The way we live now (1875)

Melmotte's financial reputation becomes valuable because so many respectable people need it to be true. Trollope follows the connections between money, marriage, the press and Parliament with the patience that a modern scandal often denies its audience. It is a large Victorian novel, with a substantial domestic plot. Read its treatment of Jewish identity critically: the attack on financial hypocrisy does not place every inherited prejudice safely outside the joke.