing conceit. Trollope sustains this irony across 100 chapters — duchesses soliciting Melmotte's invitations, cabinet ministers angling for his support — while also writing with apparent sympathy for characters caught in the machine. The irony is social and satirical, not linguistic or experimental.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- Trollope resolves virtually everything. Melmotte is exposed and dies by suicide before Parliament; the railway collapses; the major romantic plots conclude conventionally; the Carbury family finds its moral equilibrium. The ending has the deliberate completeness of Victorian serial fiction — each thread tied off across the final twenty chapters. Moral and social ambiguities are named and judged, not left open.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- The novel runs 100 chapters and juggles eight or nine simultaneous plotlines across London, Suffolk, and New York, requiring the reader to hold a large cast and their intersections in mind. But all plot threads advance chronologically with clear chapter-by-chapter focus on a single thread per chapter. There are no fragmented timelines, no unreliable narrators, no formal experiments — just massive Victorian scope handled with professional organization.
How The Way We Live Now is regarded
The Way We Live Now holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.