About this title: 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, ...
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Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Good title in good condition. Pages are clean and tight. Covers show some shelf wear and bumping. Satisfaction guaranteed. If item not as described, return for refund of purchase price. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date Published: 1982
ISBN-13:9780192815767ISBN:0192815768
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Light soiling and wear, esp. around cover edges and spine; spine curved inward; pages age-browning; bookstore sticker on inside back cover. 494 p. read more
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Don Mills, ON, Canada
Date Published: 1981
ISBN-13:9780192815767ISBN:0192815768
Description: Good. As issued No Jacket. Back corne near spine is heavily bumped (wrinkling some inside pages but not affecting text), cover price inked out, and some other light shopwear. read more
Edition: Edition Unstated
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Dover Books, Mineola, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1982
ISBN-13:9780486243603ISBN:0486243605
Description: Fildes, Luke. Very Good- As issued No Jacket. Spine lean, stiff wraps, handling creases to front cover, price inked, out, soiling to bottom edge of book, and other light to moderate shopwear. Text is clean. Includes all forty wood engravings by Luke Fildes. read more
Edition: 1st thus
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Oxford Univ., Oxford / New York
Date Published: 1982
ISBN-13:9780192815767ISBN:0192815768
Description: W.P. Frith cover art. very good+, trade paper, pict. purple & white covers. 494 pgs, ISBN: 0-19-281576-8. Edited, with an intro, by John Sutherland. Basis of recent PBS series. read more
Binding: PAPERBACK
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: 1982
ISBN-13:9780192815767ISBN:0192815768
Description: Fair. Paperback, a good reading copy. Cover image is a stock image and may vary. Your book will be securely packed and promptly dispatched from our UK warehouse. read more
"I read "The Way We Live Now" on the recomendation of Jon Meachan, editor of Newsweek, who led an effort to develop a list of 50 books "that make sense of our times." Trollopes's 1875 satirical novel was number one on their list. It describes the financial and moral crisis of Victorian England, a crisis that is very similar to what we are going through today in the U.S. "The Way We Live Now" is a long book with 100 chapters because it was orginally written for serialization in a magazine, a common practice for writers of that era. Nonetheless, it moves quickly and has a surprising number of twists in the plot. I found it a very good read."
"It's so eerie how much this book describes the way WE live TODAY, that is in 2009. There is the same cast of characters we endure in our present. Of course the details are very different but it's the similarities that fascinate me. There are swindlers and shady bankers just like today. There are young men gambling and drinking to excess (still a lot of that going on). There is the older generation decrying the rudeness and lack of respect for tradition by the young. So many similarities.
The characters are wonderful. Young Felix "the most beautiful man in London" is a particular favorite. He has absolutely nothing to offer but his beauty and his inability to accomplish anything never ceases to amuse. His mother is a conniving schemer who in the end makes out well for herself despite all her faults. The main swindler, Mr Melmotte is a character who first appears as almost invincible and his downfall, which is the central story of the novel, is wonderfully portrayed. And there are many more interesting characters. Trollope's female characters are particularly strong and memorable.
If you've never read this book do yourself a favor and start soon. Yes it's long, but I was never bored for a moment, and at the end, you'll feel sad about not hearing more about the characters who by then will feel like old friends."
"While not my favorite Trollope, this was a lovely read, and quite apposite to our own financial crisis. The account of the railway bubble and the cynical financiers behind it is as relevant today as it was then.
I love the range of Trollope's characters: the audacious swindler with his feckless, compliant board of directors, the penniless scapegrace nobleman who can hardly bestir himself to pursue the swindler's gradually awakening daughter, the female author (homage to Trollope's own mother), the near-wordless, thought-less miller with a big heart and his flighty runaway fiance, the American divorcee (yet another of Trollope's wonderful women characters that he so clearly adores but can't quite give social approval to), the young man torn between two very different women, the upright, profoundly moral man of property, the young jackasses at the club, the Jewish banker on the edge of social acceptance, the Bishop and the Catholic priest, the clever new lawyer and the old Mr. Slow and Mr. Bideawhile.
As a portraitist of a society at the same time so like and so unlike our own, Trollope is not to be equalled. His characters are not outsized caricatures, like Dickens. We see in his novels a world long gone, with the modern world we know struggling to emerge, but we see also what is constant in the human character.
Anyone who has not read Trollope is poorer for it. He is gradually ascending into the pantheon of my favorite novelists."
"A fascinating perspective on the moral bankruptcy of English society in the late 1800s...with unsettling echoes that carry forward into the present day. Highly recommended -- the Trollope to read, even if you read nothing else by Trollope."
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